meish dot org: life, unfolding

Another strange call last night at midnight. I missed it again, and called back and got a disembodied female voice saying simply the words “Alpha Telecom”, and then a long disconnection beep.

Phone weirdness abounds. ET, are you trying to get in touch?

Confession: I’ve never seen ET. Or Gone With The Wind. Or Casablanca.

Yesterday we flung open all the windows and gave the house a proper spring (well, summer) clean. Dull but necessary once in a while. It’s so easy to depend on maintenance cleaning and tidying; picking up as you go along and keeping the place relatively ordered and hygienic, but rarely getting around to hoovering the top of the doorframe. You know the kind of tasks I mean.

I have a friend who swears by having a “woman who does” – someone to come over a couple of times a week and hoover, scrub the shower, clean the oven and dust everything. I can certainly see the appeal, though I’m not sure that’s the appropriate solution for everyone.

Three years ago, I was living in a mildy-shabby flatshare in Maida Vale with a girl who insisted at least twice a week that we should get a cleaner. Now, although she had a point in some respects, it was hard to act on her suggestion without first pointing out that we wouldn’t need a cleaner at all if she would only do her share of the washing up. Anyway.

The other reasons for not getting a cleaner at the time were much as you might expect: cost, although it’s a small amount to pay if it makes your life easier, I suppose; trust, because it’s hard to imagine letting a complete stranger in to your house to rummage through your knickers and run off with the silverware (or vice versa) and you couldn’t possibly employ anyone you actually knew and trusted to come and do it, could you? But the final and main reason was good old middle-class guilt. I simply can’t quite get my head around the concept of paying someone else to do my dirty work.

Back in the dark days of the mid eighties, at a time that was especially fraught for my mum (two teenagers and one nearly-teenager in the house, plus a full time job and a recent separation to cope with) our family got a cleaner. Once a week, a woman named Brenda would come around to mop the kitchen floor, dust the bookshelves and clean the oven, as well as polish the piano, clean the windows and do whatever major cleaning tasks never quite happened in the process of normal, hectic family life. She didn’t do laundry, she didn’t tidy away clothes or anything like that, and she must have come for a couple of hours a week, max.

And yet the night before she was due to come around, my mum would spend at least that much time cleaning and tidying the house in preparation for her visit. She would hoover, mop the floor, dust down the bookshelves and polish the piano, as well as putting away all the clothes in the laundry basket, finishing the washing up, and cleaning the oven. Doing, in fact, all the tasks that Brenda was employed to undertake herself the very next day.

My brother and sister and I would mock our mother relentlessly, making a joke of the face that she was cleaning up for the arrival of the cleaner, and that Brenda must have the easiest job in London, because it was all done for her already. We imagined that she came over, whisked a duster over the mantelpiece and then sat watching telly with a cuppa until her time was up. Nice (lack of) work if you can get it.

It’s partly a pride thing, I think. It’s partly not wanting other people (especially strangers) to see your private life, the state of your oven, your knickers on the floor, the layer of dust on the mantelpiece. We like people to think we’re perfectly put together and presented, which is why we run around in a whirlwind when someone we want to like us is coming over, pulling hair from the plughole as if the afternoon visitor was going to put down their cup of tea, hit the bathroom and exclaim in horror at the slow drainage of the shower, or run their fingers along the top of the window casements, and then laugh at the dust they might find. Hardly likely, unless your mother in law is Mrs Beeton.

Perhaps there’s a gap in the market for creating a new home service industry – domestic hygiene intimidation. You can pay me �40 to come over once a week and I’ll inspect your windowsills for grime, run my fingers across the television screen to see if there’s any dust, check beneath the bed and behind the sofa, and even look inside the microwave. You never know where I’m going to look, so you’d better clean everything the night before I’m due, and if I find any grime, grease or dust lying around, or any pants out of their drawer, or any shirts left unironed, I’ll tell the neighbours and post pictures of your shame on the internet. Deal?

But it’s more than just personal pride and privacy. The trouble was that our mum couldn’t quite get over the middle-class guilt associated with employing someone else to do something that you are fundamentally able to do yourself. Employ someone to fix your roof, by all means. Pay the chiropractor who snaps your back into place, fine. Give half your salary over to a lawyer or mechanic or builder, no problem. But pay someone to do your own washing up, or tidy up the mess that you’ve made yourself? No way. Can’t do it, or at least can’t do it and feel good about it.

