of finish lines and mirages

Good Morrow Ladies and Gents all

I have been nudged into wakefulness and summoned to my laptop to write a post (for which many thankyous – it’s good to be missed).  And so, like some crumpled old genie I emerge from my suburban bottle in a poof of wattle pollen.  But I must warn you that this will be a post thrown together by a distracted mind.  Caveat emptor!  Abandon ship all ye who enter here seeking order, coherence or even linear thought.

But first, let’s do the ritual  sozzas for being late and get that out of the way. Ladies and Gents,  pray silence for the solemn reading of the Proclamation of Lamentations.   Items one to six – issues arising with the Regency Wreck.  Items seven to ten – other matters.  One such other matter, in fact, being the complete and utter lack of internet for five weeks.   There has been much eating of cold turkey around here and it hasn’t been a pretty thing.  It’s not until you’re without it that you realise the full and alarming extent of your dependence.   Mr P, normally the most equable fellow you could ever wish to meet, took to posting boxfuls of his torn out hair to call centres in Manila.  The eventual upshot being that  our illustrious ISP has now supplied us with a dongle (do you not love that word?), and so here I am, bashing out said post.

So then. Life has been somewhat Sisyphean of late.  It’s been tough on the Regency Wreck front – that’s axiomatic, innit – but also across the board really.  There has been some pretty awful news in the family and my own health issues have resurfaced from all the on-going nonsense.   A veritable tsunami of stress, all in all.   Mr P, I have to tell you, has been a Super Trouper of the First Order, with gold medals and epaulettes and everything.  But I, the ex-stress junkie, have been coming apart at the seams just a little.  Madame Flaketastic, wibbling and wavering all over, like a too-heavy thing on a too-slender base.  Hence, you know, the lack of posts.

And what of the the jolly old Regency Wreck?  Well, it finally resembles a house (more or less), and, in fact, has been hovering within co-ee of the finish line for some time now.  Hovering but not advancing very fast.  Indeed, the very definition of ‘finish’ is something that is hotly contested at present.  And so we are still waiting.  And waiting.  Parables of tortoises and hares spring to mind.  Rather fed-up tortoises with tired legs, I tell you, having staggered around these past two and a half years (I know! really!) under the weight of that big old unliveable house.  And no, that’s not the wind in the trees you hear; it’s the strains of violins.  Overall, the situation with the RW is still…shall we say, somewhat powder keggish… and because of that I think I shall be prudent for once and stay schtum about the whole thing.  Just for a short while longer, if you’ll forgive me. But, as they like to say, watch this space.  I promise posts with pictures and sentences that make sense and no smoke and mirrors.  Maybe even a theme or two.  Soon.  As soon as a spoon.

In the meantime, let’s look beyond that disputed finish line at the piles of kitchen, pantry and laundry cupboards that are still in the UK, but due to be packed on Tuesday and bundled onto a boat to make their seasick way out here.  I know that it seems an utter lunacy to have a kitchen made on the other side of the world but in fact, even with the shipping costs it’s cheaper and I got rather tired of hearing that no, I couldn’t have real hinges but I could have fake ones with those flat pack affairs behind them.  I mean, really!

In the end we did go with the pink island.  The actual colour has more yellow in it than appears in the photo; a sort of stewed rhubarb hue. At least I’m hoping it does because in the photo it looks a little scarily…pink. 

This last cupboard is for the laundry because – confession time here – I’m a bit of a closet washermaid (without the mob cap) and the pinnacle of my laundressing aspirations (other than, you know, a housekeeper) has for years been the idea of a cupboard into which I can sort clean and dirty washing.  In colour categories, mind you (for dirty) and owners (for clean).   You may call me anal – but let me remind you that Mrs Beeton would have called me organised.So then one pressing question on my mind (that small portion not taken up with matters of porcelain or semiotics, which is another story)… one pressing question is whether copper would speak nicely to the pink island in the kitchen.  Or not.  Because I am having a little love affair with these lights which look to me for all the world like slightly deliquescing jellies:

And further, whether the pink condemns me to sensible honed granite worktops in grey, and all matters relating thereto.  And on that lovely prosaic note, I am off.

