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Earlier today

simont wrote about topics of discussion which are simultaneously interesting and tiresome, and the first thing which came to mind as an example (which, it turned out, he regarded as "an excellent example"!) was the argument formerly known (on ox.* and elsewhere) as TGGD: that is, The Great God Debate. I was going to write about the various interesting-but-tedious-but-addictive conversations and try to draw some conclusions about what made them thus, but I ended up just writing about TGGD instead. So sue me.

( cut for rambly length )

The area where we live might be described as shabby, but I prefer to think of it as unfinished. It's not that it's in any sense incomplete; it's not one of these raw-edged toytown estates where the houses haven't settled into their surroundings yet and the weeds are dwarfed by the clods of still-fresh earth... quite the opposite. It's a collection of houses which were built between the wars as council houses and gradually sold off in bits and pieces over the years (I'm hazy on the history); they started out all the same (more or less) but have diverged over the years as people have bolted bits on, knocked pieces off, removed and rebuilt and revised and reimagined until they look like a kind of terraced Exercises in Style... or at the very least a kind of oversized egg-decorating competition. Everybody has added something to their house: bright flowers, trees, hedges which started out neat, gravel, paving, paint, pebbledashing, a low wall, a gate or two, a lean-to or a shed, an outbuilding, an extra room. Many of them have added more temporary effects to their exterior, too; there are front gardens with chairs, tables, mattresses, sofas, televisions, panes of glass, planks, bricks, overgrown trailers full of pipes, chained-together bicycles, cars on concrete blocks with nettles where the wheels would be, motorbikes imperfectly shrouded in plastic sheets. It could be depressing, but it's not; it's just life, as it goes on from day to day, moving things from place to place, repurposing things, putting things in a different order. Building little by little, letting things fall apart; pushing back the soil, letting things go back to the ground. Waves of energy, whirlpools of entropy.

It's unfinished in the sense that it's a work in progress. All around are loose ends, projects half begun (or even half finished), things not quite thrown away.

I am fascinated by this sort of detritus, writ large across the estate but writ smaller (in the various but usually tiny incarnations of my handwriting) across A4 sheets, post-it notes, the backs of envelopes, tissues, whatever I've had to hand at the time. And, more recently, 'written' in countless text files -- digital artefacts which somehow manage to retain some of the spirit of those torn scraps of paper in their forms and names: the descriptive (or optimistic) .txt and .html files, the tentative .tmp, the files with no extension, filenames with cryptic sets of initials, long filenames full of underscores... archive.tmp, README__list, lj_bio_1.txt, oxbridge-and-self-worth_2.tmp, loose_ends. The names made perfect sense at the time but now I can't tell whether archive.tmp is about archiving, for archiving, already archived. With the paper, it's easier to learn the shape and colour of the fragments and lists: that large pink post-it note with GRAND PLAN (among other things), the torn-off white scrap that just says weltenschaum (did I mean weltenschau?) -- I've carried them around for so long that they're like an inbox full of scars. With the text files, it's easier to search through them for a specific word (if I can remember it), but they're more flat, all the same size; with a standard directory listing of just filenames they have barely any weight or shape to distinguish them.

On reading some of these files, I often can't remember whether I've already used the text on LiveJournal. Sometimes I can't remember what I was talking about at all. Sometimes the text sounds confident and assured, and I'm surprised I wrote it so well. Perhaps I didn't.

Our house is cluttered with adjectives and slightly verb-stained nouns.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm carrying round boxes half-full of failure. Other times they're boxes half-empty of plans.

Part of the problem is the general feeling of drawing-in.

The nights are getting longer, and at this time of year many people feel a general sense of wanting to curl up indoors, draw the curtains, switch on the lights, play some music, and generally pile up the defences against the driving rain and the dark. It's not just that, though. I've felt for months -- maybe even a year, maybe more, hard to say, it's a slow-growing thing -- as though I was curling in on myself, pulling the duvet over my head, closing the door, slowly shutting down, fading to the little dot in the centre of the screen. I don't know why. I'm not particularly unhappy; I'm busy at work and stressed about some things but mostly still enjoying the job; I'm doing other things outside work -- outgoing things (singing, volunteering at Oxfam, going out and seeing friends) and quieter things (reading, playing piano, pottering around the house and the garden). The stress of house-moving and builders and so on was horrible and made me want to hide under a rock more than usual, and there are still far too many things to do round the house and not enough time/money to do them all... but on a day-to-day basis we can live with it just fine. We still don't have a kitchen really, but we can cook enough to keep ourselves fed, we're eating reasonably healthily, I get plenty of exercise from cycling and running, there is nothing objectively wrong, everything is basically okay.

