The Three Plagues of Moving House

I've recently moved house which in terms of time and energy and also financially is utterly exhausting.  I'm finally at a point now where the process has calmed and I've been able to knead some normalcy back into my life.  But for awhile there I was dealing with all the hassle of moving into a new house as well as what seemed to be low-budget versions of the plagues of Egypt.

Within a week or so of moving in, still living out of boxes and the like, my eyes drifted to my front window, where my dog was sitting on the windowsill, intently gazing out.  What I saw outside was beyond the experience of my stunted man-child mind.  Wasps.  Every-single-where.  There were a few idling, still figures on the outside, but for the most part it was a full tornado of buzzing chaos that had visited itself upon my morning.  Incredulously I watched the postman go about his business, oblivious to the madness around him.  That most popular of story archetypes, the Little Old Lady, strolled calmly through the bestingered, winged melee.  Was I mad?  Was this a crazed hallucination brought on by the stress of moving house?  What in the name of holy Jordi Cruijff should I do about them?

Cloaked in my own cowardice, I crept through the back door, down the back garden path to the alley behind my house and circled, pajamed, to the opposite side of the street where I beheld their infernal construction.

I journeyed to my place of employ, downtrodden, downhearted… down.  In my quarter century's worth of experience there was no solution to this problem.  Arriving at work I flexed my under-exercised raconteurial muscles and regaled my colleagues with my tragic tale of hardship.  Empathy, sympathy, kindness… these things I received verbally.  And heard spoken the greatest advice ever received.  Perhaps the best advice that will ever be received.

"The council will come and deal with that," she said.

Words truer than true!  As I surfed on the great waves of modern digital communication I beached upon the Council's website.  I logged my problem and by the time I returned home the wasps had dispersed.  It is unclear as to whether the Council dealt with this issue or whether the wasps simply caught wind of my betrayal and dispersed accordingly.  Regardless, I arrived home relieved and satisfied.

The next plague which visited me was the plague of one single leaf-cutting bee.  You may well believe this to be stretching the definition of plague to its limits, but coming on the back of the wasp fiasco, I was ready to punch any buzzing creature with my fist until dead.  The death of either me or the insect, I had no care for which.  One bee would not usually stir this ire in me, but for the fact that I had noticed that the thing was building a nest in the wooden surround of my back garden, wheedling his black and yellow way into the underbelly of my fencing.  I had visions of autumnal afternoons in the back garden spent supping serenely, visions of peaceful picnics prevented by a pack of prying pests, passers of tres, undoing my utopia!

He's gone now, though.

The third plague rode into town on the back of two kittens.  It was rather a spur of the moment decision to welcome the two feline creeps into our home.  The decision to add a kitten to our menagerie (prior population: 1 poodle) quickly doubled to two kittens as we decided not to split the last two brothers of a litter.  Far be it for me to compromise my rampant masculinity with use of the word 'cute', but couched in such a hedged sentence as this I shall, and have. How timid they first seemed!  They are now nosey, adventurous bastards.

When we went to pick them up (from a friend who'd already picked them up from their original home), we were met with an apology that these two silent babies "had fleas".  A little frustrating, but these things happen.  It took us mere minutes of the drive home to realise that "had fleas" was a wholly inadequate description of the situation.  They were essentially flea food, perhaps merely the packaging that the fleas we'd bought were being dispatched on.  They spent the majority of their first day with us scratching, the poor buggers.  Luckily, within a day the flea treatment was working and the kittens had died off, leaving us with the 50 healthy fleas we had always dreamed about.  HAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHA.

For the weeks since we've had them the kittens, Sirius and Lupin, have increased their abilities far beyond their meagre 'scratch ourselves' origins.  They can now claw the curtains, bat the dog in the face, attack each other, scream for food and walk on keyboards; nearly a full house of 'adorable' cat techniques.  Braving the plague of fleas has proven well worth the struggle; it has been nothing but shenanigans from them ever since.

Garden the Past

I was told last night that the man two doors down from me is dead. That is to say, he has died, and he no longer lives there, because he is dead. I'm not suggesting that he is inhabiting the house in an undead capacity. Because he isn't, he is dead.

