By the time we got up this morning the two lodgers had been out and had hot chocolate for their breakfast in the cafe across the road.
We brought our coffee downstairs for a House Meeting, and decided that we all quite liked the current practice of everybody getting quietly along with their own lives and not interfering with one another, so Mark and I buzzed off to empty the dogs, and the lodgers went off to continue lodging, quietly.
We decided that our Project for the day would be to tidy the loft.
As you know, the loft in our house is a sort of distant glory hole, where everything that we are not using, or can’t think where else to put, gets chucked. Hence it is full of odd things that might be handy one day, like tennis racquets, and hammocks, and lodgers.
There was so much clutter that there was hardly room for the upstairs lodger.
We thought that we would dispose of some of it, so that she could organise her life tidily.
We made a pot of tea and lugged the hoover up the stairs.
There was a huge pile of dusty junk underneath the eaves.
We dragged it all out and threw most of it away, apart from things that we thought other people might find handy, and we put those in bags to take to the charity shop tomorrow.
The upstairs lodger helped.
She is rubbish at throwing things away. She looked longingly at old cardigans and coats that didn’t fit anybody and broken Christmas decorations as if somehow she might manage to think of a use for them, but she couldn’t.
We shoved things that we wanted but don’t use into the cupboard with the water tanks. There were several rucksacks, in case one day we hitchhike around the world, and the hammocks, in case one day we move to somewhere it doesn’t rain, and a book with pictures of engines, and another book about teaching yourself how to speak Arabic.
There were boxes and boxes of photographs, left over from the olden days before we kept all photographs in clouds. There was a machine for giving people electric shocks, and a microscope, and a large telescope in a wooden box. There were some Indian silk rugs and some Army issue water bottles. There were books about intelligence testing for dogs, and drawing cartoons, and looking after ponies, and surviving in the wilderness with the SAS. We ought to be a very well-informed family. I am not sure how we all manage to be so rubbish.
We got rid of some of the clutter by kindly donating it to the downstairs lodger, who was too polite to say no, so we will probably find it discreetly shoved under Lucy’s bed when she leaves.
On top of the clutter lay a thick layer of dust, and beneath it was hairy evidence that we don’t hoover often enough. We pretended that we thought this was the lodger’s responsibility, but actually she has only been there a few months, and we haven’t hoovered in those corners since about 2011.
We lugged the charity shop bags down the stairs and dumped them in Oliver’s room, because of him not being there to protest. We assured ourselves that we would make the effort and remember to donate them tomorrow, but really I don’t suppose we will, and they will finish up being there until he comes home.
It took ages, and by the time we had finished we were all fed up of tidying up. In fact we hadn’t really finished, we had just piled lots of things that we hadn’t quite got round to on top of the lodger’s bed. This didn’t matter, because the lodger rolled her eyes and booked herself into an hotel up the road for the night. She likes staying in hotels, which is just as well, given the mess we had all made in her bedroom.
We had got to stop anyway, because of being late for work. The two lodgers decided that there was no point in hoping for any in-house catering and went out for pizza.
We went to work, which of course is where I am now.
It is nice to have an empty loft and a full dustbin.
Have a picture of our holiday. It seems a long time ago but it was the day before yesterday.