And I feel like there's a big glass wall around me and it stops any of the noise coming in or getting out.

I talk to people all the time, I receive and send dozens of emails a day, I make phone calls, I even get up and go and talk to people at work (and in a department full of people who don't like social interaction that's mildly unusual). I go out in the evenings fairly often, I talk to friends in the pub, I phone my parents at least once a fortnight. Objectively I'm a functioning social being. But in my head I feel as though the volume is turned down to barely above zero. When I'm actually in the midst of social interaction I feel fine (apart from the usual occasional angst about whether people think I'm just faking it, whether I sound like an idiot ... in short all the usual minor anxieties that result from only having direct knowledge of your own thought processes and having to infer, guess, assume, or put up with not knowing other people's), but when I'm on my own... it's like the way phones these days seem to cut back to total silence, not even hiss on the line, when nobody's speaking. For a moment there you think you've been cut off, the line's gone dead, the mist has descended, the whole world outside your mind has vanished. Don't you? Maybe you just think "the line's gone a bit quiet". That's fine. In that case, think of it like going high enough up somewhere that the pressure in your ears goes funny and everything goes quieter until you yawn or swallow and suddenly it goes "pop" and you can hear again. What I'm talking about is the bit before the "pop". Mentally, metaphorically, it feels like that.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I'm just trying to write something every day, to keep the channels open, to check there's still someone on my end of the line, to flex the muscles. And (at the risk of sounding pre-emptively ungrateful) I don't want heaps of comments telling me how the GI diet or early nights or counselling or whatever diet/therapy/lifestyle change you're thinking of (no, "this one" isn't different) would help: that's not the point and I don't need help. The point -- insofar as there is one -- is just... wondering where it all goes. And whether I have any interest in finding it again.

Paralysed by choice, I end up writing nothing. The blank page is not an absence of words, but the space where all words could exist. It's all of time, all possible futures, all the things with which you could fill that time. It's a snow-covered field, and your feet will make one path across and around it, just as soon as you start walking; you can backtrack, retrace your steps, jump sideways, change your mind a thousand times, but all those indecisions will leave their mark. The blank page is your bed, the head-sized space on the pillow; the white sheets are unforgivingly unfillable when unoccupied, the margins are too narrow when they're full. The blank page is your skin, and it scars easily.

Given two hours of time, I am quite capable of filling them by agonising about the fact that I can't fit everything I want to do into those two hours. Unable to choose, I end up choosing nothing: not even choosing nothing, merely defaulting to nothing. Two hours of staring at the wall, the blank page; or of listmaking, dithering, weighing up the pros and cons: sorting a pile of stones into the right pocket and the left while the stream of time flows on.

To start anything is to fail to start something else: I do not endorse this belief but it clings like cobwebs to my head and hands. To start anything is to fail even at that thing: to start is to move from the ideal to the actual, to step down from the pedestal of potential perfection. Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow: it falls on the cave wall, falls like a blade, the execution of an idea. But to fail to start at all is a double failure: not just the failure to live your life but the failure to be born. Nobody can know about the perfection of the idea until it is obituarised in its imperfect actualisation.

To begin a narrative is to condemn it to an ending: to tell a story is to write its death warrant. Is it better to stifle it at birth?

I swear if one more person has a go at me for being unhappy about our boiler having broken down (along the lines of "Surely you wouldn't put the heating on this early in the year anyway?" with optional extra snark of "I thought you were one of those green/eco-warrior/hippy types?") I will not be held responsible for the violence of my response.

