Human tries hard

We are bored. BORED! There's nothing to do. Eaten everything. Wrestled. Sick of those mice.

Bored.

Bored.

Bored.

Millie, come downstairs and play with us! 

No. Too bored to come downstairs. 

Anyway, you're such rough boys. I'm too dainty to play with you. Go away.

Time for a new toy, marinated nicely in the catnip jar. Fur, feathers and string.

Lottie, you go first. Don't look like that; you'll enjoy it once you try. Yes, you will!

Ok. Bite, bite. Kick, kick. Is that all right for you?

Bored now. Can I stop?

Scooter, it's your turn.

Bite, bite. Kick, kick. Mmmm, nice fur on a string!

Mine, all mine! Not going to share!

But if Hamish creeps across....

....and gets the string....

...and pulls....

Ha! 

Mine, all mine.

Bite, bite. Kick, kick.

Done enough of that now.

Bored. 

Decided

Well, sort of. Decided to take my time.

How helpful you were! I now have some options other than composting my ruined treasure.

Those stains won't shift. The suggestion that I frame a portion of the shawl is a lovely one, and I do have a very nice photo of Olwyn to go with it, but framing will be a last resort only; the thought of cutting up my poor baby shawl is too awful just now.

I could wait until I have learned to knit well enough to replace/repair it myself, but  you know how it is; life is short, and mine is littered with nine-day-wonder projects and unfinished good ideas. But stranger things have happened; I am really enjoying re-learning how to knit, and keep saying how much I would like to master a lacy pattern...

Thank you all for your suggestions, all of which have been received gratefully and considered carefully. There's no rush to resolve this difficulty; it took 38 years to get to such a pitch, after all.

I'll be back with news of whatever happens next.

Knitting catastrophe, anguished cry

Calling all you experienced knitters and wise workers-of-wool out there. I need your advice.

This is my son's baby shawl, lovingly knitted by my 'auntie' Olwyn 38 years ago. He was brought home from hospital wrapped in its softness.

It has been stored, clearly without due care and attention, acid-free tissue paper, or even a scrap of common sense, inside a plastic bag in the old mahogany tallboy.

Something dreadful has happened to it over the years, and I feel awful.

There are holes; they could be repaired, I suppose.

But there are also mysterious stains. Little ones, that have not responded to careful washing.

And a complete disaster in the centre.

What happened? What would you do with it now? Be blunt. I feel guilty enough to accept harsh verdicts with meek humility. I know I am an idiot.

Memoreeeees are made of this....

We were radio listeners when I was a child. Our radios weren't so much 'audio equipment' as pieces of furniture; large, wood-veneered, highly varnished, with a row of teeth-like buttons and big no-nonsense dials, they took a while to warm up and had a rich tone well suited to the fruity accents of BBC announcers. 

When I was about to leave for boarding school for the first time, my mother gave me this little transistor radio, gleaming in its blue and cream box. Such a thrilling present! I was 11, and the year was 1960. 

I had no idea then that this little object was to be such a lifeline over the next 7 years. Like torches, transistor radios were forbidden. We had to listen surreptitiously in dorms after lights out; reception was often poor, and Radio Luxembourg came and went as we strained to listen avidly to our favourite pop songs, interspersed with tedious adverts (poor Danny Blanchflower, I hate you still!).

 On Sunday nights, as silly 13-year-olds, we would fight to stay awake till 11 pm to spend a further hour listening to the Top 20, waiting for the Number One (such an odd mix in those days: remember The Tornados and 'Telstar'? Or the mighty contests between Frank Ifield and Elvis for the top slot?) and as a result, would stagger tired and underslept through Mondays.

Later, once we were old enough to move from dorms to twin or single cubicles, I listened, rapt, to weekly instalments chronicling the life of Chopin - soppily romantic to a girl of 16 or 17 - and learned to love his music. (Would that have been on the Third Programme, predecessor to Radio 3, I wonder? There weren't many stations to choose from in the '60s.) 

In 1964, pirate Radio Caroline arrived. We didn't know what had hit us or our stifling, rule-ridden, cooped-up lives. For this thrilling and groundbreaking phenomenon we needed more powerful transistors, and even then reception had a frustrating way of dropping out through ferocious static hiss and crackle. Our meagre pocket money was spent on batteries, but oh, it was so worthwhile! (Only in adult life, with vastly-improved audio quality as standard, were we to find that the words of some of our old favourites had not been heard accurately through the dense interference.)

