Monday, March 3, 2008

March 2nd

The house in Helpringham is lovely. It is incredibly thermally efficient, so much so that I am always far too hot there. The big problem with it is the noises it makes. Every time we sleep in the huge guest bedroom, a room I love, it proves almost impossible to sleep due to the wheezing of the room. Every movement of air outside is funelled thorugh some vents causing the room to sound like an ill tuned mouth organ. It’s almost like the room breathing, but with a bad case of asthma. This morning there is a gale blowing, one which doesn’t relent, and the noise just gets louder and louder as the night goes by,making it impossible to sleep for more than a few fitful minutes. Add to this Dad’s collection of clocks chiming every 15 minutes, each one waiting for the last to finish before it starts, and with the church clock in the distance clanging away three minutes in arrears, and by nine am I am totally shagged, and it is only now that I sink into two hours blissful kip.
Had planned some exercise. Have been too busy recently to get out into the Chilterns, and I consider a walk around the Fen, as does my dear lady wife. However I start playing the newly transfered dvds back and this takes precedence.
Poor Mum is a mess. She is still hobbling around on a stick and getting very depressed. It take her a month to get from one room to the next, and a trip up the stairs requires years of planning.
It's dreadful to see her, and after I suppose three years or more of this, it is becoming hard to see that her decline might be reversible. One step forward, three steps back, every new visit to the doc brings more bad news. The latest is that she is anaemic. She was always such a fast moving, never still person, and now she is looking more and more like her own mother, though in her case not having the solace of resignation to her condition. I feel very sorry for her, but there is a selfish worry also as I see my next twenty years presumably heading in a similar direction. Gum disease is upon me already, the docs warnings about diabetes ring in my ears. I wonder is my sex life, meagre as it ever was, now a footnote in history, and if it's not, then is a dodgy pituartary the next cloud on the horizon. Oh fuck where did my youth go? Oh fuck can I still even make a claim to be middle aged?
I cook the dinner. It is lovely to do so in a kitchen where all is neat and tidy,, cupboards are full simply of the requisite implements, and not a million heaps of rubbish that will never be used. Doors open without avalanches of surplus vitals, drawers shut neatly, not being stuffed to the gills with things we'll never use. Everything's to hand, there's space to work, and cooking is a real joy. I can easily believe that if I had these conditions I could easily cook daily and become a bit more adventurous.
The dinner is brilliant. A super piece of beef, so, so much better than the kind of joint that comes off the shelf at Asda. the bottle of Barola, which I haven't imbibed for some time, is s dissapointment, not as deep and warming as I had recalled.
We pile into the car, are blackmailed into stopping at the services on the way back, and arrive home about 9. Just entering the pit again is deeply distressing. The place strewn with rubbish as usual, in a state of disrepair in some cases unattended for ten years.
I skulk downstairs and watch Columbo. Faye Dunaway falls for him. The fucking idiot could have spent a weekend in Mexico with him, bit no, he has her in cuffs instead. Old perve!

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