Monday Monday

Monday 22 December 2014

2 degrees

Fraught Skype conversation between OH and WF.  Christmas is coming up on the rails with some speed and he still doesnt know what he will be doing.  There is a possibility of a job in a bike warehouse which will be interviewing somewhere between the 27th and the New Year.  If he goes to SIL house, he cant get back on 27th in time.  If he doesnt go, he will be on his own at Christmas which will break my heart.  He is still my baby.  There is a scene in Soap, not renowned for its pathos, where the character played by Billy Crystal is about to have a sex change and asks his mother if she will love him and she says 'you will always be my baby, when you are old and grey and wrinkly, you will still be my baby and I will always, always love you'.  I cried and I bet I wasn't alone.  What a fierce and tender thing is a mother's love.  Ones children are the great love of life and you grow a special new love for each and every one of them.

Drove down town through buffets of mist which cleared up at the top of the hill to show a thick puffy blanket over the fields and the brown cows.  Into our building to clean floors.  This property is our version of the Forth Bridge (for those of you who do not know the adiom, the Forth Bridge is a cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland.  This has spent most of its life encased in scaffolding in some part and perpetually being painted.  The last actual paint job took ten years to paint and cost 130 million quid).  Well if the Scots can get to grips with 1.5 miles of rusting iron, perhaps I can scrub my way around 120m2 of parquet before Christmas.

Boil up some water and get down on my knees to examine the floors at first hand.  There are paint spots everywhere and when I chip them off, what I had hoped to pass for interesting patina turns out just to be dirt.  There is an awful lot of scrubbing - four hours go by and I get scrubbers fatigue, scrubbers knees and scrubbers elbows.  Develop new arthritic tendencies in fingers.  Drink tea and play on Play Buzz.  I am a Medieval Warrior.   I have plenty of straw at home.  I could just pretend it was rush and cover up the bloody parquet.  A pony drawn calèche circles around the town.

Back home for 2 pm and am treated to stir fried prawns in soy sauce.  Yum.  OH then goes back down flats to put some more paint spots on the floor and I look for jobs for WF.  Find one suitable one, online funded diploma in something businessy and lots of good apprenticeships.  Send him links. The problem today is that all HR is online and so you don't actually get to talk to anyone.  Often, the applications don't even get an acknowledgement.

Go to see Interstellar in VO local cinéma.  Stunning.  Follow small brightly lit car all the way home through thick fog.  We could be anywhere in the universe, just us and the tunnel of light and the car in front and the bouncing walls of mist.