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Ritorna a Rimini

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As the mourners stood and the rose-draped coffin commenced its journey from the church, we followed it out to the rain-soaked September afternoon with Ritorna a Rimini sending us on our way. My Dad had died four weeks earlier and it was finally time to let those who knew him say farewell.

Unlike when Mum died, I couldn’t bring myself to say any words for my Dad; not that I didn’t want to, I just couldn’t. There was always a closeness between us; some of his very last words to me as he lay in a hospital bed that final day were recollections of the moments we had shared together. “Un po di vino, do you remember that? And the time you got lost on the beach in Rimini and I came to get you and carry you back?” I told him that I’d regaled colleagues of that very same story just a few weeks earlier, and how he used to wake me up at the crack of dawn and take me to the beach as they were preparing it for the day. We’d walk hand in hand, wearing matching hats and flip-flops and watch as the sand was raked, calling at the shop on the way back to his sister’s apartment to buy provisions for breakfast.

Back home, I wouldn’t leave him alone: following him everywhere; watching him shave; pulling at his nose; trotting along to Swinton with him on a Saturday afternoon.  He was the one who’d taken me and my sister to the park behind the church, he was the one who picked me up after I’d run into the path of a swing and got booted in the head by my sister’s foot.  He was the one who was so proud of us all, but who embarrassed us at all our school performances by shouting out the oddest things from his spot in the audience.

“Daaaaaad! Don’t!!!”

He was passionate, kind, generous, loving, clever and so funny in his own, quiet way. Always with the strongest Italian accent, and in latter years, without his teeth.

“He was a lovely, lovely man.  So well-mannered and charming”, I’ve been told by many outside the family who knew him.

Coming to England to follow the love of his life was such a brave thing to do when there was little support for him.  He learnt English on his own by talking to his family and colleagues.  His job, his duty, was to provide for his family and to support his wife; he did this brilliantly.

My parents were inseparable.  They gave us shouty, argumentative household and overcame the struggles of poverty, but they gave us everything they had including a very keen sense of right and wrong.  But there was also music and laughter and wondeful food and love.  It was an absolute privilege to have had them as my parents.

Dad hadn’t been in the best of health for some time when Mum died.  We all thought that losing his soulmate would see him give up on life; all he ever wanted was to be with her and without her, there was no him.  But despite everything, despite his failing heart and other health issues, he kept going.  For over two years, my dear Dad kept going for his family.

Ultimately though, his heart failed him and he took a final breath one friday night in August.  He was still warm when we got to him and I held his hand, half expecting him to squeeze my arthritic fingers with the vice-like grip that he’d managed to retain even at the the end of his life.

Looking at a frail old man in a hospital bed, few would have known how he and his family experienced the absolute poverty of growing up in Nazi-occupied Italy.  It might have been hard to imagine the dashing bagnino who wooed that English woman on the beach in Rimini.  Or the young man who moved countries not once, but twice to build houses in Frankfurt and then to build a family in the UK.  He was many things to a lot of people, but to me, he was always my protector, my Dad.  I am so very proud to call him that.

Passive aggressive weeding

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My engagement with life has been somewhat suboptimal this year.  That old devil called depression has left me feeling disinclined to do stuff and, while people around me seem to be getting on with things, I have been gripped by a state of pfft, still waiting for the summer, still waiting to feel better.  Sometimes you can wait too long and sometimes you just need a little bit of help to get you back to being you, whatever that might be, whoever that might be.

During the summer months, particularly the school holidays, the relative freedom from work of my immediate neighbours taunts me.  Unleashed for six weeks, they are able to enjoy their outdoor space as much as the weather allows; for them, any day when it doesn’t rain means that they move their existence to their extended garden, with added deck that overhangs the river.  In addition to the near constant procession of them running from house to outdoor living area (with accompanying slamming of their back door, and two gates every thirty seconds) they have now added a pool table to the deck.  When the door and gates aren’t slamming, the balls are.

