Sunday 18 May 2008

Deathly dull and infested

13st 10lb (as immovable as a Burmese general); five units of alcohol with dinner yesterday; 1,356; Home, Sweet Home.

How could I possibly construct an interesting blog entry out of a day which I spent ironing 15 shirts and spring cleaning two conservatories? No, it beats me. Someone rang several times to say that they fancied coming to see me, but I had to turn him down because I was so busily occupied making the house fit to receive visitors. A bit illogical somehow, since I don’t suppose that particular person will ever ring me again, and the odds are that no-one else will risk arousing the ire of the curmudgeon for months. A shame, because the conservatory with the view now offers of the finest prospects in the whole of England, following my painstaking removal of 12 months’ worth of accumulated grime from its windows.

Ah well, I suppose I shall just have to admire it all by myself. I am not sure that the dog is big on views. He is more interested in food, and bright red toys made in the shape of a Second World War surface mine.

In the course of my spring cleaning I discovered a kitchen cupboard, used only to store tinned dog food, which is subject to a massive infestation by tiny moths. Even though there is nothing in it on which moths could feed, or any obvious medium in which they could breed. I was equally puzzled by what had evidently been a large scale infestation of another cupboard by mice. This one contained nothing at all that mice could possibly eat, though they are of course famously partial to completely inappropriate things like power cables. Then I remembered that my one of my ex-fiancĂ©es had kindly given me a microwaveable support to ease (appropriately enough) a pain in the neck. I had thoughtlessly chucked it into the cupboard when I had finished with it, overlooking the fact that it was stuffed with … grain.

Oh dear. What a mess. Still, good for my local hardware retailer’s sales of traps and poison.

The LTCB has disappeared from this ramble not because I have screwed things up as I usually do, though I have to admit that that is probably only because she has spent the week in a country where communication by phone or text message has been impossible, and the exchange of e-mails difficult. She rang me early this morning from an airport in Paris, where she was not in the best of moods, having missed her connecting flight to Manchester and having nothing to read, no euros with which to buy anything, and a mobile phone with a flat battery. She was probably in an even worse mood when the payphone on which she was talking to me with the aid of her debit card cut her off, presumably because the exorbitantly expensive call had just completely drained her current account.

The awful thing is that the sound of her voice made me realize something about the strength of my feelings for her that I couldn’t possibly reveal in this blog, because she is one of its very few readers. And if I set it down here, the Rules of Dating would require her to dump me forthwith. A bit of a conundrum, that.

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