First of all I should just explain that this post may well become a little incoherent towards the end (or even before). I’ve got the most god-awful cramps (for the enlightenment of my male readers who will not know this particular joy - just imagine someone’s kicked you in the balls, then expand that area of pain down to your knees up to your belly button, let it follow the line of your pelvic girdle right round from front to back then live with the pain for 3 days without a break and you’ll have a slight inkling of how it feels) and as if that weren’t bad enough, I’ve got toothache too. Raging, throbbing, gums swollen, tingly ears, rash all down the side of my neck toothache and it hurts like a motherfucker. Not being able to get an emergency appointment at the dentists anytime in the next fortnight (and that’s with dental insurance - God help those reliant on the NHS) and eschewing painkillers for the sake of my liver, I’m treating it in the time honoured way and working my way down a bottle of Caol Ila which is a nice peaty 12 year old Islay. I realise that if you use whisky to treat toothache you’re supposed to swig some, hold it in your mouth at the side of the offending molar and then spit it out (or at least that’s what F said) but quite frankly that seems like a waste, so I’m already 2 sheets to the wind and the duvet’s about to follow soon.

So I’m pissed in every sense of the word. Partly ‘cos of the whisky, partly ‘cos of the raging hormones, partly ‘cos of the toothache but mostly because the apartment is in a mess, the like of which has never before been seen on earth. I can’t bear it. It’s not that I’m obsessive about cleanliness/order – I’m too obsessive about avoiding becoming obsessive to actually be obsessive (if that makes sense) - but it makes my brain scratchy when things are out of place. My ideal home would be one of those all white with enormous plate glass windows houses –the sort that has one stunningly simple object d’art positioned on a white plinth in the hall. How this fits with the fact that I’m an avid collector of what I term pieces of “social history”, F calls “stuff” and my parents call “oh god not more junk H”, I don’t know but I suspect that in me the aesthetic sensibilities of my parents (beautiful, sumptuous, restrained) and my grandparents (floral, padded, embellished) are engaged in a war to the death. In the meanwhile the apartment is beginning to resemble the set of Steptoe and Son.

Now normally I manage to keep everything – if not tidy- but clean, although some jobs usually have to wait until the weekend when I have a little more time and energy. I admit this with more than a slight sense of shame because somewhere buried (not that deeply) inside of me is the sort of woman who’d be out with bucket and broom to scrub her front step at 6am in the morning. The fact that I don’t have a front step is (like the step itself) neither here nor there, but the desire to get down and dirty with a bucket of soapy water, a stone step and a wire brush lingers on and I attempt to alleviate it every weekend by scrubbing down all the skirting boards. They don’t look any different after I’ve done them – but at least I know that they’ve been done and the masses of mop wielding ancestress’ rest in (relative) peace for another 7 days (they do still tend to nag me about the fact that I don’t wash the kitchen floor every day).

About three weeks ago though, the front door buzzer/intercommy thing went and against all my better judgement I answered it. Normally, unless I know in advance who it is, I don’t. This may sound a bit paranoid but for some reason the local Jehovah’s Witnesses have decided that F and I are ripe for salvation and so there’s not a week goes by that they don’t drop by to check on the state of our souls. As I was brought up to be far too respectful of other peoples beliefs to slam the door in their faces and as I’m not as theologically accomplished as my Nan; who invites them in, gives them tea and chocolate biscuits, points out when they misquote the bible (put it this way, when Jesus gave the sermon on the Mount, my Nan was probably writing what went on the autocue), asks them if they think that Kether is the Malkuth of another dimension and then tries to convert them (we’re not quite sure what to, as her own brand of religion has a Crucifix, Buddha and a copy of the Key of Solomon all sitting quite happily on the same shelf) then this usually ends in about 15 minutes of me holding the door open a scant six inches, desperately trying not to make eye contact, while they ask me if I know Jesus - a question I’m not going to answer on the grounds of self incrimination. As this was Easter Monday I figured that the JW’s would be expecting Jesus to drop by their own gaff and so they wouldn’t be looking for him in anyone else’s.

Fortunately it wasn’t the JW’s. Unfortunately it was Satan. Or at least his faithful minions - Chaos and Mayhem. They were masquerading as builders employed by the local council but their real forms became apparent within about 5 minutes of entering the flat when they discovered dry rot in the second shelf down of the bedroom cupboard (these are commonly called Edinburgh presses but if I call them that none of you will have a clue what I’m going on about. Just imagine a shelved recess in the wall about the width of a door and a depth just short of being able to stand a paperback on the shelf without half an inch overlapping the edge). Apparently it (the rot) had spread through from next doors bedroom cupboard which at least demonstrated a community spirit even if it was somewhat misplaced.