But they are doing what normal people do: enjoying life; living it to the full.  I can’t resent them for this.  I just wish they’d be a bit quieter and decide whether they’re coming or going.  And stop slamming that fucking gate and door. And yes, I know my dog is an annoying little fucker, but if you were at work all day like most folk, you wouldn’t hear him.

Despite being consumed by ennui, I did manage to make the most of my own bit of private outdoor space this year.  My little yard was jetwashed to within an inch of its life and is adorned with flowers that cheer me when I open my blinds in the morning and when I return home from work as the late afternoon sun still fills the far corner.  It’s a nice little spot and I like to spend as much time out there as possible, Radio 2 filtering through from the open door into my kitchen.  In contrast, my other outdoor spaces have been neglected.  I decided to leave the patch this year in an almost deliberate attempt to attract hedgehogs.  It is now an overgrown mess infested with mares’ tail weed.  The area where I park my car, immediately behind my back fence has suddenly sprouted all sorts of undesirable weeds, and despite my best efforts, the paved area to the front of my house provides a constant battle against nettles and dandelions.

I am unwittingly doing my best to provide affordable housing to the area by bringing property values down.

But, you know, I’m on my own and I work full time (unlike SOME I could mention).  Just because I’m on my own, it doesn’t mean my kitchen and bathroom get any less messy than those of a family of four.  My home seems to generate more dust than any other I’ve encountered.  And, you know what?  I’m tired, so bloody tired.

So, do a few weeds outside my back gate bother me?  Well, yes actually, they do, but not as much as not having a clean kitchen or bathroom, or not having clean clothes or bedding, or having everything covered in dust, or not having an evening meal, or even a little dog who likes to go for nice walks down the woods.  But clearly, the weeds outside my back gate were bothering my neighbours because I returned home from a few days away last weekend to find them gone.

Now, I know I shouldn’t get irritated by this, but I am.  Along with the slamming back door and gates, the constant in and out to the car and them filling up MY paper recycling bin to the point that I can’t fit any of my stuff in (because they got rid of their own so they could park their two cars), this has wound me up.  Maybe to return the favour, I should go and fix their gate so that it doesn’t slam.  Or stick a note on their windscreen that says “Have you remembered everything from your car so you don’t have to keep coming and going for stuff four times an hour?”

I think though, in return for this act of kindness, I’m going to phone the council and request a new paper recycling bin for them.  I’m sure they’ll be most pleased.

Alarmist

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My loathing of alarms will never be abated. Alarm clocks, smoke alarms, the fire alarm at work, the oven timer. However, it is the domestic burglar alarm that I hate with a passion, which, if harnessed, would be enough to provide power to my sleepy locale until the end of days. Unfortunately, Electricity Northwest seem to be having a bit of difficulty providing power to this little corner of Bolton, as evidenced by a series of power cuts – or “outages” as they call them these days – over the past day or so.

Of course, life being what it is, the disruption to our electricity supply has coincided with that point in the night when I have been in the deepest of slumbers. How do I know this? Well, because when there’s a power cut, a couple of things happen:

1. Every fucker’s house alarm starts going off at the same time, which has the consequence of waking every poor bastard just as they’re having the most delightful dream about being Nigella Lawson’s kitchen slave, at the second before she starts to mouth the word “unctuous” (with camera close-up).

2. The printer in the back bedroom/study/dressing room restarts with a clatter and whizz and a whir of sliding and rotating components.

Soon enough, the majority of alarms are silenced and the people of this parish can return to their slumber. Unfortunately for some though, the Nigella of their dreams has run off with yet another loser and their love remains unrequited.

The morning after the most recent disturbance, after a couple of rounds with my alarm clock’s snooze button, I stumbled my way down the stairs and into the dining room. My own house alarm went off: sirens, strobe lights, beeping things. It took a couple of seconds to register. How could this be my house alarm? I’ve never activated the thing once and I’m not even sure what the code is. How on earth could this be happening? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS HAPPENING TO ME??

