Light

I am continuing with the Certain Age project of making my life a better place to be.

Over the glorious summer, when the garden and the bedrooms have been bathed in wonderful sunlight, I have become very tired of my kitchen being a gloomy, lightless hole.

It is dark and grim, and you have got to have the lights on all the time.

I have come to realise, in the spirit of unavoidable truth-telling, that I do not actually like being in it in the least little bit. In fact, I think that. have been avoiding going into it unless I absolutely must. I have been putting things off until later instead of getting on with them promptly and sensibly, because I have not wanted to be stuck in the dark, away from the beautiful sunshine, baking biscuits.

This is Not All Right.

This is mostly happening because the kitchen is underground, and although it has a fully functioning window, the window does not look out on to the daylight, but into a narrow underground gap. It faces a solid concrete wall, which is holding the garden up, about two feet away.

The outside ground level starts about eight feet up, just below the top of the window.

The whole lack-of-daylight problem was then hugely compounded by the fact that the front garden was entirely occupied by Oliver’s trampoline, squatting solidly just above the kitchen window.

This obscured what little light might have crept down the hole and into the kitchen, and was made worse by the fact that I have been far too idle to do anything at all to the garden. A dense undergrowth, of ferns and ivy and wild strawberries, had grown up all around the trampoline.

Oliver is almost thirteen.

He has not played on his trampoline for at least a year.

The only person who plays on the trampoline at all is Ritalin Boy, and indeed, it is for his benefit that I have left it there as long as I have.

However, this week I have come to realise that Ritalin Boy visits only on the very rarest of occasional occasions, is not likely to be around at any time soon, and the dark kitchen is making me miserable every single day.

I resolved to take down the trampoline.

I discussed this with Oliver, who rolled his eyes and said that really he didn’t care, and even declined to have a final go on it, for old times’ sake. Lucy said I was carelessly destroying the last fond memories of her childhood, and Mark lent me a spanner.

I had to take the strimmer to the garden before I could even get to most of it. The trampoline was so big that it was not actually possible to squeeze between it and the garden wall.

It had become terribly tired. The net was torn and the base had a hole in it, and the whole thing had become greasily green with disuse.

It had become so rusty that it did not want to be dismantled, and the bolts scraped dreadfully as I bashed it all apart.

I trapped my fingers and swore and hit it with a hammer and lost bits into the undergrowth, but in the end it was done, and Mark loaded the bits into his car to take to the scrapyard.

The space once it was gone was quite shocking.

I hacked away the tangle of bracken and convovulus.

Bright light flooded into the kitchen.

It is still not bright in there, but it is much, much better, and we have got a front garden that I had forgotten about.

I don’t know what I am going to do with it.

Probably nothing much really, but I have spent a satisfying evening on the taxi rank looking at Google’s suggestions for beautiful small gardens.

It would be lovely to come up with something bright and beautiful.