While Boffin's Away The Cats get less Play

No sooner than RHB trundled her suitcase down towards Newland Avenue, ultimate destination Italy for a week's R&R with Culham et al, I sneaked upstairs to my stash. I got the stuff, and mixed it. Real good. Although I admit to a flicker of guilt at breaking a promise, old addictions die hard, and I seem to have particularly addictive personality. Every relapse is the same - at first, there's a rush, adrenalin surging, and you cant wait for the next time so you just do it again. And again. The problem is, the more you do it, the worse it gets. THe worse it gets, the more you need to do more. It is, as classically described, a downwards spiral. The worst thing is, you know, you just know, that no matter how hard you try to hide what you've been doing, you will be found out, because the effects just cannot be hidden.

As you will have probably guessed from the aforementioned paragraph, I have, I confess, been at it again. Plastering that is. This time I plastered my front room and hallway. This time, the results of the plastering are not as bad as they were previously, in that a hallway is, generally speaking a room you pass through quickly, on the way elsewhere. Besides, there will be coats hung everywhere.

My solution to the front room is that we will treat it like an old fashioned English "parlour" . Effectively this means we will never go in to that room, as in days of Yore, even the smallest of English houses had parlours. Children and animals, husbands and close relatives, all were forbidden from ever entering the parlour. The reason is that it was always the 'best' room in the house, kept immaculately spotless, often with an unplayed piano and fancy Chinaware on display. Unerringly, the "display only" feature of the Chinaware was a good thing, as most of the stuff was unusable - plates with stupid ripples in, cup handles that a cat could not get it's paw through, bowls whose lower curves were specifically designed to bear no relationship at all to average spoon shape meaning that even if you were lucky enough (possibly Holy Communion) to grab a bowl of trifle, you could never eat it all due to spoon related inaccesibility. Licking the bowl, at least in the parlour, was forbidden. With the kind of logic that makes you wonder if our ancestors actually did any reflection, the parlour, best room in the house, was usually used to entertain people whom you did not like very much, like the Priest, snobby relatives, the Insurance man, and sadly, corpses during wakes.

I have to admit, I struggled with the correct word in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph when describing the corpse's prescence at a wake. It can hardly be claimed that they attend wakes, and in sounds as if they are a theatrical turn. At has the same problem as attend and for implies some activity on the corpses part. So I apologize retrospectively, during will have to do.

The sudden appearance of a parlour will hopefully be a welcome thing when the RHB gets home. We have been camping in our house since January, effectively living in the bedroom and I think we're getting used to it. Pavlovian animals that we both are, I think we would not know what to do with more useable space anyway, so the parlour, to me is an ideal solution.

A final note on this is that the plastering is not just self indulgence. I tried (OH how I tried) to get people in to do it, but there was no interest. Apparently, even in Credit Crunch Britain, the are some jobs that are just "too small". The appearance of plaster on our walls downstairs though, is no small thing for us. Completion of these rooms will be massive, and will allow us to getthe floor down finally. Once that is done, you are all invited to a Great Big Housewarming Party.