Our house has basically no insulation apart from the double glazing. There are blinds instead of curtains in most of the rooms. Yes, these are things we need to fix, but we only moved in 8 weeks ago, we only have finite amounts of money, there are only 24 hours in a day and we both work full-time. Our energy usage has been consistently much lower than the national average for the last few years, and we're still working to decrease it further. We don't fly, we don't drive, we don't have a vast home cinema, we don't run servers at home that have to be on all the time. I'm not suggesting we're some kind of saints, but we're already doing a lot to reduce unnecessary energy use. We don't generate much waste.

No, I wouldn't have the heating on all the time at the moment (all the time we're there, I mean -- obviously I wouldn't have it on when we're out!), though I would use hot water for washing (and I bet all the people who are having a go at me do too). Yes, I can wear extra jumpers. Yes, I can wear gloves in the house. Yes, I can make cups of tea and wrap my hands around them. But I'm sleeping in two layers of thermals with a hot water bottle and I'm still cold at night, the floors are cold even with socks and slippers, my toes are usually numb, and there's a deep cold in the air that makes me even more tired and miserable than I already am. Also, in cold conditions my extremities basically stop circulating properly (Reynaud's syndrome). Fingerless gloves don't really help, and there is a limit to what I can do when I'm wearing full gloves. I'd do more baking (which would help to heat the kitchen and adjoining living room) but we don't have a working oven, and when we use the hob (portable one-ring electric) or toaster it sets the smoke alarm off, and Owen doesn't like any of the food I make so cooking is always just misery anyway. Maybe we should be living and sleeping in one room, and blocking up all the doorways, nailing blankets over the windows, eating nothing but porridge (he doesn't mind that). Maybe there are better ways to fix the problem more permanently. Every morning I cycle along the towpath, and most mornings I find myself wondering if one quick and straightforward way to save energy and solve a whole host of other problems into the bargain would be to fill my pockets with heavy stones and just cycle straight off the path into the river.

I was woken up by the news on Radio 2, telling me that Kingsnorth has been put on hold and that T. S. Eliot is the nation's favourite poet. Then we saw two wrens in the garden.

Perhaps there is hope for us after all.

You may have noticed that the attempt to post something every day has gone the same way as pretty much everything else this month, viz., the way of EPIC FAIL.

Work continues mostly stressful and unhappy for reasons which are mostly completely outwith my control; the weather has gone all drizzly and miserable; choir has become less of a respite from work-style stress because of personality clashes; I keep getting bitten by nasty insects; and now the boiler has just packed in, leaking all over the kitchen floor (thankfully before we started getting a new kitchen fitted).

þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg.

To try to offset the fail, a short list of positive things:

* the Installation of the new Vice-Chancellor yesterday was interesting, and a good chance to swan (jackdaw?) around in a borrowed gown
* I have pulled up about a million miles of deeply-embedded nettle roots from something that may one day be a flower-bed in our garden
* Warneford Meadow Apple Day one weekend, and Wolvercote Community Orchard's Apple Day the next, have together allowed us to sample a lot of tasty apples and local produce (it is amusing that "produce" nearly always means jam and cake rather than, say, soup, or bread).
* We have discovered that Tesco on Cowley Road do an incredible range of interesting Polish and Jamaican foods. Salt fish! Apple mint juice! Weird biscuity things! Tasty snack! (

addedentry vetoed the gigantic jar of sauerkraut, sadly.)
* It is lovely having a piano in the house and being able to play it while knowing that there is nobody behind the adjoining wall who might be tutting and objecting to the noise (I am competent enough that it's mostly fairly tuneful noise, but the music might not be to everybody's taste).
* Friends and kittens are a great comfort.

I was thinking about trying to do a post a day for October instead of the now-traditional NaNoNoNoNoNoThere'sNoQualityControl November thing, but the Black Dog of depression got me by the ankle and wouldn't let go. However, consider this a slightly delayed, slightly bruised and slightly frayed-metaphorical-trousered opening to the slightly tedious (for reader if not for writer, and that's a big if) task of trying to post something every day in October. Why? Because I want to get back into the habit of writing; because I have a few things I want to talk about; because you've got to do something other than sit in the dark rocking gently and chewing on a teabag, sometimes, haven't you? ... haven't you?

