2November1996

Saturday 2nd November.
My dear folks,

I once visited an elderly tailor up the road to have some clothes adjusted. He sat bent over his sewing machine in the corner of a shop which was filled with racks of dusty clothes, so dusty that it was quite impossible to distinguish the colours of the dozens of suits & trousers suspended from rails. Lord knows who owned them. They clearly hadn’t been touched in years, nor would they be until the little tailor went to the great alteration shop in the sky. He’d merely retreated to a tiny patch where he was determined to continue stitching to the last. It was Dickens revisited.

I’ve come to empathise with that tailor, as the dusty clothes pushed him gently back like the advancing sands of the Sahara. There must be a vacuum cleaning gene that I’m missing. It just goes against nature for me to get the machine out & spend 30 minutes giving the flat a thorough going over. If I’ve a choice of tasks, vacuum cleaning always goes straight to the bottom of the list. There comes a moment though when I know that my integrity’s at stake, when I’ve either got to start vacuuming or admit to myself that I’m a slob. That moment came yest. Mavis retired inside the stairs cupboard while I thundered around the flat, sucking every last speck of dust into the vacuum cleaner’s maw. The results are pleasing. I am able to write to you today in the sanitised atmosphere of an operating theatre.

One of the factors that makes me reluctant to do the vacuuming, I suspect, is that one of the wheels has come off the vacuum cleaner due to the gradual disintegration of the plastic axle. I have a coat hanger arrangement which is holding the wheel in place - like a surgical brace used to pin shattered bones - but it’s neither effective nor attractive. Normally, in such circumstances, I don’t think twice about going up to the nearest appliance shop & getting a new machine. But I resent having to do so this time because the machine itself functions perfectly. It’s just not very mobile.

That’s not all I’ve accomplished either. I’ve made serious inroads into other tasks that have been hanging over me for yonks. The Rocket, poor dear, has found a diminishing role in my affections as she moulders under the toll of passing years & I find myself going either to work or to Portugal. She’s not mistreated, merely lacking the affection a car needs as much as any of us. So I took her down to the local garage on my return from work yest. a.m. & gave her a five-star wash down. She needs a proper polish before the onset of winter. In truth, for a 17-year old lady she’s not in bad form at all. It’s just that where once she’d have been cleaned religiously each week, now she’s lucky to get that attention once a month. When a car has to live in a London gutter, it’s hard to keep it loved & shone all year round.

Also completed is a serious raid on Mr Sainsbury. The fridge had gradually been emptying itself for some weeks until all that remained in it was half a dozen beers & cokes. So I invited my neighbours - who lack a car - to join me on a shopping expedition. We returned with the back seat & boot laden with booty, enough I hope to see me through to my next little venture abroad in mid-November.

Having had the bare minimum of sleep after an overnight shift, I had little inclination after this frenzy of activity to do much else than sink down in the TV chair with a large voddy & coke (which I did anyhow). But one of my flat-owners was passing through London & I really needed to see her. She was spending the night at an airport hotel, a big one fortunately that runs regular buses to Heathrow itself.

So I “tubed” it out to the airport & bussed it around to the hotel for a light dinner & a useful conversation, before reversing the process to get home. On a Friday night I had no wish to face the inevitable jams on roads out of London nor to hunt around Heathrow to find the hotel. Heathrow is a city unto itself. Unless you know where you’re going, you can get horribly lost. What’s more, I’d found my usual 10 min freeway route to the BBC blocked one night earlier in the week & had to spend 45 mins crawling down Bayswater Road instead. It’s the first time I’ve been caught in really bad traffic in ages & I wished I’d taken the bicycle. I only took the car because it was meant to start pissing overnight & I didn’t want to ride back home in the rain. It did piss down, too, which made me feel much happier when I returned on near deserted roads in the morning - in the luxurious dryness of the Rocket.

The morning is grey. That’s fine, I don’t mind at all. There are several indoor tasks that lie ahead with the blissful prospect of 3 days off work to complete them. One of them is to collate years of bank accounts & invoices - relating to flats - for an accountant. It took me all of a week to prepare the figures for him. Now I’m trying to sort out the papers themselves. There’s also masses of deferred correspondence, as always. Another task that’s been waiting its turn is the renewal of the window boxes with some suitable foliage. The flowers I planted in the summer have done well but have now passed it. The nursery is a five minute walk down the road & I shall get myself down there in due course. The people there are quite happy to deal with gardening idiots & to point out useful flowers for whatever purpose. The girls in the flat below have left me a note saying that their shelving has collapsed & please help, which I shall probably do.

Jones, many thanks for your faxes. I slept late this a.m. & missed your phone call. I’m delighted to hear that the new pump seems to be working at last....bit of headscratch over how to reroute the supply pipe to keep it happy. What thoughts? There was a buzz at the doorbell this a.m. & Andries’s pants finally arrived. I had a fax from him yest. suggesting (gratefully) how best to get them to him.

My November schedule looks like this:
Day shifts Tues 5, Wed 6, Sat 9, Sun 10.
May be working BBC OnLine on Mon 11, Tues 12, Wed 13
(am waiting for details of exactly when).
Working day shifts on Thur 14, Fri 15, off duty Sat 16,
To RSA on Sun 17. Arrive back in London on Thur 28.

Mave is well, although he doesn’t like the Guy Fawkes season which is already well underway. He deposited his bulk on me last night in his usual fashion while I watched the evening news but each thunder crack in the night had him looking around for the source of the noise. He’s also taken to seeing some ghost in the patio door. There are times when he stares at (or through) the door from the top of the stairs, then runs & hides either in the cupboard or some other comforting nook. I’ve gone down to look on the patio & make sure that we’re not been invaded by enemies. And as far as I can tell, we’re not. But Mave isn’t persuaded! Strange!

So, there’s my life in rather greater detail than you need. But at least I can now account for it myself.
Blessings,
T