In Bolivia I used to pay a woman to wash things once a fortnight or so. She came knocking, from door to door, and would wash a big sinkful of items for ten Bolivianos – about two bucks. In Bolivia, at least in the houses I lived in in 1995, there were no washing machines. Washing happened in an enormous sink on the rooftop or in the compound, scrubbed in cold water and using ACE detergent and a stiff brush on a corrugated washboard. Clothes dried stiffly on lines across the roof or criss-crossed over the communal courtyard.

And it hurt. After twenty minutes of washing, my hands would be red raw – a combination of cold water, effort and harsh detergent – and I’d only have got through a depressingly small fraction of the laundry pile. When the lavandera came knocking, I was only too happy to give her my jeans and sheets and towels for washing – though I kept my smalls and still did them myself. I just couldn’t be comfortable with the idea of paying someone (underpaying them, it felt like, even if it was market rate in that particular situation) to wash my pants.

Service washes are a different thing altogether. Perhaps because you take your intimates out of the context of your home, it seems more acceptable to let someone else deal with them for money. It feels more like a business transaction, even though it may involve underwear (and let’s face it, few business transactions do, these days – at least, not the ones that take place outside Soho and Kings Cross…)

If only I could stick all the washing up and dusty windowsills and smeared mirrors into a holdall and take them down the road to the house-cleano-mat, where I could give them to a nice old lady in curlers to deal with, and then pick them up on the way home from work. If only it worked that way.

Do you, or have you ever had or would you ever have a cleaner?

Lying on the sofa and watching the sky through enormous windows, one side of the sky was dark and ominously cloudy, the other side bathed in fiery evening light. One storm cloud looked as if it was about to burst with brilliance.

We slept with the door open last night.

It was so stuffy in the flat that we left the bedroom door open, along with the window, and the fan created a cooling breeze.

But that was not the only thing left open.

Earlier in the evening, when the Sainsbury’s order arrived, I had run down four flights of stairs to collect the grocieries, putting the door to the flat on the latch. P arrived home with takeaway at the same time as the groceries, and there was a policeman on the doorstep, and we had to lug everything upstairs and things all got a bit distracting after that.

I didn’t notice this morning until I went to leave the flat and noticed that the door opened a little too easily. It had been on the latch all night.

What’s the appropriate response now? Is it to panic in reverse about what could have been? Or to be thankful it didn’t, and vow to lock it properly tonight?

We live under the flightpath into Heathrow, and sometimes the planes are very low and loud as they circle over London on their final approach.

This is a good thing if you’re in one – as I have been a few times recently – because it means you can peer out of the window and spot our street, which is always mildly exciting – I love seeing something familiar from a totally different perspective (which is why I’ve been completely lusting after this book (and this one) since it came out last year.

It’s also curiously relaxing to lie on the bed on weekend mornings, or late afternoons during the week, flopped full clothed after getting in from work and counting the seconds in the interval between each passing plane – ninety, more or less, and close enough to distinguish the airline, though not the passengers inside, peering out through the oval windows at the city streets below.

But sometimes the distant noise of the overflying plane invades my dreams. Last night I dreamt that a plane exploded over the city – I watched from the rooftop as the the aircraft banked and swooped and burst into bright flames which showered to the ground like fireworks. And I woke up frowning.

I’m sitting in the living room, and the noisy bastard from across the street has some friends over and is cranking some dub up load.

It gives me enormous pleasure to get up from the computer, switch it off, turn off the light and close the door on his racket. This is no longer my bedroom. Goodnight Mr Loud – your nocturnal noise cannot harm me any more.

But I still sincerely hope your ears fall off.

After spending much of the end of last week erecting scaffolding outside the back of our house, they’ve now discovered that they can’t actually open the window to shout instructions from inside the bathroom to outside, because the scaffolding is flush against the window frame. Brilliant. Cue much running up and down stairs like loonies, and many out-of-puff plumbers.

So here I am, waiting for the builders, or possibly plumbers, to finish and the loss adjuster to turn up all of whom were reputed to show up at about twenty past eleven. But the builder arrived at quarter to ten, and then promptly turned off my water before disappearing again until just now.