In the mid-'80s, I bought this old Bush radio from an antiques dealer as an anniversary present for my then-husband. As we waited for it to warm up, I joked with the shop owner that perhaps we would hear Lord Haw-Haw's voice. Slowly the radio lumbered into life; from its depths, to our surprise and amusement, came the unmistakeable tones of Winston Churchill delivering his famous speech of 1940: "...we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds...we shall never surrender...".

The radio was kindly given back to me by my sister-in-law after her brother's death, and it still works well. Sadly, the little transistor doesn't, but it served me well in its heyday. I can still hum the tune of 'Telstar' and I would still vote for Elvis over Frank Ifield any day.

Spotted

Today's visual treat - a ladybird on the rosemary in my front garden; it has beaten the daffodils this year.

Gone

My Lovely Son, the big presence, the oh-so-handyman, has taken the pencil from behind his ear, loaded up his toolboxes and gone back to London. Waving him off was painful, behind the smiles and hugs. It never gets any easier, does it, this saying goodbye to your child, no matter how old he/she is.

I say the same old things like "Have you got everything? Will you let me know you've got home safely? Do you have cash on you - just in case?" and today, at the actual point of departure, when the engine is running, "Is Millie out of the car?" but inside, a small voice is struggling not to cry out "Don't go! Stay a little longer!" But he has already stayed a little longer, and must go back to his own life as a grown man who doesn't live with his mother.

The dog starts moping in the morning, even before the car is loaded up. I try not to join her, because she isn't subtle about it, and my son is all too aware of how painful this parting is for us all. But afterwards, when the house is strangely quiet and empty again, I sit down and let myself feel the complex and wordless emotions of a mother having parted again with her child.

These are the times when I can understand my own mother's decision to move, at 80, from her lovely home in a seaside town to a small flat in this city that she so disliked, "to be nearer to one of her children." The need to be near one's child comes closer to the surface with age, I suspect, and isn't only to do with an increased need for physical or practical assistance. I'm not at that stage of life yet, and can rejoice in my son's healthy adult independence, can cope without him, can get by with calls and texts and emails, but oh, I do miss having him at home.

So he leaves, and I sit, and slowly draw towards me again the familiar threads, rhythms and patterns of living alone, of silent hours and a head full of unspoken thoughts, of quiet unregimented days, of coming and going as I please, of watching and being watched by small creatures whose demands are straightforward, and - this rather to my relief - of smaller, sometimes-erratic, barely-planned meals. And I love it, I do. But it takes a day or two to find my equilibrium again. The dog snuffles hopefully at the door of my son's room every morning for a few days after he has gone; I know exactly how she feels.

And he did ring when he got home; he always does. It rounds off the parting, lets us both know we have got safely through it, and we can say cheerfully "See you soon!" and in the meantime, get on quite equably with our separate lives.

But he did admit to fretting, as far as Durham, about whether or not he really did get Millie out of the car.....

First catch of Spring

Hamish! Come quick! See what I found!

It moves! It buzzes! 

It's hypnotic.......

Let's catch it.

I want it! 

Let's eat it.

Num num. Crunchy....

Tastes.... funny. 

Maybe you should eat the next one, Scooter.

And maybe I should cough it up now....

But five minutes later, Millie comes home:

Look at this one, boys.

See what you can aspire to?

Impressed? 

Just a small job

This started as a small repair involving a small bit of filler in a small corner of the windowsill in my bedroom. I am trying not have a small hissy fit. *

I don't drink; sometimes I wish I did.

*Editor's note: Lovely Son grumbled that he "was getting all the blame" (don't they sound about five when they complain like that?) so in order to restore his amour propre, I'm stating plainly here that it wasn't him, but the joiners who rebuilt my dormer window who made a terrible job of it.... And that's the catch with cowboy tradesmen of course - you don't want to have them back to make good what they made bad years ago, do you?

Signs of Spring?

Some think it is, despite the absence of much plant growth.

Here they are, lurking in corners, biding their time, waiting for fresh green shoots.

I'm going to collect them all up and carry them to the green by the church. They'll like it there too (maniacal laughter).

Dust and smells

Today certainly is Smells (thankfully out of doors in the yard) as my new bedside and sofa tables get their first coat of paint, but oh, that indoor Dust will take more than the combined forces of the LS, the sainted Margery and myself to conquer it. Remember that chapter in 'Titus Groan' where the dust in the Hall of Bright Carvings lies in centuries-old heaps on the floor, and as the carvings are dusted daily by Rottcodd the Curator, rises up in soft eddies behind him to settle lovingly on every item again? It's a bit like that here, with paw prints.

