More or less

So my grand designs regarding furniture and moving things on evaporated.

Or friend from church who was homeless and had found himself an apartment, as things turned out, didn't want to actually live in that apartment.

He appreciated the wisdom of securing a bolthole for when it rains and freezes, and for storing his few belongings, but the confinement of being indoors did his head in. At least for the summertime, he needed the spaciousness of walking and drifting and sleeping outdoors. You can understand it, can't you?

So he didn't even want to think about the items of furniture and cookware we had made available for him. Food, he needs, from time to time — otherwise he simply stops eating — and someone to sit with him and allow him simply to be. But not furniture.

So I took the chair back up to my bedroom. Well, I say I took it — in fact I needed help from Tony. As armchairs go, it is small and light, but I got stuck with it at the bend of the stairs. I take this as a sign of growing old. Anyway, the return of the chair is appreciated.

It's good, isn't it? Even when things don't work out, they are not wasted.

The little chest of drawers I had taken downstairs ready to go makes handy extra storage and a place for the lamp to stand.

Ah — that cushion (in the middle of the sofa). It is — of course — not actually alive, but it has personality, don't you think?

The crockpot still awaits a new home. No one in the family has need of it. I shall gird up my loins for the task of posting it on the Hastings Give and Bakery, but for now it is in hibernation, in a state of dormancy interrupting its seasons of usefulness, on the floor outside the cupboard where the boiler (US, furnace) lives.

But look, not only did we fail to pass on that furniture and so reduce our in-house liabilities, but we actually augmented them by bringing something else home.

I have had to adjust the light right up so you can see its structure, because it is by nature deep and mysterious. It looks Chinese, in every possible way — it has that square, toad-like ambience of some Chinese aesthetics, it is as solid and secretive as Old Beijing. I mean this table (with the apples on).

( #should_have_been_a_furniture_salesman )   😉

The thing is, where we live people fly-tip whatever they don't want. Broken vacuum cleaners. Defunct mattresses. Old clothes. Cast-off children's toys. Car tyres. They put them out in the street and walk away. Someone else's problem.

That's how we got the blue and green blanket on the sofa further up the  page. Someone tossed it out into the road. I left it for a while in case they'd made a mistake and dropped it by accident (well, you never know). but eventually I brought it in from the rain and washed the mud out of it.

And this little table had been out in the street several days — we kept seeing it when we went for our evening walk. The weather was dry and hot, but then They forecast a thunderstorm, and I began to worry about it; because that table is, in its inscrutable, squat, Chinese way, rather beautiful. It is the kind of furniture you might have if your near relatives were dragons.

So Tony went back for the car, and brought it home. I cleaned it up. It stood in the passage. I showed photos of it to my family. They didn't want it. I considered offering it to Father Aleksandr —

— who is an avid collector with an eye for beauty. Frankly, he will take almost anything.

And then, seeing it adorned with apples like a harvest altar, I realised it was happy here. It wanted to be allowed to stay.

Not the only one.

Brian Walsh fixing the sky

 Brian Walsh comes from Lancashire, but we won't hold that against him.

To be honest I'm not a hundred per cent sure of his name. He was recommended to my husband Tony by someone on Nextdoor, the neighbourhood app you can get. So when we moved in to our house, after a financially disastrous beginning with Irish John who did some good work on our garden for sure, but charged us an arm and a leg and a second mortgage for the privilege, we paused a little while and then my husband found Brian Walsh.

Now, facial recognition is not my hubby's strong point — he doesn't always recognise me, and we've been married twenty years this September — but to go with that, he doesn't always recall names either. So on Sunday he came home after church and told me what an interesting conversation he'd had with Dave, told me all about Dave's doctorate and the book Dave wants to write and how many languages he speaks. I was beginning to wonder if Dave was seeking employment. And he mentioned Dave's wife Emily and her sphere of work.

Now, Dave is moving on to a different town, so yesterday morning we prayed for Dave and Mrs Dave. "Emily?" I said, but my hubby said no, he thought she was called Fiona. Fair enough. Maybe Dave has two wives?

And so, after Irish John had departed with half my hubby's savings and left us with a nice new fence and a mended terrace and a sturdy plinth for our shed and various other jobs done, there was a pause while we recovered from our fiscal wounds and then my hubby found Brian Walsh. But later he said he thought Brian's name is in fact Welch. Or I suppose that could be Welsh. This is the whole problem with oral traditions. Hard to rely on. accurate record-keeping is everything.

But that was how Brian Walsh came into our lives, and what a Godsend he has proved to be. He took away the spaghetti of cabling festooned round our house like a cobweb enveloping a fly. And then he filled all the holes where the cables had gone into the house so that every room could have a telly and Christmas lights could be erected and old telephones had been connected. He filled the cracks in the render and repainted it all and slapped bitumen stuff onto the side gate and replaced the flashing round the base of the chimney where water was getting in, and sorted the barge boards and put back the slipped tile and boxed in the kitchen pipes and replaced the pantry window with one that both opened and had a trickle vent so the pantry didn't go mouldy any more.

Not only that but he told us about the time he'd seen God and about all the hundreds of paintings he'd collected, and he re-ordered the political structures of England to get a better result than the present unfolding fiasco, and he had a nice time drinking tea and eating chocolate biscuits on our terrace with his assistant (and son-in-law) Lee.

Lee is almost as silent as St Joseph, observant, courteous when he does speak, and very brave. This latter I know, because Lee doesn't like heights, but when they put the scaffold up to fix the chimney and the roof, Lee didn't say anything — he just went up the ladder and did the work.

It rained a lot this spring. Day after day of heavy cloud, cold and grey. I got fed up with it and Clarence hated it. Not that Clarence — our cat — likes the hot weather either. In last week's heat wave he had to lie spread out like a dead frog with as much of his belly in contact with the floor as he could manage. Because Clarence has luxuriant fur, and a lot of it; that fur goes very badly with heat waves.

Even so, he finds ways to get cool and at least it's dry. Because if there's one thing Clarence hates above all else, it's when it rains.

He came in one evening back in the early spring, telling me at length that the sky was broken and leaking all over our garden. He was soggy from nose to tail and he didn't think it was funny at all.

But then came Brian Walsh, bringing with him the sunshine and a tower scaffold, fixing our chimney (and our neighbour's while he was at it) and our slipped tiles (and our neighbour's the other side while he was at it). And after Brian had been there followed several solid weeks of glorious sunshine. Until yesterday. 

Now you and I know sunny days cannot continue for ever. What about the flowers? What about the snails? For that matter, what about the frogs and the streams and the summer fruit? Yes, I think we do need the rain; but Clarence does not share this opinion.

He put off going out into the garden for as long as his bladder would hold on, this morning. Eventually he had to give in. 

When he came back inside to find me, Clarence had Things To Say. His fur was wet, his paws were wet, it was even wet under the hedge. The sky was leaking again. The repairs had not held.

Clarence thought maybe it was time to place a phone call to Brian Walsh, and ask him to come back as soon as possible to fix the sky.

I told him I'd think about it.