Part of the reason for the unexpected and unwelcome Act of Dog was the ongoing restructuring shenanigans which seem to be going on at work. I didn't expect to be so unsettled by what is effectively just a minor internal game of musical chairs, it's not as if my job is at risk (or if it is, then there are plenty of people ahead of me in the firing-line) but a) some of the specifics of the intended reshuffle didn't look like much fun from my point of view (likely move to less-interesting work; possible change of line-manager to someone I would probably find harder to work for/with) and b) more importantly, the ongoing uncertainty, rumour-mongering and indecision was making me feel as though everything was provisional, everything was planning-blighted, and everything was more pointless than usual. Being given the impression that it's not worth starting anything long-term is not good for motivation or avoiding avoidance. But a big part of the problem was that it felt as though the whole question was hanging on the whim of one or two people, and my attempts to ask serious questions about how those people were going to decide how to redraw the lines (show working!) were all met with "it's obvious, we'll take everything into consideration" (what, everything, including the completely irreconcilable wishes of lots of irrational individuals?), "how should I know?" (well, duh, it's your job to know, that's why you get paid 10K a year more than I do) and "oh, stop taking everything so seriously".

It was the last of these that upset me most, really, because a) it was said by someone whose opinion of me matters somewhat more than it should (~sigh~) and b) I really don't see myself as the sort of person who takes everything deadly seriously -- quite the opposite! I worry that sometimes I'm too quick to jump for a pun (usually innuendo) and don't always think whether it'd be better to keep my mouth shut; I'm not labouring under the delusion that what I do all day counts for tuppence in the much-vaunted Grand Scheme of Things (why isn't this Grand Scheme documented anywhere, eh?), and I don't make much secret of the fact. It is all a game; if we make a mess of it, nobody dies. But if a game is being played, I want to try to play the game, or just say "no thanks, I'd rather not play" -- not sit on the sidelines sniping at the participants, or play in a way that spoils the fun for everybody else; if I'm playing, I'll try to play within the context of the rules (playing by the rules is not breaking the rules; playing within the context of the rules is breaking them only in ways which will be understood by the participants as breaking the rules -- it's the difference between slipping an ace up your sleeve and, say, breaking up the card table with an axe, or getting up and going to the pub instead without a word of apology when it's my turn to play). I guess I do take what I do seriously, in the sense that I try to do it to the best of my limited abilities; and that applies to the process of working as well as the individual tasks of work. If you're going to have a meeting at all, don't make it a waste of everybody's time; if you're going to write project plans and report back to someone on progress, you have to at least pretend that the reports mean something. Otherwise it's like running a roleplaying game where people can just say "What are you talking about? You didn't cast a spell on me, you just rolled a couple of dice". You have to have some kind of collective suspension of disbelief; you have to believe in the fourth wall, even just a little bit, in order to break it successfully.

Maybe for some people it is more fun to undermine the game to the extent that nobody can enjoy playing it. Maybe that's their game. I don't want to play their game. But not wanting to play their game is a move in their game. (R. D. Laing totally had this one nailed. I wouldn't dream of trying to compete.)

So, I don't like being called humourless; and I don't like feeling that everything I spend my day doing is under some kind of managerial planning blight. But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln...?

Perhaps you're hoping that all this was a digression and that the real point of the post would be How I Made The Black Dog Lose Its Grip (in which the Heroine kicks the DOG in the teeth & sends it Howling into the Outer Darkness without so much as scuffing her patent-leather SHOES, &c), but no. It's still scratching at the door, and work still feels like an unstructured mess, and I'm still feeling as frayed as those metaphorical trousers (or should that be TROUSERS). The ability to weave a spun-sugar web of words around the problem doesn't change the hard centre. Traces, as they persist in saying, of nuts.

Of course, thinking about it probably makes it worse. I guess the same goes for writing about it.

Perhaps I shouldn't take everything so seriously.

We finally bought a lawnmower and mowed the lawn. That is, we mowed the area we're choosing to call the lawn, in the hope that a combination of linguistic imperialism and rotating knives will gradually tame the lawless forces of nature. Significant portions of the "lawn" were in fact large clumps of nettles and brambles, dark forests and thickets among the rolling fields of the rest of the garden; one corner was almost entirely bindweed; and another was a sad little rubbish-heap of stones and tiles and bits of wood.