“Of course we’ll have to take up the floorboards” said Chaos ripping up the carpet and destroying several civilisations in the process. (Who would have thought that the rather hideous beigey green carpet in the bedroom would have an even more hideous orange and brown carpet underneath it?)
“And the plaster will need to be knocked off” said Mayhem whacking the wall with a hammer just to see how much dust it would create (a lot). “Probably out to here” he added gesturing an area that took in most of the two walls on either side of the cupboard. (Who would have thought a man with such short arms could make such an expansive/expensive gesture?).
“Better rip out the ceiling too – just to make sure” added Chaos prodding the same with his pitchfork and dodging the paintflakes as they fluttered to the ground as gently as snow on Christmas Eve.
“You’ll need to move all your stuff out” they said, practically in unison as they waved airily at 3 wardrobes, 10 archive boxes, 7 shelves of double stacked books, 1 sea-chest, 2 chests of drawers and assorted other sundries which make up the bedrooms décor.

They didn’t say it like that really btw. Being Scottish there were a lots more hae’s, wee’s, an’s, o’s, tae’s, oots, yons, ye’lls and a host of other indistinguishable vowel sounds that I certainly didn’t understand and I’m not even going to attempt to spell. But that was about the gist of it.

“See you next Monday” said Mayhem.
“About nine” said Chaos

The rest of the week was spent moving everything out of the bedroom and putting it – everywhere else. Piles of clothes covered every surface not already taken over by jewellery boxes, dressing table sets, ornaments and teetering columns of the books that wouldn’t fit into bookcases already full to bursting. Archive boxes surrounded the sofa like some bureaucratic fortification, haphazardly strung with odd shoes and escaped socks. Sofas were piled 5ft high with clothes which slithered off whenever you squeezed past them. The hall closet – already Tardis-like in it’s capacity to hold an infinite number of items – had yet more stuff thrust into it and a heavy box placed against the door lest a tsunami of household paraphernalia engulfed us while we slept.

Movement, or at least movement without severe bruising, was impossible. To get to the lamp in the far corner of the sitting room for example; meant squeezing between a sofa bristling with 4 foot of angry coat hangers and the aforementioned archive boxes while being careful not to crash into the coffee table*, winding your way round the TV F won in a raffle (which we’ve never used and can’t offload onto anyone else), sliding round 4 bin bags stuffed full of sheets and towels and then arching over the other side of the sofa (by which time the coat hangers have swapped sides and are waiting to spear you) being careful to pull out of the headlong dive you’re in before you disappeared into the ravening maws of the other bin bags stacked up round the base of the lamp.

*(The coffee table itself is a crime against humanity but we can’t get rid of it because the law in this country regarding rented flats states quite clearly that every apartment rented as furnished is required to have one white MDF wardrobe with at least one door that will neither open completely or close fully, one chest of drawers on which the handle on the drawer you’re likely to use the most will drop off as soon as you’ve filled it with stuff and which Thomas Chippendale himself wouldn’t be able to re-attach so that you need to jemmy it open with a bread knife every time you want to take something out of it, and one coffee table made from brown plastic covered with irregular stripes meant to approximate wood grain (if you’d never seen wood before). This coffee table is always the landlords pride and joy and he’ll make a bee-line for it, inspecting it for rings, stains and smears with the sort of scrutiny a mother cat uses to wash a particularly dusty kitten - although strangely enough he’ll remain impervious to any suggestions that, since he obviously loves it so much, he takes it away with him when he leaves.)

As you might imagine; this set my (not obsessive about things being in their proper place at all) brain itching like it had chicken pox. It wasn’t just the mess though that was bad enough. Somehow during the upheaval I’d managed to lose all my underwear and though I know its old fashioned of me, I’m the sort of girl who likes to know where her knickers are at any given moment in time.

Things got worse.

The night before the builders arrived F and I had gone to bed in our bedroom as normal. At 7.30 am, the builders arrived. I say arrived but really that’s no way to describe someone knocking through a doorway between your room and the flat next door.