Soon, jellyspoons.

The fool’s waltz – one step forward, two steps…

Well hello there campers.  Long time, no thingummies.

(Please take as read the by-now standard apology for time elapsing, general slack tartishness and various assorted etceteras).

Actually, in fact, I had intended to write a post during our five week extravaganza to the UK, but we went at such a fast clop here, there and everywhere, ordering sofas, gathering paint samples and (most importantly) organising retirement homes, that I had hardly a second to sit at my machine.

 

In order to cope with the stress and the sheer wall of anger generated by house issues, our response has been, as far as possible, to pretend that the Regency Wreck doesn’t actually exist.  Instead, we have tiptoed, hand in hand, into the realm of fantasy.

Not  that nice, safe, unattainable variety of fantasy, mind you,  but the sort that has a margin of realism, something that might actually be pulled off by those with stunning reserves of masochism, goodly sets of blinkers and at least one very impulsive adventure seeker (that would be me, the sort of adventure seeker who always forgets that adventures are hard.  Incidentally, on hearing my (abbreviated) litany of woes, someone at potty training last week reminded me that I was even so lucky to be in my position.  And, of course, she was absolutely right.  I think the mistake is in expecting luck to always feel pleasurable).

In any case, the bummer of it all is that our bolt into fantasy still involves houses!  Do you see what I mean by masochism? Is there no escape? Were we terrible destroyers of houses in other lives who have been set the task of making amends in this life?  It’s bonkers, I tell you, and I watch aghast as we keep on doing the same thing, but keep on we do.

So this little jaunt into fantasy – it started as a throwaway line.  The best and the worst things always seem to start with throwaway lines, don’t they?  Some friends told us that a house in the Somerset countryside which we know well, which we used to walk past yearningly, had finally come onto the market.  This was the house we dreamed about buying when we were properly grown up. It was the house we asked our friends about every year when we visited – had they heard anything about it, had it come on the market yet?

And now it was footloose and fancy free and seeking a dalliance with new people.  Excuse me, all potential buyers – but that would be us.  Begone, you scurvy knaves, get thee hence!

There are complications though. Always with the complications! One, a mere bagatelle, being the mountain of money it would take to secure this house.  We would have to sell almost everything (including that house which will never be finished).  We would have to go cantering over there quam celerrime.  It would take upheaval of the most blithering variety.  The Regency Wreck in comparison?  Would be a doddle.  A waltz in the proverbial park.  But why let that stand in the way?

And while we were at it, drooling over our old love, we had a little look at other houses in the same area.  They got bigger and madder the further we looked.  We rediscovered our old fantasy of doing up a vast old wreck and running it as a hotel.  If I tell you we got down to what we’d serve for breakfast and the fact that I’d need a studio to make the crockery, you’ll see how far gone we are.  If you’re going to be sick, I tell you, be properly so.

There was this one, which utterly smote my heart:

But it’s near a busy road and the whole village can peer into your windows.  But even so, look:

and

And then there was this little tootsie, which is already a hotel.  In need of, of course, dosh and love.  And, oh em gee, new bathrooms:

and

The problem with that one is that there’s a car breakers yard just over the hedge.  So then we found another, this one already a hotel and one which Mr P has the  decided hots for (me less so – it’s a tad masculine):

A grade 1 medieval number in need of a bit of colour and oomph

But alas alackikins, this one sits in the grounds of an agriculture college and has no land.

And there are more.

But I am off for supper.  I’ll be back in short order with pictures of the sofas ordered, rugs ogled and that sort of thing.  Tooraloo.

Of walls and Herberts.

Hola mis damas, mis caballeros, mis little castanets.