Some of the nettles succumbed to the mower, others got secateured down to the ground, some lived to sting my wrists another day (three-quarter-length sleeves and short gardening gloves are a bad combination for nettle-wrangling). I pulled up about a mile of bindweed (and removed a pot of paint from underneath it), hacked back a few brambles (eating the blackberries first) and sorted through the miniature midden: a heap of broken tiles, some lumps of concrete, several half-bricks, some scrappy pieces of wood and MDF, a couple of plastic bottle-lids, an old cigarette lighter, and a large curved white bone like a rib. Bleached bones and stony rubbish. My own tiny waste land.

In the process of attacking the abode of stones and the pit of vines I uprooted an army of woodlice, several small spiders, one enormous spider (the sort so big that I could hear its feet clacking on the wood of the fence as it stalked indignantly out of reach), two small brownish frogs, an even smaller yellowish frog which sprang up out of the chickweed like a jack-in-the-box, small yellow-shelled snails and even smaller slugs, a tiny caterpillar all curled up like a soft green ammonite, and a couple of huge hairy caterpillars which seemed to be doing their best to battle the bindweed by eating it all.

To the spiders and frogs I must be Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. No, nothing so important, just some sudden hairy mammal crashing oafishly through their threads and burrows. I hate wrecking these little ecosystems, I would love to leave the beetles and caterpillars to their business and take my big feet of fail elsewhere; but like the rest of my species I was born selfish, and the creatures were in the space that will be my vegetable patch, and the nettles and brambles were in the space that will be my tidy little English lawn (or at least some soft grass to sit on in summer). I have never been a committed gardener; I hack at things in fits and starts, small splashes of effort followed by long stagnant periods of apathy, and I think underlying the surface laziness (and the general sense of futility which taints all tasks which are explicitly fighting entropy) is a feeling that my attempts to curate the wilderness are not just hubristic but an offence against the order of things. It doesn't help that the only plants I recognise are weeds: I can pick out our groundsel, chickweed, nettles, dandelions, bindweed, brambles, rosebay willowherb ... but show me a 'proper' plant and I'll shrug in confusion. I like the look of the bright flowers and well-defined leaves of well-ordered gardens, but I know the raggedy plants that grow out from under things. I pull them up in handfuls every now and then out of some misplaced sense of duty, but they grow back in a heartbeat.

Every time I lifted a stone, something small scurried out from underneath it, rushing around in the unwelcome light, a many-legged burst of busy energy, until it found another dark hiding place.

I think part of my problem is that I empathise too much with the insects.

14:48 I really don't think the average of all my Oxford-based geo coordinates is Petit Mapfoungui, but I do like the name. #
14:50 Reverse the coordinates (I often get them the wrong way round) ... no, I don't think it's Purzien either. Bollocks. #

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22:40 Thanks for the clarification, Oxon County Council: twitpic.com/hn0od #
12:26 I have it on good authority that "no-one is interesting in [...] 140-char chunks" - I hope all poets have been informed! #
19:41 Blimey, Ms Shakira is quite bendy, isn't she? bit.ly/3Kc037
(NSFW!) #

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10:33 "Gordon Brown is now following you on Twitter." I don't believe woaimd is the real Gordon Brown, somehow. #mocknblock #
10:34 esresnick autofollowed me for mentioning horses yesterday. Perhaps if I say 'HORSE DEATH' they'll unfollow? #mocknblock #
10:37 Impressed though I am by marierzuecqvcnk's collection of consonants, I don't want her tweets. #mocknblock #

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09:57 Why web development sucks (or why it's difficult to do well): ff.im/-7XZkl #
11:25 If you're in OX4 today, visit Corpus Christi Barge (off N side of Meadow Lane by Donnington Br.) - beautiful! #opendoors #
11:43 Off to Kidlington (or should that be 'London'?) for Climate Rush picnic. Fallback plan: nice cycle ride & pub at Thrupp. #
13:24 Having delightful picnic outside Kidlington airport. I just talked to a nice man from the Oxford Mail! :-) #climaterush #
13:53 Jolly old sergeant 5964 is taking photos of our croquet game! I hope he'll put them on Flickr for us. #climaterush #
14:16 We learnt a song about climate crimes. The environmental movement needs more musicians. #
14:21 But not Sting. Definitely not Sting. #
14:31 "..if you drink water that's had the minerals taken out, it leaches the minerals out of your body." Paging @bengoldacre! #
14:36 15 police (& 2 bored horses) + airport security to watch a picnic of 30 (mostly women & children). Amazing! #climaterush #
16:59 @jpstacey: tinyurl.com/ysj9cd ? Or I can fwd photo to ex-botanist colleague. #
17:06 "Yarnton Lane" on map (OX5) turns out to be narrow recently-ploughed dirt track, but has a pub (Turnpike) at the end. #