I didn't know him at all really, I only ever saw him sat on his doorstep as I walked or drove past, and he always seemed happy enough. That is pretty much the extent of my knowledge of him. Strange to think that with the huge size of the earth and the multitude of people upon it, that even people who must have spent years and years within 40 foot of me can be completely outside my sphere of experience.

My bedroom window looks out onto his back garden, which, since we live on the side of a hill, stretches upwards quite steeply. For this reason, a number of the back gardens in my street are untended, covered with sprawling brambles and weeds. Some people are more resilient in their garden-tending habits, however, and so precarious sheds, flowerbeds and decking adorns certain plots, looking like a collaboratory project between Kevin McCloud and Tim Burton.

The back garden of the house two doors down was rigorously tended. It didn't have the new shininess of the garden that, at great effort, had gravity-defying decking installed, nor the simplicity of the plots where it is merely grass, cut short. It doesn't have the collected order of my grandparents old garden did, which, since it was further up the street, was subject to a less extreme incline, and was larger, allowing for spacing out of the glasshouse and the shed, with a small patio area and a stretch of grass.

The garden is busy and full, with any likely bit of turf used to a definite purpose, to make the most of the small, difficult terrain. There are a patch of flowers, I am not able to give much more information on them, if I was ever described as having green fingers then it would definitely be in connection to a medical mishap. They are purple, with long stems. They look slightly overgrown now, looking more like wildflowers than I assume they must have done when they had someone to tend to them. I can't be certain of that though, since I never paid the garden any attention whatsoever until this afternoon. The garden has been partitioned into levels, with the flower level being the lowest I can see from my oblique angle, it is likely raised from the ground level by a wall. The level above the flowers is still covered in growth, though I make a distinction because they are plants rather than flowers. I'm not overly sure whether that is a distinction botanists/biologists would make, the chasm is my own knowledge is becoming clearer with every entry of this I write. These plants aren't bearing any sort of fruit, and it is only because of the strips of bamboo that are holding them straight that I assume they are in fact, plants. There's a small wooden construction holding these bamboo strips upright, it's odd that nature gets anything done considering how much needs to be done to make even a tiny garden grow to specifications. Upturned cans of Fosters adorn the top of the bamboo, though I needed to strain my eyes to make out the brand as the cans have faded due to the sun. Considering how little sun we get in these parts, the cans must have been there for quite some time.

On the level above that, the highest level, is a sturdy old shed, which, if it bears any resemblance to the one which used to stand in my grandfather's garden, I would not enjoy being inside. The rust and the mustiness of old tools and compost, hollow watering cans and a coating of spider's webs, it is that kind of shed in my speculations. The sort of spiders that would inhabit such an outdoor indoors would be the fat, strong kind which fill me with the same kind of revulsion, and trigger the gag reflex upon seeing them, in the same way I get when George Osborne is on the TV. It is the sort of shed that is filled with functions that I do not understand, and have no interest, currently, of involving myself with.

Some of the windows of the shed are open, and I feel disquieted looking at them, because I don't know whether or not they should be open or not. Are they always left open to air the shed, or were they left open the one specific time? And now the person who knows whether they should be open or not is unable to affect their positioning.

The garden is, perhaps, sadder to see than the insides of the house (not that I did or will see that). The garden was working towards a purpose. It was a cyclical beast, an organism that was growing and being replanted, growing and being replanted. It was the culmination of the plans of one man, and with that planning force removed, the garden will eventually leave the cyclical path it was meant to be following, eventually growing unmanageable or having a new vision imposed upon it. Perhaps it will be utterly scrapped, and a completely new cycle will be established, an utterly different organism in the exact same geographical location. Perhaps some of the garden will be salvaged, and incorporated into a Frankenstein's garden type creature.

I didn't realise when I woke up this morning that I would actually be interested in the fate of a garden. Perhaps I'm being possessed.

I hope that when new people eventually move into the house I remember this line of thought and watch the garden cycle.

I could also stop being so lazy and actually sort out the garden behind my own house, which is insanely overgrown with pickies. Although that would require that I become the sort of person who goes inside sheds and knows what is in there, and not only that, knows what those things are for. I already know what's inside sheds; rust, must, tools, compost, cans and webs.

I'll stick to watching through the window.