Huffkin, puffkin

.... such an ado

Such ages since I wrote anything at all, but I think the multivitamins I have ordered and which will eventually arrive are already working. This is the placebo effect in action. Spring is pingingly green and my grape vine is zipping away. So I’m starting again!

My mother had a weekly helper called Adie. Adie was deepest gloom personified and lean, very lean, and sort of rather like an underwatered climbing bean, limp. Draped in what appeared to be several droopy aprons and smoking like a chimney in the frequent intervals of tentative dusting and hoovering. She was married to the local gardener, but my mother refused to let him anywhere near, as well known to be death to plants. When Adie died (it had been on the cards for years …. so not unexpected, huge funeral which was much enjoyed by all), he very rapidly upped and married someone from the next village and there was great disapproval and tutting. From both sides. Villagers having been sworn enemies for generations and this ancient Romeo and Juliet situation was really too much. They moved to the local town and lived happily ever after. We think.

My sainted parent could not not have Adie even though she was a liability as a cleaner and not massively reliable as to time, being quite often at the Drs with this and that, but the local info and gossip and who was doing what to whom and why and when it had started and ….. was too irresistible and Adie stayed. She made cakes with brilliant icing flowers and sometimes was known to perm certain people’s hair. Not my mother. Villagers would say “hmmmm, Adie?” to some fraught person with a peroxide haystack affair atop.

Mrs N in the teeeeny post office was a great thorn in Adie’s side and they had no doubt been embattled since Sunday School (quite often a thing, I think), and there were head tossings and mutterings and I must say I used to take Adie’s side in all of this because I was entirely terrified of the Post Office and Mrs N. Who was much put upon by the Post Office bureaucrats whom she loathed with a loathing, and her front room with a plank across the front door was the counter. She would emerge from the dark and glare at anyone who dared to want to post anything. Customer service did not really matter in those days.

Adie would report in about the latest “upset” and describe her foe as “right aeriated, Mrs Lock, she was right aeriated.” And “she do fly up in the boughs, she do, right up in the boughs ….” and make another cup of tea and a ginger bic and fag to keep her spirits up. My mother, who was tiny, and elegant and would have made a really good spy or perhaps a witch, yes a white witch, would pretend to notice nothing of these indiscretions and make soothing noises. All the while making mental notes, and no one ever knew how much she knew about everything going on in the village.

Skipping swiftly over approximately 40 years, here I am in what I imagined to be a calm, quietly unaeriated Square in darkest Wiltshire. “This will be lovely and peaceful and nothing appears to happen here” is what I thought. But no. Of course it isn’t. Why did I think this? Wishful thinking, is what that was.

Just had a WhatsApp informing me that the restaurant (cool, trendy) we thought we might go to when we “do” Chelsea in Bloom next Monday is fully booked, quelle surprise. “We COULD go to Peter Jones …….”. Which has made me hoot. I once kicked a hoover in PJ because I was livid about being a responsible grown up person who had to do hoovering rather than a free spirit skipping about in party mode. Reader, I bought the beastly thing and it haunted me for years. I now have a Henry which is much friendlier. And I’m older so that helps. And it is very good for getting the balcony tidied up.

Anyway, back to the Square. Everyone has been asleep for the winter and early spring and now the sap is rising and ancient fusses are being refreshed. Luckily for me the weather isn’t reliable at the moment so the chief fusser hasn’t emerged. But an unidentified (as yet) fusser “mentioned” to one of the Directors a “concern” about the, aaaagh, parking infraction by a flat dweller. And because I happen to have been conned into being a Director for the flats “oh, it’s nothing, not onerous ….”, I was approached by one of the other Directors to find out what was the matter. Great. Thank you very much. I am averse to any sort of fuss and botheration.

I thought I wouldn’t mention the matter to the car owner on a Sunday night because the last thing anyone wants is upset on a Sunday. It lingers and gets one off on the wrong foot for the week. I hung over the balcony railing today (Monday - when one is strong and focused on the to do list) and flew downstairs to negotiate as she emerged. Instant huff and puff and aeriation and up in the boughs and eight years of feeling put upon landed on me. It was a tense moment. However, once all of that was off her chest and onto mine, it seems she is moving out this week and she is shaking the dust of the Square from her Sketchers and off to live with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren and so she couldn’t give a stuff about the stuck ups making a fuss about her car. And would I like a book case and her garden table and two garden chairs for my balcony. We are now besties. And she doesn’t have to transport the bookshelf and table and chairs ….. …

And the reason she couldn’t park precisely where she was supposed to was because she was driving her daughter’s Merc and it is quite low slung and the front bit that protects the engine (it has a name - a “bumper” perhaps but lower down…) got caught on the raised cobble bit at that point. Aha! Perfect sense.

Please, if you would like to, leave a comment. This button thing is so bossy.

I am now going to play with my new bookcase - which is painted a vile grey - but will probably become “Invisible Green”

There is a heart button either at the top of this article or at the bottom - it depends what you are reading it on - and apparently this is a good thing for a reader to press ….

No photo this time as my laptop is being awkward and won’t play.

Sarah