I don’t sleep well at the best of times. Years of burning the candle at both ends have taken their toll, and now I’m trained to exist (or subsist) on about 4 hours of sleep a night. I’m clued-up enough to know that this is not a good thing; that it’s screwing up my metabolism and giving me dark circles a bride of Dracula would envy but it’s a pattern I can’t seem to break. I do try. I’ve done exercise, relaxation techniques, self hypnosis, giving up caffeine, drinking gallons of hot milk, herbal tea, carbs and sleeping pills and all to no avail. Every night sees me in bed by 11.30pm with the firm intention of lights out by 12 and a full eight hours sleep and every night finds me lying in the dark, my brain whirling like a dervish, dreamland a million miles away, until I admit defeat – switch the light back on and pick up another book or wander through and fire up the computer. I admit that not being able to switch off the light until I finish whatever it is I’m reading doesn’t help, but then neither do the nightmares. They’re a hereditary thing – like our knackerdy knees, wonky blood sugars and bloody mindedness – all four of us in my family get them. Being terrified of the dark isn’t a big help either. I’m fine outside; stuck in the middle of the countryside with nothing but the big sky above me I’ll wander around without a care in the world. But left in a darkened room, my imagination goes haywire. To combat this I leave the hall light on all night. A sensible solution to a very silly problem. Unless of course you’ve got incredibly photosensitive eyes (despite all rumours to the contrary, I don’t constantly wear the sunglasses just as a pose – I have really pale eyes and really large pupils and even on the cloudiest days, too much light hurts them) and so sleeping with even a sliver of light showing through a closed door is impossible (I did try one of those sleeping mask things but that made me even more paranoid about not being able to see whatever it was that was coming to get me). So I stay awake (and prod F and the real HC because if I’m awake I don’t see why they should be enjoying themselves sleeping) until extreme exhaustion knocks me out.

Therefore the time between F getting up and 6 and me getting up at 8.30 are the best couple of hour’s rest I have on any given night. I can relax, knowing that he will deal with the monster in the hall, I can smell the fresh coffee he’s made, I have the bed to myself and can roll over and luxuriate in that lovely comfy feeling you get when you roll into the warm space left by the other person and you know that they have had to get up at an ungodly hour but you don’t have to.

So I am really less than impressed by the sound of builders making like the seven dwarfs at 7.30 on am Monday morning.

To give them their due they didn’t knock all the way through into the bedroom. Right at the moment when I’d just decided that I really couldn’t sleep through the noise and so I’d better get up, they rang the front door buzzer/intercommy thing.

This time it wasn’t Chaos and Mayhem who arrived at the door. It was their cohorts – Mess, Messier and Messiest.

“We’re the builders” said Mess who at 3 foot shorter and 20 years older than the other two seemed to be their leader.
“Right” I said somewhat dazedly. Good job they’d clarified that, for a moment I’d thought it was the postmen about to wreak revenge for the number of times I’d made them carry parcels up the four flights of stairs.
“We’ve come to knock the plaster off the walls” said Messier wielding a mallet just in case I didn’t get the idea.
“and probably the floorboards will need to come up too” said Messiest brandishing one of those metal thingy’s which looked like the sort of fishhook you’d use to if you were out to catch Leviathan.
“The rot will be thorough here then” said Mess pushing past me and heading towards the bedroom.

I trailed behind them – or at least I trailed as much as you can trail behind three people walking through an eight foot corridor.

“Aye” said Mess as he stood in the bedroom door “there’s the rot like”

The man must have had x-ray eyes. Chaos had pointed out the rot to me when he’d visited and its total area couldn’t have been more than three inches. I’d actually discovered it myself, on New Years Eve when I’d been cleaning the bedroom, attempted to shove another book onto the shelf and a small piece of the shelving had broken off. At the time I’d just put it down to really cheap shelves.

“Come and have a look lads” he said “we’ll have to take the plaster off from here to here”, he indicated an area which was (despite the fact that he had even shorter arms than Mayhem) larger than the area first suggested.
“And the floor will have to come up as well” said Messiest who was obviously itching to use his fishhook
“The ceiling will have to come down for good measure” said Mess. “Ok lads lets make a start”.

It was then that I realised that these weren’t proper builders at all. Proper builders don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do. Proper builders sit around and drink tea and listen to the radio and measure things and then think about things and measure something else and then have their sandwiches and then read the paper and then go home. Proper builders don’t really rip up your carpet, knock the walls back to the stone, rip the ceiling out to the laths and turn your skirting boards into kindling. Proper builders certainly don’t accomplish all of that in two days.

Or maybe they were proper builders after all. Because here we are - one month later and the builders have disappeared. The walls are still down to the stone, which would give us a lovely view of next doors bedroom through the gaps in the mortar if next door weren’t (as we are) camping out in the rest of the flat - me on the sofa in the sitting room, F in the computer room. The ceiling is bare laths with gaps that stretch up into a dark, and from the smell of it, dank attic. The floorboards are stacked neatly in a pile in the corner of the bedroom. Everything (and I mean everything) we own including ourselves is covered in a layer of plaster dust one inch thick and no matter how much you scrub at it one day, the next day sees another layer of fallout taking its place. Everything is still everywhere and my brain has now scratched itself raw.

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