Country Mouse
As the festive/election season approached, Mary chose to complicate life further by becoming a major employer in the area.
When Dennis the pest-control officer – a regular visitor – sat down in what we call Room 4, for his cup of tea, he was taken aback by the sheer numbers in the cottage.
First, an attractive Oriental wandered onstage. She was womanhandling a portable ‘therapy’ table (false eyelashes for Mary) through the narrow runnel of rooms and out to her waiting Mercedes.
Next, two electricians came through, en route to the attic. They declined cups of tea, as most tradespeople tend to these days. Surely not health and safety diktats? Even Mary’s PA turned one down, preferring a tin of sparkling soda water. Furthermore, there were two men in the garden: one quoting for excavating a wildlife pond and one laying a floor in our shed.
I explained to Dennis that this need of Mary’s to fill her life with people may hark back to her childhood, and early memories of her home doubling as a doctor’s surgery. I had a laugh with him about that scene in the musical Oliver, when the boy wakes up in a London square and a chorus of ‘Who will buy?’ erupts from outside, as a crowd of assorted tradesmen and -women turn up to sell their wares.
In other news, our cottage has become a simulacrum of the Brexit impasse in Westminster. No progress for over three years as I had gone on a go-slow. Correction: I hadn’t gone at all.
I had been using the well-known trick of leaving selections of tools in each room – tins of paint, filler, turpentine, drills et cetera – to signal work in progress rather than actually making any progress.
When Mary announced that our house-insurers would remove cover unless the cottage was rewired, barring the discovery of dry rot or asbestos I could not imagine a worse calamity (within the curtilage of First World problems) to hit a householder.
The date of commencement of works was suddenly sprung on me. The gangmaster had told Mary that if she waited till after the election – my preferred option – they would be forced to amend their quote in an upwards direction, citing Brexit uncertainty.
I lost sleep as I wrestled with the logistical problems of gutting the house. I had clear visions of hefty bruisers cursing as they levered up flooring planks to access cables, or stripping off the wallpaper which, as in many damp cottages, covers a multitude of sins.
Then Mary delivered another Exocet. We would have to clear the attic so that the operatives could install ‘ratproof cabling’.
Such is the toxicity of the cottage attic that for me it might as well be the central core of Chernobyl. My policy had been to keep the problems of the contents of the attic out of sight and out of mind until we could both be judged by medics as too infirm to be expected to tackle them, what with all the necessary climbing and bending double to avoid collision with ancient elm beams.
The contents represent a multitude of sins of omission – failure to make decisions about jettisoning things. In my hoarder wife’s case, this was deferring agonies; in my case, deferring ecstasies, since there is nothing I enjoy more than a bonfire of clutter.
It was precisely the Kafkaesque impossibility of putting countless useless objects on trial – in a nihilistic version of Neil Macgregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects – that caused most distress.
But, in the febrile conditions of sleeplessness, I incubated an idea that might just break the impasse. No ifs, no buts. What if I were to insist on my own red lines? These being that no object should leave the attic.
I submitted the suggestion that if I cleared a gangway and created go and no-go areas of order within the chaos, the etiolated young electricians from Devizes might work around them.
Amazingly, it was agreed. The youths persevered in the most trying conditions, without rancour or grudge-bearing. The miraculous task of rewiring the attic is now behind us, and not once did I hear them utter the dread phrase ‘How can people live like this?’
It is as if the mental logjam of dozens of small uncompleted tasks had reached the proportions of a fatberg. But this has been unblocked and the fatberg is now gradually shifting downstream.
Among all the electrical improvements, being able to see into the bottom of my toolbox, thanks to the new flying-saucer-style LED spotlights the electricians chose themselves, has enabled me to find the fabled missing chuck key for my trusty 1970s Black & Decker drill. I now have no excuse to ignore the chore of affixing the fauxantique fireplace to the wall with the aid of two judiciously-placed mirror brackets. JOB DONE.
One of the worst aspects of modern life is having to make decisions. These well-adjusted electricians brought their own spotlights. With any luck, they will replace the half-moon, ceramic, urinalstyle wall lights that appeared during the last round of improvements, which I had chosen to general dismay. Because of their open nature, these have doubled as cottage moth traps.
If the womenfolk dislike the new ones, then they can’t blame me.