I awoke this morning
staring straight into a hairy arsehole. Luckily it was clean and the sphincter
was firmly closed. I knew it wasn't Vic's as he is still away and it was a bit
too close to know exactly which one it was, but I took a random guess and said
"Oh Kerry!" She just
snuggled in tighter. I just sighed. I supposed it was time to get up anyway.
The night before had
been one of those restless ones. Thunder had been in the air for several
days. Everybody was complaining of
headaches and I was no exception. That was the night it came. The thunder was
mild but the rain heavy. Still it did not matter how mild the thunder, our
little preciousnesses were sensitive to the slightest bang, rattle or crash. I
was asleep for the first rumble, but was woken by one quivering dog trying to
embed herself into my armpit and another burrowing into the side of my head. We
all struggled for survival for a good while and finally they settled. Kerry was
on my shoulder and Candy on my head. As I lay, helplessly trapped in a sort of
strange 'S' shape I could hear gentle snoring from underneath the bed. Good old
Looki, he never really gets his knickers in a twist. I tried to drift off but
that was when the rain came crashing down and the wind whipped the curtain up
and out of the patio door. It was quite exciting, but I figured rest was going
to be difficult that night and so it was. The girls milled around the bed, up
and down it, back and forth, off it and back on it! In and out the flapping curtain they went. Flickering
flashes of lightening were followed by rumbles of growling thunder. All this
action to the rhythmic ghrrrrrr, ghrrrrrr, of Looki's gentle purring.
 |
| Looki never gets his knickers in too much of a twist |
All I could do
really was give myself up to it and hope that the following day would not be
too taxing.....
I awoke to....well,
you know what. I knew it wasn't
going to be a great day, I didn't realize then how awful it was in fact going
to be. Bleary-eyed I staggered to the bathroom, everything was done on autopilot
including the rubbing of Looki's ears. Downstairs, open the backdoor, The
Charge of the Light Brigade went one way and I groped my way back to the
kitchen to put the kettle on. I heard the familiar trotting toes on the
tiles. He looked at me with his
head tipped quizzically to one side "Hello there mum, are we having a cup
of tea then?" and in the same breath
"Are we not going for a walk this morning?" These dogs were
born to make me feel guilty.
"No. We're not going for a wall, ok? I just don't have the energy
today and I'm not making tea either.
It's a large pot of coffee for ME!" Guilt, guilt, guilt.
But then being born an Irish Catholic I do guilt very well, I've had
plenty of practice.
Luckily for me it
was a Saturday and guilt notwithstanding we could just slouch around the house
for most of the day.
 |
| Candy does 'slouching' pretty well |
The ring at the
doorbell said otherwise! How could
I have forgotten? The electrician
was coming to finish off the electrics in the house, finally! We have only been waiting the best part
of five years. Of course the dogs
went bonkers at the first ding dong of the bell and all of them went haring
through the house to see who was at the door. Kerry always seems to lead these expeditions and has the
most piercing bark of the three.
At the front of the house we have a front door, not surprisingly. It leads into a porchway entrance with
an iron gate opening onto steps down to the street. In this vicinity it is essential for security and anyway,
living on my own for so much of the time it is great as it means that I can actually
open the front door and speak with whoever is there. Obviously if I know them I let them in, but if it is some
random ticket seller, salesman or beggar I can just send them on their way and
they never get a foot in the door so to speak. Now that we have our little furry darlings it is doubly
great because it keeps them from running out onto the road.
When I start opening
the door fat little Kerry always tries to squeeze through before it is open
enough, she is like a tube of toothpaste, squished in the middle, her fat
little tummy stopping the flow and she usually has to back up a bit so that I
can open the door fully for her.
Then all the dogs welcome whoever is there. Once the initial greeting is over I have to drive them all
back into the house with a stern "back, back" or "in the house" command. They are all very good and do as they
are told. Only then can I open the
front gate and allow the visitor, in this instance Pepe the electrician, into
the 'decompression chamber' of our front porch. Once the gate is safely locked again I can open the front
door and let the jumping, barking, Westie adoration commence. Of course this is fine if you only have
one or two people calling at the same time. Four can be a bit of a squeeze in the front porch and six,
as discovered recently when we had some Irish visitors, can be downright
intimate. Luckily we are old
friends.
