The weekend continues with its catalogue of adventure-deficit.
Nothing much of note seems to be happening to me at the moment.
The most exciting event of today so far has been going to bed for our afternoon snooze this afternoon to discover that our next door neighbour was kindly cleaning our drains out for us.
We knew about this because the drain is underneath our bedroom window.
Our house is built into a hillside, so that the front door is level with the street. You come inside and go down a flight of stairs to discover that the lower floor, which should really be a cellar, is level with the street behind, where we have our back garden and log store.
In consequence we do not have a cellar but an underground kitchen and living room, and on the first floor, which is the ground floor if you come in at the front, we have our bedroom next to the front door. The kitchen is below the front door, and has a window which opens on to a subterranean alley with some smelly drains in it. You can’t smell them from the bedroom but going into the alley is a bit black-slimily unpleasant.
We have been too idle to clean ours for ages but this afternoon we happily discovered that our next door neighbour had relieved us of the problem. He had put a ladder down the hole and was muttering and swearing and emptying the drains. His was clear, but ours was blocked. This is because he is a single man with no children and nothing else to do apart from occasionally unblock his drains.
We considered getting up to help. I am ashamed to say that we did no such thing. We lay in bed and stifled giggles.
He put a postcard through our door afterwards to tell us that he had done it but had unfortunately run out of bleach halfway through and so we ought to put some of our own down it.
I am embarrassed to tell you that I knew perfectly well that our drain had been blocked but since his was working splendidly had not bothered doing anything about it.
I like our neighbour very much indeed. He is possibly the most generously patient person you could ever hope to meet. During the ten years we have lived next door to him we have accidentally set his house on fire once, flooded his living room a couple of times, owned a cat which regularly broke into his house when he was away and behaved unspeakably badly in his front room, and once we knocked a hole in his wall. Also we have got noisy dogs and children and once upon a time we had ten taxis, some of which invariably parked in his parking space
In return for all of this we have occasionally become mindlessly, excruciatingly drunk with him in his back garden in the summers when the weather has been good. I was so ill after the last time that we have avoided him since because he keeps inviting us to go and do it again. He drinks champagne, which he buys by the crate, and the resulting hangover is eye-piercingly awful.
The evenings in his garden have been magnificent fun, though. The last one became so rowdy that Lucy came round and told us to shut up.
We thought perhaps we would give him some apologetic champagne in gratitude for the drains. It is an awful job, involving carting buckets of disgusting gloop up a ladder, and really it was very kind indeed of him to do it.
We could even go round and help him to drink it.
The picture was taken last summer. It is small boys shooting at passing neighbours. I am glad I don’t live next door to us.