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10:05 Yammer will suddenly become a whole lot more usable (not necessarily *useful*!) if I can update it from Twitter... #yam #
10:45 Lazily cloning web pages to show different CSS comes back to bite me: conflicting edits, confusion, doom. :-( #yam #
17:13 @jpstacey: we bought a Henry vacuum cleaner (with low-energy setting for normal use) after lots of recommendations... #
17:20 @jpstacey: also, if you want to try our Henry out, you're welcome (on our carpet, of course, ha ha - no, only joking). #

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ETA: I did tell LoudTwitter not to include @replies, but it looks like that didn't work (maybe I didn't save settings or something... trying again).

Thank you all for kind comments and offers of help, but honestly I don't think there is any point trying to sue people or live in a hotel and (more to the point) I think it would be more stressful than just living with the fail until it stops being fail.

We spent a large part of today in the House of Fail cleaning things (my hands got so plaster-dusted that I could have probably peeled them off and made a cast of them) and polyfillaing in the holes that weren't quite big enough to put a badger in, and have come to the conclusion that:

* overall, it's not quite as bad as despair led me to believe
* if they fix the Bloody Great Holes then it will be even less quite-as-bad
* they have actually, despite all the mess and fail, done what looks like a pretty good job of the ceilings, which is after all what we asked them to do in the first place
* we can (and will have to) get an electrician in very soon to fix the boiler/lighting fail, but electricians are less likely to leave the house in a horrible mess
* the paint will probably come off the laminate floors in the end
* the carpet is completely fvcked, but I guess that is why god made rugs
* the walls will all need painting, but we can do that while we live there, because some people seem to repaint their houses nearly as often as I change my underpants, and they don't move out completely every time[*], and in the meantime we can always put posters up or something and pretend it's the 1990s again
* okay so I guess 'home' is going to be a bit grim and half-finished for a while (and we still won't have a kitchen! That's not the builders' fault but honestly did they have to get the sink covered in paint?), but I guess that is why god made pubs

[*] Every time they paint. Not every time I change my underpants. I presume.

Also, we went to the everything-shop on Cowley Road to buy extra cleaning stuff (I cycled from there to the House Of Fail with a mop bungee-corded to my bike, big yellow spongey thing sticking out a couple of feet at the end like one of those 'long vehicle' reflecty things) and ended up buying (as well as the mop) one of those tabletop cookers, a little electric hob-in-a-box, because while we do have the magic calor gas hob-and-grill my parents lent us (the one they used when they moved into the first house I remember) we don't have any gas for it. Anyway, the man in the shop must have thought I needed cheering up because he suddenly said "You like sweets? I give you some for free. Which ones do you like?" and I was all surprised and confused but picked a pack of fruity sweets in the shape of bright-coloured hearts & was much cheered as a result. Aww. If all else fails I reckon we can go and live in the everything-shop. They have rugs and mirrors and candles and DIY stuff and cleaning stuff and, like, everything. And fruity sweets and a nice man.

Also also, we then went to

truecatachresis and

squigglyruth's barbecue, where we accidentally had lots of wine and ended up sitting outside in the dark proving that Odysseus was stupid, that democracy didn't work, and that we absolutely had to kill that bloke who's ruined Channel 4. (I don't know, I don't even watch telly! But he has. Ruined it.) All of which seems to have helped with my general attitude to the House of Fail. We are lucky to have lots of lovely friends.

We are probably going to be off the internet for most of this week as O2 and BT between them have begot fail (though I still have my iPhone); I suspect we will fairly quickly find ourselves in the Rusty Bicycle, begging the barman for a flagon of his finest foaming wifi. I'm back in work on the 17th though so after that I'll be a lot more emailable.