Pepe is a very
pleasant man. Petite and with a
little spiky moustache and goatee.
He is always dressed in a sort of electrician's uniform and makes me
think of a miniature army general.
However, while his initial impression is one of brisk efficiency one
soon realizes that where Pepe goes, chaos follows. Whenever he does one thing he invariably manages to break
something else or lose a screw or put a switch on upside down, so it all has to
be taken apart and done again.
This was his third and final visit. I had decided that already, finished or not! He arrived at nine and I will admit I
almost threw him out of the door at one.
In between I could do absolutely nothing of my own.
He is one of those
men who demand your full attention while he is working. He likes to give a running commentary
on how the electrics work. Now I
am not averse to this as it helps me understand how the whole house is put
together and that is useful as well as interesting to me. However there are
limits. Our previous electrician
it appears left quite a lot to be desired though and to be fair Pepe has inherited
a right mess of wiring and junction boxes as well as two fuse boxes to navigate
his way through. An outside back
porch light became an impossibility when he simply could not find out where the
wall tubes for threading the wires led to and the wire he uses to lead the way
just went on and on into infinity when he tried to do an exploratory 'dig' on a
previous visit.
While Pepe was
working I found that as long as I was sitting in his near vicinity, fiddling
with my Ipad or rubbing dog bellies he got on more or less quietly with the
job. The minute I wandered off and
picked up a broom or had just immersed my hands in dishwater he would call me
for some reason or other. "Go
upstairs and turn on the bathroom light." "Where are the materials that Antonio left for
me?" "Go back and turn the bathroom light off." "Do you have this or do you have
that?" Until I really was losing the will to live and whenever I stomped
off back up the stairs for yet another thing I found myself clenching my hands
into fists, which dearly wanted to punch his lights out. Now I am not usually a violent person,
but there is something about the chaos that Pepe produces that drives me
absolutely nuts.
 |
| There are always plenty of bellies to rub |
Just to add to the
chaos and to make the day even more exhausting Candy also had got wind of a cat
and every ten minutes or so, just to liven things up, she would jump up and
dart out the back door, Kerry would of course start barking like mad and dart
after her and Looki would follow until he got just outside the door and then
look bewildered and wander back into the house. Of course Candy ended up covered in leaves and burrs again
with her tongue lolling and her eyes rolling wildly with cat-lust!
I had had no
opportunity to even grab a bite for breakfast and only noticed the clock when
it was already nearly twelve: dog dinnertime. My own stomach was gurgling madly as I prepared lunch for
the dogs. Of course Pepe required
my assistance halfway though the preparation, which only confused and excited
the dogs even more as they could smell their dinner by that time and were also
getting hungry.
By one o'clock I had
only had one cup of tea. Pepe
finished adapting the latch of the fuse box, which he had managed to break in
the final moment as he replaced the plastic cover over the fuses. He asked me if that was everything crossed
off my list. I lied and said
'yes', while mentally making a note of the little finishings that I could do or
Vic could do on his next visit home and I virtually bustled the little man out
of the front door with a happy farewell and a wish for a lovely weekend! I closed the door and silently
screamed. The dogs jumped up and
tried to lick me on the mouth.
Back in the living
room, where most of the activity had taken place I surveyed the damage. Scattered wires everywhere, the tiny
clippings especially painful if trodden upon in bare feet. A heavy shelf unit pulled out from the
wall. Pulled out together I would
now have to push it back into place by myself. Torn bits of cardboard where Pepe had opened a box of parts,
a few screws which should have gone into the sockets or light switches
somewhere but never made it, random bits of rubble and dust and a fusebox door
hanging ever so slightly ajar.
Some things would never again be the same.
At this moment a
thought occurred to me. Waking up
beside an arsehole was a whole lot better than having to deal with one for the
greater part of my day….