I tried to turn off the fuses and it just beeped more. I hit the numbers of the keypad in the living room – no response. I tried the keypad in the kitchen – no response. I was in a living hell at 6.30am, the little dog was going into meltdown.

How on earth was I going to deal with this situation? Well, the first thing to do was, quite obviously, put the kettle on and make coffee. The next thing to do was to find the main box for the alarm and rip the fucking thing off the wall. Before resorting to that though, I figured that an examination of the internal workings of the thing might help identify a less destructive method of dealing with the noisy problem from my absolute worst nightmares.

Screwdriver in hand, I opened the box, hopeful of finding an off switch. Of course there wasn’t a bloody off switch, it was more like a terrorist bomb from an action film. “Red or blue?” Red or blue? There were about fifty wires in there of all sorts of colours, randomly chopping at them with a pair of nail clippers was never going to be useful solution. And then I saw them: fuses. I couldn’t see a thing in any detail, but I started pulling the fuses in sequence until eventually, I removed the one that silenced screaming.

Once the sense of relief had left me, confusion reigned again. What on earth had happened? How can an alarm system suddenly arm itself? So not only does my fear of burglar alarms stem from the terror of not being able to disarm a system in time before the bells and sirens start, all the time being beeped at loudly, but now I find, the bloody things can arm themselves out of spite while disabling the control keypads. This is a whole new circle of hell that I’d never imagined in my worst nightmares. It’s almost enough to make me want to live in a yurt, far away from the entrapment of reliance on mains electricity and precious things that need protecting from theft.

Almost, but not quite.

But thinking about my whole issue with alarms, does this make me an alarmist? Or am I alarmic? Alarmophobic? If somebody holding the view that people of other ethnic backgrounds are inferior to people of their own is a racist, what does that make a strategist… or a therapist… or organist? Is organism something we should be marching in the streets against?

This whole matter has confused me immensely and I am consulting with my electrician to find an explanation. He’ll probably just tell me that I was inputting the wrong code and that’ll be fifty quid thankyouverymuch.

Daytime drinking
I did daytime drinking today, but finished by about 5.30. My body now finds itself in that weird 4am place where it’s not sober, but no longer drunk. Aldehydes are doing unspeakable things inside me and I really ought to go to sleep. I wonder what Nigella is up to.

Bedding

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I’ve been very lax in the bedding department over the past couple of weeks.  The set that I removed last weekend hadn’t been washed by the time it came to change the current stuff this evening.  I’ve had to wash two sets and stick the heating on full blast to try to get it dry.  In the meantime, I’m resorting to emergency bedding that consists of a way past its best duvet cover and… shame of shames… a polycotton fitted sheet.

The depths to which I’ve sunk.  I might as well be sleeping in a homeless shelter tonight.

But they say you have to hit rock bottom before you can start to rise again.  Come tomorrow, I’ll be back on top with two full sets of clean bedding.  Of course, I have guest bedding that I’d never let anywhere near my own memory foam.  Visitors have something called “easy care”, whatever the hell that is.  All I know is that that it’s not white, high thread-count Egyptian cotton and it’s going nowhere near my sleepy body.

Sofie Gråbøl drops the F-bomb on teatime radio

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This woman is utterly charming, and look at how OSX treats her!

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Anyway, lovely Sofie was on the Radio 2 Drivetime show this afternoon to talk about the National Theatre/of Scotland production that she’s appearing in in Edinburgh and then London.  The show is on National radio, broadcast between 5 and 7pm to a family audience.  

Of course, the host of the show, Simon Mayo, asked her about what she’s most known for, her performance as Sarah Lund in the wonderful, The Killing and what she thought of the US version.  Having never watched the US version myself, I was interested to learn that she’d played a cameo in it.  Describing her appearance, what she said is paraphrased in the following:

“The producer wanted me to play a cameo and so I went over to Vancouver to do this. I was playing one scene as a solicitor who was meeting the equivalent of the Sarah Lund character.  I was dressed smartly in a suit and thought it would be OK to do the scene opposite Sarah Linden.  She approached me in that pony tail, and that jumper… inside I was four years old, give me my FUCKING jumper… I meant ‘bloody’…”  What followed was the some of the best radio I’ve heard in a long time.