Oy vey.  As far as silences go, this one has been an absolute doozie.  Not only did I plunge headfirst off the blogging horse but said horse got so tired of waiting it pottered off to livelier pastures, raised a family, opened an organic oats business and then retired.  And so here I am, mountless.  But, you know, bisons is bisons and tradition is tradition and if I started too many posts without the statutory apols for slack tartishness, you’d think you too had wandered off to some other, more organised blog.  So, dear Ladles and Jellyspoons all – (if there is, indeed, anyone out there still with half a cocked ear) – I bid you good morrow.

And the reason for my muteness?  For one thing I’ve started back at what it amuses Ms Pimperletta to call my ‘potty training’.(http://northernbeachesceramics.wordpress.com/). So there you will find me from Monday to Wednesday, having a lovely old time making oddly gonadal shapes out of porcelain. You’ll also find me engrossed on many a night, strung like a looney between the twin swaying poles of dusk and dawn, wide awake and watching as images of  clay go flowing in plastic glory across the  night stage, and off into the flaring dark. You could call me obsessed. I am, for the nonce, much engrossed by the oddly sexual qualities of orchids, and am trying to render them in porcelain as fine and as translucent as my bumble-fingered skills allow. Let me show you what I mean:

And this, which reminds me somehow of monks at prayer, piety verging on the disconsolate:

And from Thursday to Sunday?  There is the house. Natch.  The dear old Regency Wreck. On the subject of which a little caveat, because there follows a short rant, so for those averse to such things, please avert your tender eyes now. Because I have to tell you – we are almost dunfer!  We realised recently that it’s over two years since we bought the house and still there is no moving in date.  In fact we have stopped thinking of moving in at all – it saves on the endless steeplechase of expectation and disappointment.  Mr and Ms Pimp went so far as to join a gym just up the road from where we are renting, and Mr P and I are off for a month next week to visit family in the UK. We were going to do it in December, when we’d moved into the house, and then January when we’d moved into the house, and then February when ditto.  And now we are just doing it.   It has come to feel  as if  there has always been the house and there will always be the house.  Endlessly demanding of door knobs and colours and cupboards and floor tiles and money and money and more money, and energy when the reservoir is dry… and yet never quite getting there.  If I sound a little jaded, it is because I am.  Jaded and absolutely cream crackered.

But (and you can look back now) – there are good bits.  Because there are always good bits.  We are poring over colours (about which, more anon), agonising over kitchens, ogling sofas.  We are thinking what will go on walls.  This all requires a certain suspension of disbelief when, you know, we are never going to live within said walls.  We have found ourselves awash with thoughts of  chinoiserie, for instance. Which was somewhat of a surprise.  Had you once asked me whether we were a chinoiserie kind of mob I’d’ve said probs not.  A bit fiddly, a bit schmancy, a bit opulent – for me at any rate.  But Mr P, coming as he does from several generations of Orient-raised family, has always had a soft spot for it, and Miss P has recently joined in.  And so I have taken up the challenge of sourcing something good, as cheaply as possible.  I have been talking to China.  Several months now of prolix and deeply frustrating emails which start off with a rush and then trickle into intermittence.  Maybe I ask too many questions, maybe I’m too fussy with my requests to add/subtract a bit of bamboo, make the petals finer.  But anyway, we’re getting there and I have learned an invaluable lesson – if you want to save money, you have to spend time (and patience, which is something I’m not renowned for).

Ms P favours something like this for her bedroom, though it has to be said that the bottom portion would be quite wasted, buried under tissues, clothes, shoes, papers, make up, and the general miscellany of what she calls her ‘floordrobe’:

And Pimpoh finds himself fancying something a bit like this:

or this:

Me, I like things a little plainer and a little simpler.  It’s the old Wee Free in me. But even I have been carried away on the  wave.  Just a tad, of course, no deeper in than my knees. Because I like dark things I could, for instance, be persuaded to this.  I’m currently trying to persuade Ms Pimp she wants a version of this for her bathroom.  You know, to go with those dark tiles I’m so enamoured of, but she, she ain’t so convinced:

