It started me off with a nice 9am dentist appointment (yes, it IS Saturday) where I let a jolly beefy Welshman jam his fingers in my mouth, poke at me with sharp bits of machinery, spray me with cold water and humiliate my stylish exterior with a paper bib and a pair of Bono-esque protective goggles. Normally there�s niche websites for that kind of thing, huh, diaryland? Anyways, then he fitted a temporary crown, told me to come back in two weeks and to make sure that I �don�t eat on that side � its for smiling only� which is a bit of a shame as my default setting for crappy days is �Eat things. All the things� and, as the day has panned out, the opportunities for smiling have been few and far between.
The only good bit about it is that (because I am poor) I didn�t have to pay � the bad bit is the receptionist saying, nice and loud �you don�t pay for your treatment, do you?� so the whole waiting room could hear that I am poor, too. Treacle came to meet me and conspired to make me even poorer as she wanted to go into town to get some flip-flops. Two hour Primark extravaganza later and I was �50 lighter and she had a whole new holiday trousseau. Oh, and a pair of flip-flops.
When we got home, L was nowhere to be seen, unless you had happened to be in the pub and then you would have been able to see him very easily, Im sure. We were supposed to be recording some new songs for �The Tr@in T0wn Songb00k� Faceb00k page this faternoon, in the hope that it will eventually bag us some nice lucrative gigs. There�s a couple on there already but we need some different stuff, for a bit of balance. The washing up hadn�t been done and the place was an absolute tip.
Then things sort of started to get real shitty, with a couple of hours of desultory housework, then an hour or so of unenthusiastic recording which will need to be re-done tomorrow, then a MASSIVE teenage tantrum (Jooj) which spilled over into various parts of the house as it mutated and flowed about, around an unending number of gripes, injustices, moans and arguing dragged up from latest edition of The Young Adults Book of Things to Burst Into Tears and Stamp Around About and, hang on, Jooj! What�s that noise?
�Water. In the bucket. In my room.�
Brown rainwater was POURING IN, in a couple of adjacent locations in the corner of the room and the bucket was so full that the splashing was jumping out of the bucket and up the walls, where it was running down again, behind her desk.
As her bedroom looked like it had been ransacked in a WMD-hunt kind of way, I was easily able to lay my hands on a towel, which (by balancing at an angle of about 45� over the piles of disguarded teen-flotsam and jetsam on the desk) I was able to hold under the flow to stop the splashing, but I couldn�t lift the bucket as a) it�s a big bucket to lift with one arm when its soaking wet and it doesn�t have a handle b) it was full of water and was FUCKING HEAVY and c) by now I was standing on one leg in some hideous suburban arabesque, bearing aloft a sodden towel and cradling (yet not lifting) a pink bucket of icecold precipitation. I shouted �Get L!!!� and a bizarre 180 decibel game of Chinese Whispers started up and down the stairs between me and my offspring (with directions, if you want to play along at home).
GetL!!! >
Treacle, Get L!>
What?>
The water!>
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Anyway, he arrived just after I started crying.
So there was quite a lot of leak-based trauma after that, including lots of phone calls to roofers � who knew? Theyre as rare as rocking horse shit! � in between which I made pizza dough from scratch and cooked dinner cos, like, I cant let my standards slip and serve my family pizza that comes out of a BOX ferchristsake.
We had to scoff it down quick as Id forgotten I was supposed to be taking Jooj to a party. A forty minute drive away. Leaving L and Treacle to stem torrents, finish pizza and wash the dishes, not necessarily in that order.
The petrol light flicked on just as we pass the end of our road, it pissed with rain all the way there and the house was in the middle of nowhere. Then I had to find a petrol station or I would�ve been pushing the car back from Nowhere. I thought perhaps a bar of chocolate (a big one) to share with L and Treacle when I got home might be in order, too. Then I went to my friend Karen�s, cos she lives at #2A Middle-of-Nowhere and I haven�t seen her for a while and I thought it might improve my day to spend half an hour in the company of my lovely friend. Even though she knew I was coming, she wasn�t in, so I sat in the car and ate most of the big bar of chocolate. Karen did show up and listened to me moaning about my shitty day and only laughed a few times and they were mostly to do with my impressions of the rainwater arabesque thingy and not any kind of shadenfreude thingy. Are her bloke is proper good looking so I get to look at him for a while.
I got to drive forty minutes back home and look at my raddled wreck of a husband.
He�d been to the shop and bought a load of chocolate bars. All of which contained toffee in some form or other which meant I couldn�t eat them, on account of having been to the dentist this morning and��
D�j� vu, anyone?
later
s
x
ps The 'head directions', demonstrated by the '<' and '>' symbols have converted themselves into incomprehensible html and now dont make sense. Icing. Cake,
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