The BBC playlister of the show is available here for the next week, it even warns of strong language and asks that listeners confirm that they’re over 16, this must be a first for this programme… for Radio 2.

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I’ve managed to save the sequence to keep and keep again… 

Anyway, I love her even more now, and I hope that the Edinburgh and London production of James III: the true mirror is even more successful as a result of her appearance on the radio this evening.

Who’d have thought the BBC might need to employ a 10 second delay for a such a sweet woman though.  I think she needs a cuddle.  I’d happily give her a very special cuddle.

The fresh scent of line-dried cardboard

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Domestic pride has finally started to win the battle against my inherent slovenly nature; I’ve been doing housework this weekend. It all started with me looking despondently at my kitchen window yesterday morning.  There were a few cobwebs, bits of fly remnants, bits of dried, curled-up plant detritus that had fallen from the basil and chilli plants growing there, bits of soil.  General mess.  As much as the spiders had been my friends in terms of pest control, it was time for them to find a new home inside the dust collector of my hand vacuum.  It was time to clean the bloody window. Yesterday was very warm again and despite feeling like I was actually, really dying, the sense of achievement gained from cleaning the window and thefuckingvenetianblinds, spurred me on to tackle other elements of the kitchen that I’d let go for too long.  Next up was the cooker hood, which had grown a skin of greasy fluff that probably had sufficient nutritional value to keep a ballerina going for a month.  It was so easy to clean only laziness had kept me from cleaning it up to this stage. The back of the fridge freezer and the floor beneath it (absolutely disgusting) got it next, followed by… the dishwasher…   The thing about dishwashers The thing about dishwashers is that they’re great for storing all your used crockery, cutlery and pans until the time is right and the load is sufficient to warrant to operate the thing and wash them.  This is great because it means that you don’t have used cups, plates, bowls, pans, chopping boards, utensils, cutlery (that covers most cooking and eating apparatus) hanging around on work surfaces waiting to be washed up.  It’s nice and tidy and it allows you to get on with kitchen activities unhindered, which is particularly important when space and work surfaces are limited. I thought this was pretty logical: use something, give it a rinse, pop it in the dishwasher.  So why is it that this is a completely alien concept to everybody who visits my house?  They use a cup, rinse it out, leave it on the side, or on the draining board.  They even see me do it: rinse the cup, lean over just a wee touch, open dishwasher, place cup in dishwasher.  There are usually one or two items in there already to show them how things go, so there’s a template for them to work to.  And just what do they think is going to happen to the item that they’ve rinsed? It baffles me, it really does. ...Anyway, back to my dishwasher… I slid it out from its slot under the worktop, just enough so I could get the part of the floor on which it sits and give it a good clean.  To my horror, I noticed that the back casing of the thing had melted.  This stuff is made of some sort of heat-labile (not used that word since I was a smart arse) plasticky cardboardy stuff, which is ideal for an appliance that pumps high-temperature water around.  The internet told me that this is perfectly normal for machines that are a couple of years old and the stuff is only put on for sound-proofing anyway.  Why even bother with it then? The temperature was rising, I was weak through hunger and hot and sweaty, but I only had the work surfaces and the floor to go.  I was done in a jiffy.  Done in a Cif-fy ha ha ha!  It’s the smell of cleaning products. Just as I’d finished, my sister and her feller turned up to pick up my niece who’d spent all this time behaving herself upstairs.  My sister was hungover and in need of coffee, which I provided for her.  We sat and chatted for a few minutes while she drank up and my niece got her stuff together.  They left me in peace and picked myself up to lock the back door to prevent an axe murder while I was in the shower.  And there, on the draining board, was the cup that she’d used.   Anything for a streak-free finish Today, my kitchen looks like a bomb has hit it, but that’s the unfortunate nature of the universe.  Undeterred,  I have continued on my cleaning-spree and tackled the glass panels of my interior doors and the inside of the dining room window, the bottom ledge of which had become a graveyard for numerous houseflies and wasps.  My cleaning product claims to give sparkling, streak-free results in seconds.  It makes no mention of lasting elbow damage and the nagging disappointment that comes with the realisation that you’ve missed a bit.   The appliance of a sucky thing and a hot-air blowy thing I’m girding my loins in readiness for vacuuming.  This is a chore that is made much easier by the deployment of a cordless, light-weight, yet powerful vacuum cleaner.  Unfortunately, the little dog objects to vacuuming more than I do and a good proportion of the activity is interrupted by him trying to bite the machine. My house is full of labour-saving devices that make life more tolerable.  I couldn’t live without my washing machine or my melting dishwasher.  I also love my tumble dryer for the way it dries towels into big, fluffy bales.  Alas, on days like today, with the sun shining and the wind blowing, I can’t justify using my tumble dryer on the towels that are now pegged-out and drying to a cardboard-like crisp on the washing line.  What pleasure I’ll get from using them after my shower as they scrape against me and take off layer upon layer of my skin.  People who claim to like using line-dried towels are either liars or masochists.  I’d pity them if I didn’t feel such contempt towards them. I’m off to take out my pent up anger in a fight with the dog and the Air-ram. Bring it!