And talking of walls, there’s another thing (actually there is a whole firmament of other things, but let’s pretend there’s only one) – and that is this, the hallway:

I think there should be a little oomph when you open the front door.  You know,  a small trumpeting fanfare.  And if you can’t afford a line-up of liveried rabbits, you’d best be thinking about getting your drama from the walls. Preferably the wall to the right in our case, which is actually a lot longer than it appears in the photograph.  The problem is that the hallway and staircase also need to sing duets with the rest of the house which is going to be, for now at least, tricked up (or down) in those fugitive, atmospheric greys.  You know, purple greys, brown greys, and their various assorted offspring.  I have ditched, with some reservations, my addiction to moody, inky drama.  It was pointed out to me that the house has a feeling of lightness (in the Enlightenment sense of the word) and that it would be good to go along with it.  And that made sense to me. For now at any rate.  We’ll see whether darkness makes its way in, a little pool here, a dark lake there.  So in all probability the hallway and staircase will be grey also.

How to achieve a sense of drama, then.

There is good old grisaille, of course, and Mr Pimp is very fond of things like this:

And I have to admit, I can see how it might be fun to find an elephant calumphing along the hall when you stumble downstairs at cock call, all early morning frowsy and bleary of sight.

I had a passionate-ish tango with this offering from Trove.  A panoply of old queens seemed quite the thing to come home to:

But then I discovered the price.

Still an arm and  half a leg, I am having a bit of a pash with these:

Or, on a more sedate day, these:

But enough of such fripperies.  Right now I must leap into the car and hurtle down the motorway to go bed shopping with Ms P, who is currently sleeping on a mattress on the floor.  We shall be without the Herberts, who are staying at the farm with Eric the house sitter while we are in the UK.  All of which is another story.  Finding a sitter has been an education that sits alongside buying Chinese wallpaper.  I have encountered aspects of humanity I had not previously met, even in my psychoanalytic practice.  There were many lovely people who replied to my ad, and a few…what you might call eccentrics.  One good lady, for instance, very kindly sent me photographs of her aura.  But Eric seems solid enough, and the dogs are tentatively accepting of him (“what does his arrival mean, where are you going, can we come too?”).  So off I go, guilty heart heavy, until another day…

Of progress and wheels – a few before and durings.

 

Yo Homeslices – greetings from the sickbed.  Wherein brain-deadness covereth all like a sodden blanket.

I say this sotto voce, just in case Fate is lurking somewhere in the bushes – but it is conceivable that we have passed through the valley of death and begun our ascent. Or to cut the hyperbole, that we have finished the dismantling of the Regency Wreck and have begun the re-mantling. I know!  Craycray innit? But, let me tell you, that valley was wide and boulder-strewn.  Our wagon of hope and fortitude just about perished along the way.

A friend remarked recently that we’ll be on a roll now and my response is yes, we are indeed rolling, but at much at the same pace as the first stone-age wheels rolled.  You know, just blazin’ merrily along. Actually we are in attitudes of agitated despair and glumnitude here because the official moving-in date in November was nudged a while ago to January, which was just about cope-able with, and has now been shunted to the end of March, which is emphatically not.

But  leaving all that aside for one moment – to give you a glimpsette of progress so far, by which I mean that which is visible and therefore of interest to me, rather than structural and buried deep within the bowely fabric of the house.

The stone in the basement vestibule is now golden and gleaming, courtesy of the builder’s wife Lin, who actually should be called Builder II on account of how hard she works.  I began the process and she has taken it over – we have gone from this:

to this:

And the dining room is on the march, from this thing of potential

to this thing of golden glory:

All of which is Mr Pimp’s own fair work.  He has further still to go with his trusty scutch hammer, but even now it is looking almost baronial, don’t you think?  Positively Arthurian!  And opposite, this gorgeous stud and noggin wall has been uncovered, and will remain thus:

The plaster on the wall to the left of Noggin the Nog is a little drummy, so there are perchance more stone revelations queuing there.  That dining room, I tell you, will be a veritable feast of texture. A glut! And, furthermore, I shall be spared the necessity of agonising over paint colours.  Which is always welcome.

