Nightmare on Elm Streetsfield Road
Yes, the decorators came back today. It was like that moment in Fatal Attraction when Glenn Close rises again from the waters of the bath in which you were sure she was dead. Like countless other moments on screen and in real life, when, just as you think it's safe to pick up the threads of your life again, just when you think things are under control and you're coping, the horror returns in all its malign determination.
We'd happily moved out of our bedroom into the 'spare' or 'guest' room. This is a kind of virtual space, because it never was spare until the children started to leave home, and it still isn't really, because when they started moving out, most of their stuff stayed behind - as it does - and it also acquired the new status of general junk and box room for the offspring that remain. Just occasionally a genuine guest finds where the bed is in there, and succeeds in staying the night. But it's like all those folk tales: we, the hosts, bid them Goodnight with anxious expressions. Will they survive? Will we find them dead in the morning, strangled by something evil that lurks among all the piles of stuff? I have read about 5 bed-roomed vicarages, but I don't really believe they exist, except in some fabled travellers' tales of Somewhere Else. Maybe only Important Clergy, or incumbents of Important Benefices, are fortunate enough to live in such exotic palaces ...
So we moved into the spare room and slept there last night, and all seemed wonderfully comfortable and serene. Before 8 this morning the decorators came. And all the Other Stuff had to be moved in about 5 minutes, and naturally turns out to be much more than we had already moved and that took all day at the weekend. I don't know how these anomalies in the space-time continuum creep into my life: they should stay in Star Trek where they belong.
Not that the painters themselves are evil; in fact, they're lovely. One of them, Billy, an Irish Catholic, actually asked to come back and work here again. He was asking me if I had Mass in the morning. Only on Wednesdays, I said; the other days it's just Morning Prayer. I'm touched by the good will of ordinary people who want to do a good job to benefit someone working for a Church that isn't even their own. There is a true ecumenism. It just doesn't have much to do with the church structures and institutions.
We'd happily moved out of our bedroom into the 'spare' or 'guest' room. This is a kind of virtual space, because it never was spare until the children started to leave home, and it still isn't really, because when they started moving out, most of their stuff stayed behind - as it does - and it also acquired the new status of general junk and box room for the offspring that remain. Just occasionally a genuine guest finds where the bed is in there, and succeeds in staying the night. But it's like all those folk tales: we, the hosts, bid them Goodnight with anxious expressions. Will they survive? Will we find them dead in the morning, strangled by something evil that lurks among all the piles of stuff? I have read about 5 bed-roomed vicarages, but I don't really believe they exist, except in some fabled travellers' tales of Somewhere Else. Maybe only Important Clergy, or incumbents of Important Benefices, are fortunate enough to live in such exotic palaces ...
So we moved into the spare room and slept there last night, and all seemed wonderfully comfortable and serene. Before 8 this morning the decorators came. And all the Other Stuff had to be moved in about 5 minutes, and naturally turns out to be much more than we had already moved and that took all day at the weekend. I don't know how these anomalies in the space-time continuum creep into my life: they should stay in Star Trek where they belong.
Not that the painters themselves are evil; in fact, they're lovely. One of them, Billy, an Irish Catholic, actually asked to come back and work here again. He was asking me if I had Mass in the morning. Only on Wednesdays, I said; the other days it's just Morning Prayer. I'm touched by the good will of ordinary people who want to do a good job to benefit someone working for a Church that isn't even their own. There is a true ecumenism. It just doesn't have much to do with the church structures and institutions.
posted by Tony at 9/15/2004 05:12:00 pm
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