Anyway…. ;@)

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So it came to pass that I became a homeowner on the 29th October.  It’s all a bit weird since, apart from a letter from my solicitor telling me that the business was completed on 29th October (and a big hole in my current account), there’s nothing here to say that it’s ours (mine, but ours).

Nothing apart from a new toilet seat* and a pile of aspirational magazines that display wonderful homes that one can only ever, well, aspire to. But the homes in these magazines aren’t real, not for people who can’t even afford an average-priced house; they’re beyond aspirational and drift into other-worldly.  After having discussions about wallpaper emblazoned with bold patterns, it was interesting to note that the homes featured in Homos in their Gardens, Period House, Cunty Living and the like, they don’t have wallpaper, they’re just plain with pictures and soft furnishings to add colour to a living space (“living space”, for fuck’s sake).  Nice houses don’t have bold wallpaper and feature walls, oh no, this is the reserve of the Horror Houses that you see on Rightmove in the £95,000-£120,000 bracket. I have seen them ALL.

In addition to starting a new line in designer toilet seats, I’m going to start a monthly periodical (how can anybody not laugh at that?) that features real homes, decorated by normal people with decent taste, on a moderate budget.  The sorts of folk who get their kitchens and decorating materials from B&Q and their furniture and soft furnishings from M&S (or even the never knowingly undersold shop).  I’d also produce a monthly magazine digest of the worst homes currently showing on Rightmove…. like THIS horror in Glossop, or this bugger not far from here.

There is no problem with falling house prices, people are just trying to sell rubbish homes.

*One thing struck me on the day that I moved in to this place last year: the flimsiness of the toilet seat.  I know I don’t have the most delicate of derrières, but even so, the original B&Q toilet seat on the B&Q cheapo toilet was beyond a joke and was the first thing to be replaced once we had hold of the keys (metaphorically speaking).  Needless to say, we shunned the opportunity of going for the £60 soft-close variety and went for a bog-standard, yet solid little number that will hopefully provide many hours and years of comfortable toilet visits.  I’m sure there’s a market out there for designer toilet seat embellished with images from the Bristol Stool Form Scale.  I could make millions from it!

A special day
Friends and loved ones will gather on Wednesday to say their farewells and celebrate John McCusker.  A man who left himself somewhere else and became known and very much loved as cute wee John Pigster, or Piggy.  There will be tears, but there will be colour and hopefully lots of smiles once the tension and sadness of his funeral has passed.

His death was tragic, his life cut short so unexpectedly, he will be missed terribly, but he will live on eternally in the fond memories of those who came to love him.

The cunt.