And speaking of progress, we escaped to the country a couple of weeks ago, to see how Tortoise the calf was faring.

In-flight catering:

 

And when we arrived we found Tortoise so busy with his homies that he could barely manage a wave:

We also discovered that Miss Brown, one of the two original matriarchs of the herd, with this little blokey in tow:

Which made me extremely, ecstatically happy, because the last two times we saw her she’d separated herself from the herd and I feared she had lost a calf.

So there we have it.  All is well in the Green Kingdom, and stultifyingly slow in the urban one.  And I am off to my sickbed.

 

 

 

 

 

Do I look bovvered to you?

Well hello!  Greetings from the echoing grove, this place of cobwebs and silence.

Apologies for the even-more-sporadic-than-usual posts (at least I think they are). Thing is, the jolliness quotient has been rather low recently.  Sub-optimal, as Mr Pimperooh would say.  Bottom dwelling, actually. Positively languishing!  And bearing in mind the convention in blogland for upbeat and happy, I have thought to stay mum for the duration.

But recently there’s been a small revolution taking place in these here  bloggity parts – have you come across it?  A group of bloggers have defied the blog(u)topian rule and have been Writing it like it Really Is in a collection of posts under the umbrella title of ‘Things I’m afraid to Tell You’.  Souls have been bared, secrets revealed, the not-so-perfect strewn across the innernets. Exciting and liberating stuff.  I first came across it here.

So somewhat in that vein, and because (like that children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt) you can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you’ve got to go through it,  I think I need to get at least some of it off my chest.  Confined to Regency Wreck matters, because – and I’ve already confessed to a certain confessionalism -otherwise we’ll be here all night. And then we can move onto such niceties as taps and basins. And stone floors and copper islands.  And nickel plated baths and tear-drop taps. And, of course,  the conundrum of the ever-rising bathroom waistline.  You thought it was only trousers and hemlines?  No! Not on your nelly.

Anyway,  please avert your eyes if you are  squeamish about the glumps.

So,  we have been troubled in Pimpsville.  Cast down somewhat, and depleted.  Tempers have been frayed. Sleep has been interrupted.   By day we tiptoe through the tulips, hand in hand through shops and showrooms. Baths, lavatories, showers. A thousand dollars here, five thousand there.  And who cares?  It’s only monay!  But by evening the shadows lengthen and at night come tapping on the door of sleep.  Softly, ineluctably.  My dreams are not the des res havens I wish for at the moment.  No white voile curtains billow languorously at their open windows. No rectangles of pale afternoon light spill in, warming floor and feet.  Instead, they are populated by suited thugs demanding money for  umbrella vending machines in the basement of the Regency Wreck.  And by unruly hoards who rush in tsunamis through the front door in search of self-help workshops or wallets to steal.  It doesn’t exactly need my rusty psychoanalytic self  to decipher the lumbering symbolism in all that.

There seems to be a threshold  beyond which floors that collapse and walls that crumble bring with them a wobble of  the confidence. Suddenly there are doubts about the project, questions about its viability. Relationships suffer, finances dwindle, horizons cloud. Survival in one piece seems no longer axiomatic. To be spending like a couple of drunken sailors can be frightening when neither of us is working,  when jobs become scarcer and scarcer and when the world around us seems more tilting and more wobbling by the day.  Everywhere we go we find closing down sales, liquidation stock clearances.  That means bargains of course, but they are bargains resting on the backs of people who are losing their jobs.  Under all their valiant politeness the dark and fearful waters of joblessness sway. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices.  These are hard times and to be so profligate in their midst brings a queasiness, an unease of the soul.