Margery is doing 2nd hoovering, with me following her with bucket and cloths, to wash down the staircase spindles and the doors. We are both very dusty. And tomorrow I shall do it all again, I just know it.

For those who asked or who are intrigued, the decision to move was made last year, with very welcome encouragement and support from other bloggers when I fell into despair. I'm planning to move away, and you can read about it here and in various agonised episodes thereafter, until I settled on Devon, went to have a look, and made up my mind.

And that means I must finish this house, and stop putting things off.  Both are unbelievably difficult things for me. Prevarication may be my middle name, but this week, with the Lovely Son in determined mood, I might be looking at a very small light at the end of the 28-year tunnel that is my house project. And then, who knows? I can start doing it all again, somewhere else. You can all come along for the ride anguish suspended disbelief laughs.

Attack of the toolboxes

They're everywhere. And they bring a degree of encroaching chaos that leaves even me, the mega-untidy one, defeated - utterly, abjectly defeated.

The Lovely Son is working on about ten things at once - sawing, routing, filling, sanding, painting, fitting in one task while another dries, and sorting out other niggling problems for me, like my printer/scanner that had steadfastly refused to scan, while carrying with him rich deposits of dust that remain on my desk when he moves elsewhere. See?

The mess is overwhelming. I have reared a Mess Monster. If he was your handyman, you would be moving into the shed while he worked; I can't, because he is putting sensible shelves in the shed, and to get to it I would have to climb over the contents of the boiler cupboard, because he's putting sensible shelves in there too. Up till now, I had shelves that tipped over sideways if too much weight was put on one end, and sent all the boxes of screws, nails and assorted, hoarded tat to the floor, where there were more ill-organised heaps of things that couldn't be parted with.

He sends me texts if I go out: "Be prepared to sort cupboard contents when you come back." This means he has just piled mountains of stuff higgledy-piggledy on the back kitchen worktop that doubles as the cats' feeding station, thus causing feline consternation at the abrupt loss of elevenses, twelveses, afternoon snacks.

The house is perishing cold. The heating is on, but the back door is wide open, because he's cutting and sanding out in the yard, and forgets that the rest of us aren't dressed for outdoor temperatures. If I flee upstairs, I have to avoid the mess from the handrails that are being sanded back to their beautiful un-paint-splattered mahogany. In the small attic, the little door to the eaves, so shrunken with age that a strong draught can blow it open, has been replaced, so that the layers of itch-inducing loft insulation are safe from marauding cats who so love an unsupervised dark corner.

Scattered everywhere else are his personal belongings, phone (with its unsettling ding-dong! doorbell sound that indicates the arrival of another text, not a visitor), books, shoes, cups, lists, pencils, and much more. The words "Where's my...." are uttered so often that I no longer hear them, let alone respond. 

The two little scaredy-cats are in hiding, because the Lovely Son is large and unfamiliar, and only safe to approach, they think, if he's sitting down quietly eating a meal, in which case he becomes fair game for professional scrounging. The dog is delighted to have him home, although the noise gets to her too, and she has to cling to me when the sanding is going on. And the LS looks a bit alarming even to me in his high-spec dust mask, practising his Darth Vader breathing technique.

Millie the fearless one sleeps, unperturbed. What she doesn't know is that she is having a special little door made for her that will close neatly and securely over the cat flap so that she can no longer break out by sliding the lock across and following me whenever I go out. This is a more reliable option than buying a more secure cat flap, because I believe Millie would learn to open or barge any cat flap, but might struggle to unlatch and open a hinged door first. 

But I may be wrong there, of course. I'd swear that she is quite capable of overcoming a lack of opposable thumbs in pursuit of thrilling walks with the dog and me. But I hope the double door idea works. The prospect of being able to walk all the way into town without casting anxious glances over my shoulder is a comforting one.

Today is dust. Tomorrow is smells; paint and varnish. I stand warned. Of course, despite moaning and feeling overwhelmed, I am deeply grateful to have so much sustained help, messy, smelly and noisy though it may be. He's not called the Lovely Son for nothing.

When it's all over, I will have a long and venerable to-do list filled at last with gratifying crossings-out. Wally the painter arrives in late April, and my aim is to have all the other major jobs completed by then. And why?

Because after the sitting room has been painted and the ancient stair carpet replaced, this old house is - dare I say it here? with so many witnesses? - I'll whisper it:

going on the market.