See you on the other side...

The builders still haven't bothered finishing the things they said they'd finish a week ago. We're supposed to move in on Tuesday.

Okay, they've finished plastering/painting the ceilings (taking huge chunks out of all the walls in the process, and leaving all the light-fittings hanging out) and they've put the boiler in (taking more chunks out of the walls including a large hole in the front wall, and ripping out some of the skirting boards). The boiler may even work, but it can only be plugged in with a duct-taped-together power cable stretching through two rooms, so it's a bit hard to tell. Somewhere along the line they nicked one of our radiators (which we didn't particularly want there anyway, but you know, it's the principle of the thing). I said there was no need to replace it, and now they have replaced it, and will probably expect to be paid for it. They've also left every single room in the house several inches thick in plaster-dust and ground-in dirt, walls splattered with plaster and general grime, etc.

I don't think there's any way we can delay the move now, but I also don't see how we can move in on Tuesday/Wednesday (it's a two-day move). We could spend all tomorrow cleaning the house, but there's no point if they really are (as promised) going to come back on Monday and patch things up, because they'll just trash everything again. And if they don't patch things up, then we have to move into a house which still has gaping holes in all the walls, and somehow move everything out again when we get some more builders in to fix everything -- who will not only trash the house again but trash all our stuff as well this time.

I feel sick and tearful and angry every time I think about any of it. We bought a shabby-but-liveable-in house, and we've wasted thousands of pounds making it unliveable-in, and now we have to live in it anyway. If I'd known it was going to be this awful we could have hung on to this flat for another two months while we got the house sorted out, but it's too late for that now.

I suppose this is only what I deserve for being too fucking incompetent to do my own plastering, and too stupid to know how to tell whether builders are going to be useless (I trusted the recommendation of lots of people at work), but it's utterly miserable. I don't want to live in a house that's falling to pieces around me, where everything is covered in dust. I spend enough time feeling as though I'm carrying suitcases full of sand around with me, I don't need someone to make the metaphor real.

People keep making kind offers of help and suggesting "painting parties", but what we need is an electrician and a plasterer who can come out at zero notice and won't charge the earth, and some kind of miracle by which Monday can be made to last for approximately 72 hours.

I just don't know what to do.

ETA: Owen points out that we can't delay the move because the movers would charge us sixty percent of the cost of the move to change the date at this short notice.

All this, only more so.

I just don't want to be here any more.

Sorry I've not said much lately. We're a week away from moving house and I'm in a state of neurotic despair about the whole thing. ( And I'm going to tell you about it in tedious detail whether you like it or not. )

Teenagers overheard on the bus:

"No, you can still carry the germs even if you haven't got it."
"No you can't, not if you take Tamiflu."
"What, you can get a TABLET for it?"
"Yeah. No. It's called Tamiflu."
"How do you know you've got it?"
"Well you can't sleep, and then there's loss of appetite, and... I dunno, there's this thing,
I've got it on here, and there's this number you can ring, I'll show you... what does 'Swine Flu' begin with? Is it 'S'? Yeah? [pause] Oh for fuck's sake well anyway there's a number."
"Apparently the age of, like, getting it is, like, 5 to 15. The age of, like, DYING from it."

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Current Location: United Kingdom, England, Oxfordshire

addedentry and I have the keys to our house! Well, some of the keys. The estate agents gave us the front door keys, & told us that all the other keys were in the house. They're not, as far as we can tell.

I say "as far as we can tell" because it's entirely possible that the keys are lost/buried under the skipload of junk that the seller and tenants have kindly left us. Books, clothes, furniture, bottles of vodka, a broken bong... basically all the cupboards are still full of crap. Ugh.

So, as twittered, we're going to be there on Sunday afternoon clearing stuff out. It's not exactly a party, but if anybody's at a loose end and feels like helping us sort things into piles ("recycling", "bin", "what the holy fvck is this" etc) then they will be very welcome & we will reward them with beer and/or cake (or equivalent local currency). Also, you'll be welcome to take any of the junk if you want! (I'm not promising some kind of treasure-trove here, but, y'know, books is books.)

If you're planning to take up this generous offer :-) please email/txt one of us for the address.

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shadows of echoes of memories of songs

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