Things have been wobbly in Herbertsville too, with Mr Derring Do himself, HRH Remington Rem the First jumping one too many fences he shouldna, and utterly eradicating his cruciate tendon. He has had a knee re-construction and a spell in hospital (wooing the nurses left and right, natch, for he is a splendoursome thing, ma boy ).  He was discharged on Wednesday, sent home to an ecstatic Elsie (and a moderately happy me) only to be re-admitted  the next day with…ahem…complications of the waterworks.   And so he is back there again, and it is testament to where my head is at that one of the thoughts I had was “oh my gawd, we could fit out a bathroom for the cost of that”.  Though that was, I have to say, a fairly low on the list thought.

Here he is, shaved, sutured, and stapled. Confused and confounded.  And still utterly himself. Because after all, a Remington is a Remington is a Remington.

And that, said Fred, is that.  Enough off the chest. I shall be back forthwith with baths and taps and the like. And a goodly dose of something closely resembling optimism.  Just you wait and see!

Hubble bubble termite trouble

Tap tap…testing, testing…1, 2, 3…

It’s been a while, crocodiles.

A month, in fact, since I posted from the sheet less bed in my – oh – old house.  A month in which we have passed through the valley of cardboard and emerged, blinking like moles, into the new suburban light.  A new suburban light which, I’ll have you know, is tinted yellow by bottle glass windows, and brown by  vertical blinds.   A suburban world of architectural wonders, everso shouting children and friendly neighbours. All of which deserves a post unto itself.

But while we were buried down there in our little house-moving purgatory –  stolidly chewing our way  out  through card and packing paper – what of the Regency Wreck?  Well, in fact, it was having a little crisis of its own, quite understandably.

It all began with the builder, a thoroughly thorough sort of fellow, digging away at the layer upon layer of flooring in one section of the house.  In some places there were as many as three or four floors all laid on top of each other, like so (though this is only two):

I mean, actually, when you think about it, why bother to remove old floors when you can simply cover them up?  Just add more as needed Missus and stop only when you can no longer stand up straight.  Anyway, while he was removing extraneous floors, the Thoroughly Thorough Builder noticed some rather suspicious little trails of mud which, when he followed their progress, led him to yet aNOTHer termite nest, very artfully and discreetly secreted within one wall.  And, in the way of termites, those little buggers had gone up and down, left and right, and nibbled away at the floor joists in four rooms. Four!

I give you, ladies and gents of the jury,  exhibit A, itself a mere fraction of the nest:

And what he found was that the floor joists, which conventionally are supported within the fabric of the wall, in the RW appeared to stop shy thereof. In fact, they were held up only by the render on said walls, which, when it was removed to get at the termite nest, resulted in such scenes of floorless carnage:

and this (which is the entrance to my study)

so that you can see almost from top to bottom of the house at the rear.  No need of internal intercoms now:

So the dear old Regency Wreck, which before looked derelict but absolutely beautiful, now just looks, well, abandoned.  Much in the way of the houses of my childhood, except without their dignity or intrigue. It’s as if we’ve taken a rather grand but crumbling old lady, removed her pearls, her lippy and her wig, pulled her arms out of her fur coat and left her revealed and without dignity under a fluorescent light.Our last few visits, to be honest, have been somewhat woeful affairs, characterised by a distinct flatness. We knew this sort of thing was to be expected, of course, but expecting something and encountering it are never quite the same thing, are they?

BUT.  But!  They say diversion is as good as a cure (don’t they? something like that? anyone?) and it just so happened that when we poked our heads above ground after the move, not only the yellow light and the bellowing children were there at the end of the tunnel to greet us , but also  Thoroughly Thorough Builder, gawd bless ‘is ‘eart, demanding lavatories with menaces. And so we have been cantering about the length and breadth of Sydney, peering down porcelain pans.  And as we all know, questions about lavs beget questions about basins, which in turn beget questions about baths (baths! don’t get me started) and many assorted sundry etceteras.  So we are diverted, madly, and in the diverted meanwhile TTBuilder is putting up floors, and patching brickwork….and so it may all come good in the end.

To breathe out into calm.

