A Fresh Start

So, it’s been one of those weeks.

It started off nicely enough on Tuesday when, shortly after posting last week’s edition, I flopped down onto the sofa and heard a grating twang followed by a softer crunch.

Yup. Broke one of the springs.

It had sheared sharply off, twisted downwards and ripped through the bottom of the sofa embedding itself in the wooden floor. Good job it went down, really.

This was surprisingly traumatic. Our sofa is well over thirty years old. We inherited it from Beck’s parents, who were shocked we even wanted it as they’d been planning on sending it to the tip. Then we kept it for a decade. (I had the armchair in my room in Sheffield for those who were there) I’m not a big one on new furniture. Only the bookshelves and the Argos cheapo bed were actually new when we got them. Everything else has been begged, borrowed indefinitely, built ourselves (oh, alright, built by Beck whilst I watched), out rightly stolen or found in skips.

The idea of going out to look for a not-quite-so-old sofa that’s comfortable and fits in the space allotted seems akin to taking your elderly pet out into the woods a long way from home and leaving it there.

Wednesday didn’t get much better. I enjoyed my day at college, but had to curtail the following pub session in order to watch Southwark Council vote to approve the budget cuts that closed the Livesey Museum for Children. I’ve banged on about this before, so I’ll just express my disbelief that, given that the budget is the most important decision the local council can take, six opposition councillors didn’t bother to turn up. You know, it’s deciding the fate of local services for the next twelve months, it’s the one chance to actually vote on things that matter rather than whether new speed humps are going to be built on the one remaining residential road without them, but I guess something more important must have been happening. Like someone on a street corner giving out free Haribo.

Over Thursday and Friday I managed to write myself into a corner, which meant that I had to spend all day Saturday making extensive plot, narrative and character notes, trying to see how it was all going to fit together over a hundred thousand words or so. This is what scares me about ‘the novel’ rather than my comfort zone of short stories. It’s just too damn big to just try and write through it and then cut back the bits that’re crap later.

Anyway, I decided to take Sunday off. Entirely. No words at all. We’d do something fun, something that would give my brain a rest.

Probably should have mentioned this earlier, though. I got up late (about quarter past eight) and wallowed I the bath for a while. When I went to get dressed I found Beck just waking up.

“What’re you doing today?” She asks.

“Absolutely nothing at all. Want to join me?” I bounce onto the bed and get a flashback of Tuesday night and think that I should probably be more gentle with the furniture until I loose a couple of stone.

“I need to do some work today and there’s a meeting for that show tonight.”

“Ah.”

Eventually we decided on a compromise. Breakfast and then to walk down to Greenwich via Blackheath. Get some exercise, potter around one of our favourite bits of London, grab some quick lunch off a market stall by the Thames and then head for home so Beck can get some work done.

“And then you can clean the house.”

That wasn’t quite what I had in mind. I’d been thinking more along the lines of mindlessly watching Alec Guinness in The Fall Of The Roman Empire for the umpteenth time, or maybe reading some more of Andrey Kurkov’s, frankly brilliant, The President’s Last Love.

But when I’d been submerged in the bath I’d been disgusted by the brown gunk growing in-between the tiles. So, I agreed.

Now, Beck and I have slightly different approaches to cleaning. I tend to clean frequently, but in a relatively half-arsed fashion. (I should probably qualify that by frequently I mean every four to six weeks, everything’s relative). I’ll also reach the point where I’ve had enough and I’ll either vacuum just the rug or simply spray a bit of cif around the basin and, hell, that’ll do.

Beck, by contrast, cleans annually, bi-annually if it’s a leap year. However, she will clean far more thoroughly than me.

Provided she finishes.

Back in July, the time of her last descent into domestic cleanliness, I came home from work tired and fancying my tea pretty promptly. I found the lounge curtains in the washing machine, all the furniture down the one end of the room and a bucket of cold, soapy water and a sponge in the middle of the half cleaned floor. In the kitchen she had clearly cleaned the inside of all the cupboards, although the contents were still strewn over the floor. Beck was, of course, absent having suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be attending a friend’s private view.

Still, I guess the two techniques compliment each other.

Maybe.

Cleaning our house is always complicated by the fact that neither of us is very tidy, so the first stage is always a tedious return of objects to their rightful place. Hiking boots are retrieved from the bathroom, tampons from the kitchen, stacks of open CD cases are returned to the shelves, newspapers cover every conceivable surface and orifice, some of which are weeks old. Any dead animals need to be disposed of properly.

The whole cleaning, tidying malarkey took nearly three hours, but I think I did a pretty good job for once. If you ignore the fact that I didn’t actually move anything and just dusted and vacuumed around objects and broken furniture. Apparently, though, the process includes an unyielding stream of swearing and moaning. At any moment I can be heard muttering “I hate cleaning the toilet/kitchen floor” or “I loathe vacuuming the stairs/wooden floor/bed.”

In my defensive the extremely crude explosion was probably when I was trying to fix the toilet seat and my DIY skills are about as advanced as a giraffe’s.

The only thing is, I got so bored cleaning that when I was done I wanted nothing more than to sit down and write.

So much for a day off.