FINDING A BUILDER

Kevin, On His Rope, High In The Geodesic Domes of Eden

I am outside Younger Daughter's house situated in one of the less salubrious suburbs of Cardiff that roll away east of the Taff. The house is already famous for it figured in an episode of Dr Who having its top window blown out by the BBC's pyrotechnicians.  That was a couple of years ago.  BT - or Before Theo - who is now three.  I am not sure what Theo would make of windows being blown out in a sheet of yellow flame but I'm sure he would like to have a go.  Since then, of course, Isla has arrived; Butterbean in family parlance, so the days of BT, or for us before grandchildren, seem a long way back. How time flies.

Anyway her house lies at the bottom of a tree-lined cul-de-sac down the sides of which cars park in herring-bone fashion leaving an irregular gap in the middle which is simple to drive up but very hard to reverse down.  One of the things that impressed me about Ken was that he got into his large, red builders transit van and reversed up the narrow gap, between the projecting tail-lights of the cars on either side, at speed without once stopping or having to draw forward to re-align himself.  Someone to be taken seriously, I thought.  Someone with obvious talent

He had admitted to me that he did everything himself, apart from electrics and central heating, in which departments he relied on friends in the trade.  Driving too, he did himself, as we have just seen.
Younger Daughter had recruited him to refurbish her bathroom while she and the family went off to spent two months in a caravan at the Eden project in Cornwall where the No Fit State Circus - for which her partner, Kevin, performs aerial acrobatics on tall ropes - has a residency.

Having finished his work, Ken was reluctant to accept payment until the job had been 'signed off' and the Eden project being just too far away comfortably to nip back, Younger Daughter requested our help to meet Ken at her house to see what he had done.  She had already sung Ken's praises.  He was, she said, an 'intelligent' builder in the same way that a predictive keyboard might be described as intelligent.  Give Ken a budget, she said, and a broad idea of what you are looking for and he will do the rest.  And there we were: we opened the bathroom door and there was the rest in the shape of a very smart little bathroom in black and white with modern fittings all perfectly refitted and retiled and insulated - a bathroom that would not have looked out of place in a smart modern hotel.  I was bowled over.

So standing outside the house now in the thin rain that is Cardiff's usual trademark I said to Ken that perhaps he might come over in his red van, when he wasn't busy, and give us a price on some of the many jobs that need doing here.  His face lit up and shined as brightly as his bald head. He said he would be glad to.   No hurry, I said.  Ring us in a week or two.  And as Ken drove off backwards down the spiky avenue of death and we reversed hesitantly expecting to hear the crunch of metal on metal at any minute, we thought we had at last found someone who might help to get the house into shape at last before we come to sell it in a few years time.

In fact I find myself anxiously awaiting Ken's call, for the list of jobs seems to get longer by the day. As I lay in bed after waking this morning I remembered the barge boards under the eaves which have been attacked both by birds and the weather.  Then I remembered that we really did need a new loft hatch and then a folding ladder for access. All very tiresome.  Moreover, we have just had a letter from British Gas offering to service our new central heating boiler for £18 plus per month.  I wondered whether Ken's Central Heating friend might be prepared to do it for less. 

Picture of Kevin at Eden is courtesy of No Fit State Circus

EXHAUSTION

Peace be unto me! I've been lying on my bed most  of the afternoon drifting in and out of sleep.  Sheer exhaustion!  We despatched sister Sarah and niece Madeleine this morning on their way to visit another sister and thence my old step Mum, Rosamund, who is now 90 and has lost the use of her legs and has been committed - is that the right word? - to the caring arms of a community hospital.  I wanted to give Sarah a couple of bottles of wine for her but she wasn't sure whether the hospital allowed alcohol. If it doesn't - and I can well imagine that to be the case - it surely is another case of the world going mad.  When I spent time as an eighteen year old - Maddie's age - gosh was I then as svelte and fresh-minted as she? - in a geriatric hospital in Cahors in France (it's a long story) the local wine figured in copious amounts on the dining table.  I mean when you are that sort of age, deaf, in pain, without even the dignity of being able to get yourself on and off the loo, then alcohol is the one thing perhaps that makes life tolerable.  And who cares if you die of liver disease?  The wine should be available free, too, on prescription, with a tonic of gin every now and again.

I am even reviving my own poor self with a glass of the (as Alistair Cooke used to call it) 'twilight wine of Scotland.' Still I am not exhausted because of Sarah and her daughter, who are the most unexhausting and delightfully accommodating people on the planet, even though our day yesterday was spent mostly in wild goose chases.  We went first to the Job Centre to arrange a National Insurance number for Maddie who is off to University in Exeter shortly, only to find that the one in Llantwit had closed a dozen years ago.  And then we tried to open a student account for her at the Santander Bank but there was no-one in the branch who could help.  So much for customer service!  We even tried to do a bit of sight-seeing around Cardiff Bay - the Millennium Centre, the Oval Basin and the Bay itself;  thought we might possibly push out the boat with a tray of sweetmeats from the Turkish Bosforus restaurant - a curious edifice built on stilts over the waters of the Bay and to be highly recommended - but we could not find a single place to park.  If we were of a suspicious turn of mind we might have put it down to Friday 13th, but we aren't and so we didn't. So we ended up in the Deli at Marks and Spencer - a destination that was as an oasis to a weary caravan - to Sarah and Maddie who live in the rural south of France and haven't seen an M and S for two years. 

No, this overload isn't, or wasn't, caused by our visitors but by a whole concatenation of events too numerous to mention that have been tumbling over the horizon starting with the birth of little Isla May, our second grandchild,  a week before my birthday on 9 May and who now looks a twin of her mother at the same age - that is seriously grumpy, but with a winning smile.  Every front of my fairly pedestrian life seems to have swung into action in the last three weeks, necessitating constant activity, 14 hour days and seven day weeks.  The theatre, writing, the business, the social scene, visitors from afar, the garden, the children and grandchildren, holidays,  all have suddenly demanded extra time during which, of course it has rained practically everyday; indeed it is raining now in the time I had set aside to mow the grass lawn at the theatre. Still, its loss is your gain - or do I flatter myself?

Has anything been achieved apart from erecting an IKEA bed which required 300 screws (and eight castors)?   I have adapted Alun Bennet's Wind in the Willows for the CADS garden party on 18 August.  I have received a cheque for £100 for winning a short story competition and encouraged by this have revised and submitted a synopsis of what I grandly term my 'Russian novel - Boraya' to our local representative of one of the London publishing houses.  The story concerns the acquisition of a chocolate factory in St Petersburg and has grown, like topsy, out of short story I submitted unsuccessfully to a competition run by the Choc-Lit publishers. We shall see whether anything transpires.

Actually this synopsis (or rather the particular take on the story) came to me when I was machine minding a 23 hour printing job that we had recently.  You can't listen to the radio all the time and so I found myself composing in my head:  not music but stories. I find that I can hold a set of ideas in my mind - like a dream - but as soon as I come to write them down they evaporate, because the idea doesn't seem to be cast in words, rather it is more of an experience. It's like trying to bottle smoke, tying down one bit seems to alter all the rest. I suppose ones words need to act as a trigger for someone elses imagination and thus allow them to recreate their own smoke or in this case images of a war-torn chocolate factory beside the mighty River Neva, which, incidentally, makes a good subject for a pub quiz question in that its flow is greater than any other river in Europe that flows westwards.
Only the Danube has a greater flow - and than debouches eastwards into the Black Sea.



The picture is of the River Neva and St Petersburg, courtesy of Wikipedia.