If the first rule of blogging is to be positive and the fifth law is that the ratio of difficulty posting is proportionate to time elapsed between posts – well then, a lot of silence can happen.

But enough of all that – Mr Pimp is, as I type ,winging his way back from Singapore (the silver lining in the cloud of financial collapse).  As well as that,  our house is getting ready for sale  in the next couple of weeks, and there are paint pots and wet dogs and steam machines all tumbling chaotically towards the deadline.

So, by way of buying myself a plot of peace, here are a few pictures from my ‘dark room’ cache.  And the common denominator?  Stillness.  Do you see leaking roofs, spooned floorboards, chipped paintwork, spiders’ webs, torn lampshades, fly-blown blinds, dying plants, grimy tiles or grubby grouting – all clamouring to be seen to – in these photos?

Do you see gob-spattered walls courtesy of Remington Pollack?  Gouged floors courtesy of his smaller, more anxious friend?

Do you see the army of solid burghers all come to fix said ailments – the estate agents, the painters, the gardeners, the house washers, the floor sanders, the window cleaners?

No, nor do I!

I see acres of calm space.  I see a modicum of intersecting lines, but not so many that they intersect thoughts.  I see a bed on which it might be possible to read a poem, where each word might inhabit its own unrushed space and images unspool at their own unrushed leisure.

(The interesting question, with all this yearning for peace, of course,  is why I dream of one life while busily making another one entirely.)

Could I live in this house?  As work on the RW gets closer (whatever you do,  don’t mention the money with which to do the work!) the style becomes a more pressing consideration.  At the moment, it seems to boil down to this – whether to dress the house up or down.

I’d love to credit these pictures but the only annotation in my file is ‘voorhaven’ which is, to say the least, a bit mysterious.  So, usual apologies for usual slack tartishness. It looks very Belgian, though, don’t you think?

Edit –

The pictures are of the home of artist & interior designer Monique Meij-Beekman. Her website is Voorhaven 7 . Photos are by Jan Luijk.

Thanks Jo.

Of collapses and corners.

We’ve been in a floundering pool here, plunging up and down between hope and despair –  Mr Pimp’s salt mine having gone suddenly, shockingly and spectacularly belly up last week.  No warning, no forecast, no prognostications of doom. One minute the company was fine, the next it was gone. One minute we were trotting along, the next we were two cartoon people, the ground gone beneath our feet, frantically pedaling thin air. A thing of perception and rumour, the corporate world.  No more, really, than a house of cards.

The phones between here and there have been ringing red hot. First there was no hope, then there was some, then none again, then a tad, a sliver, a wraith.  Then none whatsoever, for ever, without hindrance or let up.  In the end the receivers were called in and that seemed so final we expected him back any minute, home again, home again, jiggedy jig.  Now he’s staying there a month.  Then, who knows – there are rumours this morning (more rumours!) that someone might buy this dead company, wind it up and set it skittering across the table top again.

So where does (what’s left of) my mind go for solace in the middle of all this lunacy?  Why, to sculleries of course!  Not sculleries as they have become in modern parlance – pantries, or laundries, or even just kitchens by another name – but those shadowed shivery hidey holes where you stuff your scullery maid or channel your own, buried under mountains of greasy pans and potato peelings and plucked feathers.  Me,  I am an inconvenient mix of the house-proud and the slattern, and love the idea of a sequestered ante-chamber where grungy goings-on can poked away.

In my trawlings I found these, and felt that funny house-love/longing/lust/acquisitiveness.  It’s those half-glassed walls that do it for me.  Secret and not secret at the same time.  Revealed and enclosed…this begins to sound a bit kinkay.

This is Plain English’s Osea Kitchen (though theirs looks to be more of a laundry.  Socks – stylists own):

And this is a house on the market in London: I am trying to decide how it would actually, practically work, to have to go into another room to wash pots etc.  Whether it would be practical, really, when it came down to it.  And whether I could do it without losing my beloved stone arch as entrance into the kitchen, complete with steel and glass pivoting door.  Picture of which I would post but for the fact that my new Mac had a fit of conniptions last night and is now withholding pictures.  It never raineth but it poureth.  Time for a stiff gin and a lie down.

