Eiljert Gabbles On

Wife is on a purging mission. If I didn’t know better, I would assume that she was eight months pregnant and the famous “nesting instinct” had kicked in in reverse. I came upon her (not like that, it’s not that kind of blog…) sweating and carting around bagfuls of toys and books for the charity shop, having just purged Eldest Son’s bedroom. Established readers will remember that Youngest Son has – fairly recently – been subjected to a monastic style of living, imposed on him for kicking my father, so there was no need to go through that exercise again for him.

Spurred on, I decided to follow her example and set up about re-arranging the furniture in our bedroom, in advance of the builders turning up to install an en suite bathroom in there (amongst other things). Thus were unearthed ancient piles of dust, letters from British Airways, and (as ever) about £300 worth of taxi receipts. Things are now re-arranged, so that the bedhead is no longer surmounted by the Masaccio book jacket poster, but by an engraving of St. John’s College, Oxford – which means that my suspicions that I will one day be killed by a falling picture in the night will have an excitingly ironic “Jude The Obscure” build to them.

The ottoman is in the bay window (where it can absorb what little heat emanates from the radiator there, and the wall that used to house the bed now enjoys (in Estate Agent Speak) a chest of drawers, an armchair and a butler’s table with Wife’s Grandmother’s Russian correspondence box upon it. So, now you know what our bedroom looks like – apart from the fucking great hole in the ceiling, from when the bathroom above flooded and STILL hasn’t been repaired. Anyway, the renovation of the whole house is starting reasonably soon – so it makes sense to get the same builders to everything (or so I keep pretending to myself, every time I look at the ceiling which lends our rather beautiful bedroom an unwelcome Dostoyevskyan air).

Wife was pleased by the transformation. I know this because her comment on my three hours of puffing and sweating was: “The ottoman looks better there.”