Monday, 15 March 2010

Today I heard two bangs of the front door, early in the morning – separated by about half an hour. I realised, even from my bed, Landlord HQ, that the lodger had been on early manoeuvres. I stumbled blindly down the two darkened flights of stairs, my right hand skating along the top of the banister to safely negotiate the turn to the right half way down. I love my house. An ever-constant in my life. I’m not used to surprises.

There were flowers in the kitchen when I eventually got down there and opened my eyes. Yellow carnations. She’d used that yellow toaster - the one I was trying to hide - pulled it out, and then stuck the flowers in front of it for maximum yellowness. So optimistic, so nineties, that little corner of the worktop! I shall have to watch she doesn't start to take over. I wonder whether she’s one of those troubled women that are always trying. Every day is a new day - that sort of thing. Today is the first day of the rest of your life...

Still, the carnations matched my favourite yellow T-shirt. Kitchen and I were looking strangely coordinated today.

As I walked to work, I discovered it was one of those fragrant, silver English days that everyone likes to whinge about. Secretly, I love them. I walk with a lighter tread. Even Whitechapel looked good. The leaves of the plane trees were so passionately, deeply, madly green! Really, they were. Against a grey sky, and a grey pavement, they were the limelight. In the half-light of mid-morning, with no untidy shadows to clutter the pavement, the street market seemed – refined, elegant even; a place for murmured conversations and quiet reflection. As always, some people got it, some didn’t – I saw almost at once a frown clouding the face of a commuter barrelling out of the tube station; and a coy smile from a stallholder. Some would join me in my conspiracy, some wouldn’t. A voice, something like Alec Guinness, spoke from a small speaker somewhere inside another stall, in curiously received tones for this quarter of London. Curiously received tones for anywhere, in fact. ‘This is the path,’ he said gravely. ‘You must earn your place among the...’

I can still see the stallholder’s smile, slow to fade, reflected in the puddle between us. It wasn’t, of course; but it was the kind of day you could imagine these things. I wonder what the lodger’s stall is like. Must pop by sometime. I wonder if she ever smiles. Perhaps her face would crack under the strain.

* * *

I had to babysit this evening. Belinda was busy not speed dating future hubbies, so I was left with my niece for the evening. I made up a stupid story, about Percy the Very Particular Postman, a low-ranking valiant in medieval England. Percy is accompanied everywhere he goes by a faithful pet trolley; faithful, of course, mainly because it’s a trolley, with about the same level of free will one would expect of such a device, but Percy doesn't know any of that - he's under a spell cast by a tribunal of wicked witches seeking to change his terms and conditions, and so he has been persuaded that the trolley is actually a dog. He names it ACAS, after the Greek god of mithering. The court laugh at him. All the lords and ladies, the servants and the soldiers, the courtesans and the cooks, laugh at the devotion he shows to his faithful container. Only the trolley stands by him, amidst the ridicule. Proof of the trolley’s loyalty.

Now she wants to be a postman. I see this producing some tension with her mother when she finds out. Uncle Joe will get the rap for this.

I wonder about our Bel though. She needs a new man. One who won't bugger off this time. She says it’s hard, if you have a child and live in a showpiece Huguenot house on Fournier Street. The men who might be good enough would never think they would be good enough. The men who think they're good enough are “tedious fuckers from finance”.

I want to help, but I’m a tedious fucker from the legal profession.