I wouldn’t mind so much but there’s a horrific banging noise coming from the bathroom now… and I daren’t look.

To say we got caught in the rain last night would be to understate the situation just slightly.

It had been drizzling all day and then, on our way back from a post-work (I nearly said post-office, but that would be something else entirely) trip to the supermarket, the skies opened dramatically, soaking us from head to toe, leaving us sodden and streaming with London rain, and splashes thrown up by puddles on the busy Talgarth Road as we squelched home with bags of groceries.

How wonderful, then, to be able to get into a flat that is utterly our own, and strip off to eat falafel drowned in tzatziki in the warm living room. Sometimes I feel so lucky, and I can’t quite believe this is my life.

And then this morning, looking out at a part-blue sky, I remembered that thing my mum used to say about the weather – if you can make a pair of sailor’s trousers out of the blue, the weather would be fine. Well, I could have made a pair of sailor’s hotpants from the sky, so perhaps I was stretching it a bit, but I left the house without a brolly anyway, looking on the bright side.

And now I’m regretting it. Goodbye sunny blue, hello-drowned-duck-in-a-thunderstorm. Such a good look, don’t you think?

We moved house yesterday – quite literally. When we first moved into our lovely flat, we took one look at the large room with enormous windows at the front of the house and said “oh yes, that’ll be the bedroom, thankyewverymuch” leaving the middle room (which has two doors – one to the hallway, by the main entrance, and a door to the West Wing, with stairs to the spare room/study and bathroom) to be the living room. Besides, why would anyone put a bedroom in the middle of the house? Anyone who came to stay or for dinner would have to traipse through our bedroom to get to the bathroom or the front door. So it made much more sense for that room to be the living room.

And you know, it worked pretty well like that – though the living room had built in cupboards along one wall, and far too many books and bits of electronic gadgetry for such a small room. And the bedroom had big, bright sash windows overlooking the road, and because it was slightly larger, also housed my computer as well as our bed. But the other small problem was the noisy fecker across the road, with his terrible taste in music and his unsociable listening hours. We tossed and turned and pulled our hair out at the noise, stubbornly refusing to rethink our room arrangement, investing instead in earplugs and ambient music to overplay.

And then, on Saturday night, the Rah couple downstairs had a dinner party, and ended up playing Trivial Pursuit with their guests until long after two. We know the game because their voices were so loud, bouncing off wooden floors, and booming with booze, that we could answer all the questions through our floor. Their living room, you see is at the front of the house, something they have in common with every other flat on our street (or so we assume, from nosing at our neighbours).

At half two, we were curled up in the spare room. I was doing the Guardian Quick Crossword, and P was having a spod at his machine (which lives in there), when suddenly it occured to us that it was possible to move the flat around. Why not?

When we got up on Sunday, we had a bacon butty each, and then set about moving everything. Like moving house, but without the stairs.

But at the end…oh my. What a lovely quiet bedroom. What a beautiful bright living room. For the first time in eight years, my computer isn’t in my bedroom. I have a bedroom which is just a bedroom. No, not just. Exclusively a bedroom. A quiet, comfortable, big, bright bedroom.

Of course, because of all the moving around, it felt like sleeping in a new flat, which meant that I was hyper-aware of all the other strange noises: someone’s fridge shaking down in the early hours, my alarm clock buzzing gently. A different kind of noise; quiet noise. But what a lovely change.

There is a big welsh man who lives (or is staying) in a flat across the road from us, but who I’ve never seen before (odd, because this street full of houses converted into flats with big Georgian windows is perfect for people watching – remind me to tell you sometime about the kiwi commune directly across from our kitchen window – hundreds of faces and never the same person twice, plus barbeques every weekend).

For the second night in a row, at almost exactly the same time of night, he’s leaning out of his second floor window, shouting down at the occasional passer-by to find out what the correct time is. Each one consults their watch or mobile phone, and then tells him, but he keeps asking.

“Hey…mate…up here…have you got the correct time?…What’s the right time?…Ten past twelve?…Thanks very much…..Hey…mate….Excuse me….What’s the correct time?…..Thanks a lot….Hey….Mate….Yes, You…..Have you got the right time?…Time…Do you know what Time it is?…..Ten past?…Cheers….Hey, mate….”

Just another night in Wet Ken.