Into the Abyss

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….