Generalisations are a necessary intellectual evil - Aldous Huxley Make copy of your life - advice given by a mother to her literary offspring. I cannot recall the provenance of this and am aghast to find that the heap-of-mostly-crap that we call tinternet does not yet contain a transcription of the source text. It was either Mrs Bronte or Mrs Sackville-West and I think I will probably find it in the Sissinghurst Castle and Gardens Guide book; Sadly thats now too far away for us to make a day trip of it, happily we did so may times and theres still a particular flower I first saw in it that I must make time to identify and locate in order to see it grow in our Once and Future Famously Beautiful Garden. Enid Birch who loved long in the lodge before us was a lovely lady and like us very good friend of Silke Pimm who lives in the poshest if not the best house in Castlefields, namely 1 Severn Bank. This was because we all share a love of gardens and antiques. In Enids day the lodges garden was such a spectacle that people on Castlewalk bridge would stop and gasp in amazement and was even visited by Heritage Seeds to collect some rarity :-) As you may know I have found it essential for many moons to spend the first hours or so every morning doing some writing or something else creative in order to take advantage of my brain at its best and more importantly to write myself, as my father did before me at a similar age, out of depression. Then each day I do at least 5 hours hard work as I must do as I preach which is mainly that whatever situation you are in you can take steps to improve it. Working, like writing, helps keep despair at bay and I have to say both the writing and the working is working. Do not despair, but if you must, work on in despair is a thought that often passes through my mind as I beaver away to get through the woods and reach the threshold of the dream that I see before us. Yesterday was a particularly gruelling day in a procession of gruelling days. As ever it competed to be the Day Of Greatest Variance Between What I Planned To Do and What I Did. I was determined to continue to address the dreadful state of the uppermost and third storey of our home, and by dint on pulling down upon my head and the bed and floor below more of the ancient thick and heavy cobwebbed and dusty ceiling in Julias Once and Future office some photos of the transformation of which I posted a couple of days ago. For having made with our wonderful new master builder Fernandos assistance a wonderfully large and well-appointed hatch into an amazingly small and well-appointed Cybermans-Tomb of an attic I felt compelled to remove the small and old hatch and to affix in its place new plasterboard ready for Fernando to skim. The variance between the mess I anticipated and the mess I brought down upon the beautifully dressed beautiful brass bed and the very dirty but debris free carpet beside it was great. [WARNING: the sentence you are about to read is as long as Henry James or Douglas Adams at their most mind-stretchingly best so please take a deep breath before reading further]. The ache in my arms and shoulders which partly resulted from pulling down the old hatch surround (mysteriously the person whod bodged it into place used copious linseed oil putty as filler which had set as anybody who has chipped out an old broken pane of glass will well know eventually sets hard as granite), pulling down much of the surrounding heavy plaster that had separated from the lath in a way that reminded me of Barquentines ceiling, using the car crevice vacuum fitting to suck out much muck and dust in the crevice between the lath and plaster surrounding now much bigger than expected new hole, eccentrically squeezing a full tube of ScrewFixs no-nonsense silcon (an abundance of which we have in prior anticipation of having to do the snagging of the almost ready flat that we crucially inserted into All Saints’ Hall as its future rental revenue made it possible for the Triratna Buddhists to purchase it) into the crevice, straightening the nails that I pulled from the old surround, using them to strategically place the old surround pieces so as to support the bits of plasterboard I used to fill the hole salvaged from the removal of the board put in place by the un-builder and removed in the aftermath of the late July break-in, squeezing most of a 5 litre tub of Wickes wonderful interior/exterior fondant-like filler into all the gaps around all the bits of plasterboard used to fill both the original hole and the new hole in the ceiling, and clearing up the resultant awful mess was so great that it did not subside in spite of my daily meal of Ibuprofen. Those activities and many more resulted in such fatigue that when we eventually and happily drunkenly made it to bed I actually fell asleep lying on my back with my spectacles on, which I hope made a little spectacle for God be They ever so odd. [Richard Benjamin just phoned to happily ask may he collect his and our very lovely mutual builder friend Dales scaffolding which Tim Beagent and I used to dramatically and comically put in place the very large and very heavy final A-rated roof window we were contracted to do, an account of which I look forward to regaling my friends with :-) (Meaning the one or, if Im fortunate, two who actually read that which I so copiously post). I happily said yes thus todays writing hour’s number one and todays fatigues are already taking unexpected shape. I also let him know Id be recommending Dale and Fernando to the Buddhists and so we were amused by the notion that hell be removing the scaffolding only for it to return in the not dim and distant. He also gave me a smile by letting me know hed worked on a Buddhist centre at a place near Snail Beach called White Grit which is beyond Hope] So it is that this mornings writing session and preparation for the days chores is longer than usual. The foregoing was a preamble to that which I actually wanted to say, which is this: Julia and I are, being the last children of the last world war generation, members of that sadly dying breed of people that knows the true value of things. Our kind are as amazed as we are appalled by the general decline in the quality of things and are dismayed at how the younger generations (which to us is anyone under the age of 50) apear to neither know the value of things nor care of how they dispose of things they no longer want or need. As most of our friends know were currently clearing the Hall in preparation for our Buddhist friends. As were both hoarders, have lived long lives and accumulated a lot of possessions, enough to fill our very large 5 bedroomed house in Addiscombe, Croydon, including its very large attic and the greenhouse and shed we erected while living in it, there is still much to do in the 9 days that remain for the sale to complete, Thus we, like most of us, are very stressed, and are in need of laughter, which is our only weapon against the sometimes seemingly unnecessarily cruel universe. So it is with a smile that I relate my purchase on the 23rd inst. of a Galaxy S4 for our lovely friend Lee who will soon be visiting us :-) After I won the auction the seller apparently regretted selling it at what it must be admitted was a very low price. Being very busy it was not until the 26th that I noticed a series of eBay messages from the seller: 24Oct From Seller: Hi. Im writing you about the phone you won on eBay. Today I was taking it to the post office and made everything ready. Unfortunately I dropped the phone at the desk in the post office and it has a cracked screen. I dont know if you are still willing to buy it. I went to shop to fix it and they are looking £130. If you dont want it I will cancel the sale and refund you the money. 26Oct From seller: hi. I havent heard from you back. shall I go ahead with the shipping or cancel the transaction Our allotment shed was a similarly difficult purchase. In that case the Wolverhampton seller wrote to say that a neighbours dog had smashed its way through the fence between them and through the back of the shed so we would probably not want to purchase it. We said actually that wasnt a problem and after declining to purchase a metal shed from them at the same price we amusingly made our way to Birmingham to be told that the blue panel in the fence was indication of the repair and the to find the shed mysteriously undamaged. So it was that I decided to call his bluff. I replied Please go ahead and send the phone Love, love, love, Psy
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 14:06:02 +0000
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