The heart is a lonely hunter.

I’ve already ‘fessed up to a certain…uhm …restlessness I am afflicted by.  A tendency to the flibbertigibbet. So then, a confession.  I have been having a dalliance with another house.  Except not so much another house exactly, as other houses.  But even that is too definite.  The idea of other houses.

It began when this bit of lovely came onto the market, just down the road from The Regency Wreck.  It’s part of a terrace that I’ve been stalking past, rapt, for some considerable time.  I didn’t believe these houses would be coming up for sale.  I had factored them out of the equation.

Truth is, this house lacks many of The RW’s charms.  It has no sandstone floors or walls.  No shutters.  No servants’ bells.  But it is spacious and it offers privacy, front and rear.  And, what’s more, it has a garden.  You know, for the frolicking of dogs and the growing of vegetables.  Even though my tomatoes, Mr Pimp sanguinely pointed out,  would be covered with dust from the bridge, fumes from the cars and who knows what from the dogs.

But that aside, there is also a certain view as you come out of the front door.  And though I’m not big on views, I do consider the Opera House to be one of the Seven Wonders of the world. I do. Have you seen those fishtail scales up close?  I mean, lawdy.

Not that I would  swap this particular house for the RW, I hasten to add.  But its sudden availability has set that wayward restlessness  awhispering in me.  What if a certain other house in the terrace  were also to come up?  Maybe next week! In a month!  Because I would sell my extended family to live in that certain other house. Maybe.

All this has all brought on not inconsiderable guilt.  And because I am tiresomely imbued with the ways of analytic introspection, I have, of course, run the whole affair under the jolly old microscope.  But since the modality of blogland doesn’t appear to be confessional (shame! I say, bring out yer dirties!),  I shan’t pin all my drawers on a public noticeboard.  Let’s just say say that the comings and goings around here recently – Mr Pimp to the salt mines, Ms Pimp from the cold climes – are proving to be very disruptive emotionally.  Not to mention the small additional bagatelle of a certain dog (Miss Elsie) who has become increasingly neurotic  in the absence of her person and has taken to barking the household awake at 5 every morning and chewing her tail, so that the walls around here resemble a scene from Miami Vice. So anyway,  that’s my official mitigation.  Another, more troubling possibility is that the recovering adrenaline junkie in me is craving house purchases like some might crave new Maud Frizons.  I hope not, or I shall soon be blogging from the commodious accommodations of the Debtors’ Gaol.

So in an attempt to tether my roving heart,  I visited the RW the other night.  It was Saturday.  There was live music in one of the pubs, people on the street, traffic. It was inner city noisy.  I feared the worst.  I feared the magic might have gone. But actually, it was like stepping into a calm and endlessly patient embrace.  Street light came in through the windows and fell gently over the floor in yellow pools.  The city sounds were muffled, as if by a velvet cloak. I went up to the bedroom and watched a boat, decked in lights, move slowly across the harbour.  Below me, the trees were wearing their new green fuzz of Spring and a couple, thinking the house empty, peered into the basement windows and then kissed. It was all very still and protected somehow.    And so my fervour was soothed.  For now.

Well then.

Heritage came up trumps.  Gawd luv ’em.  Oy am a stoneaged, but even so we have it in writing, with rubber stamps and all.  The ocular proof.

We are allowed everything proposed, with barely a twiddle here and a twitch there.  Oh, and they’d like to see samples of the glass before we set sail on the Jungle Bathroom roof (grey glass).

So, as good as my word, because a promise is a promise

Never one to miss out, Big Boy bonneted up too

Miss Elsie, alas, became too excited and had to be removed (temporarily, natch) from the celebrations.

Of course, there is still the DA to go.  But that’s another day, another hat.