Wednesday, 30 March 2011
Provocation
Mystified today as another salvo arrives with the post. This time, a neatly typed letter from Mrs Landlady, ostensibly formally accepting our notice, full of provocative little demands about how she expects the house to be left:
"Please would you remove the settee and any other soft furnishing but leave behind the chest of drawers and any other items of storage. I assume that you will also leave the house fully carpeted and curtained as it was when you moved in."
Arrrghh!!! For crying out loud, if the place was left in the condition it was when we moved in it would be uninhabitable. We spent our flippin' wedding present money on carpeting the place as it had been necessary to remove the disgusting collection left there. Luckily I kept some of the curtains so they can go back up!
Following this frosty little request, she goes on to say that she has contacted the builder that I arranged to do the work in the bathroom "as soon as possible after you leave and I have asked him to be in contact with you to arrange access and I am grateful to you for offering to do this." Oh YES?
Perhaps I've taken advice (come to my senses) and regrettably am unable to take any further responsibility for the house or its keys after we leave.
Grrrr! I can feel my Pluto going white hot as I write and will have to resort to much calming therapy before the day is out. What the fuck is it all about? Sooner or later this was always going to happen. In spite of having to leave a house we rather liked through no fault of our own, we are leaving the place looking as good as it can under the circumstances and most of it is massively improved. The rent has been paid in full, on time, every time, complete with a friendly note, photos etc, keeping in touch and a copy of the local paper sent every week without fail at my own expense as a gesture of appreciation.
Now she will have no personal sense of obligation - if she ever did - a bigger rent and I can't see that we have done anything to deserve the provocative attitude.
This is not the peaceful blog it started out to be, I suppose given the nature of the times it was always unlikely! What it does do is allow me to talk to myself and 'get it off my chest' so that the aggro goes no further. It would be wrong to take bad feelings out into the world or with us to our next home. Only a month to go now and Quirky House with all its own lessons and rewards will wash away this sad tale and I for one will not be sorry.
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Awake
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
Thanks to Neeti at Astrology Expressed for finding these perfect words from Leonard Cohen's
'Anthem' Revolution is just that - round and round and round again. The I Ching says ;
" Times change, and with them their demands. Thus the seasons change in the course of the year. In the world cycle also there are spring and autumn in the life of peoples and nations, and these call for social transformations......... the object of a great revolution is the attainment of clarified, secure conditions ensuring a general stabilization on the basis of what is possible at the moment."
May this great wisdom be in the hearts of all leaders, everywhere as we go into this new dawn.
Sunday, 27 March 2011
Friday, 25 March 2011
Skirmish
Oh dear, the Rescue Remedy bottle's been out this week. On Wednesday we had to bite the bullet and hand in our notice to our Landlady of 8 years. She and her husband arrived for their annual cup of tea / small talk visit, only to find that Mr and Mrs Reliable weren't going to put up with a disintegrating, rat infested house any longer - Not a popular move! We were supposed to be stuck here by dint of socio/economic circumstances until such times as either the roof and/or walls fell down or they decided it was all too much trouble ( one cup of tea a year) and decided to sell. Meanwhile we were supposed to get estimates and arrange for builders/ plumbers and electricians to come to stick their fingers in the ever multiplying holes in the dyke holding back the tsunami of collapsing structure, dirt and plaster, whilst endeavouring as best we could to keep the place clean and looking nice. Over the last year or so we have lost the battle as the house has taken up more and more time - not to mention money and Pluto squaring my natal 4th house Sun.....
It was like this....We were happily settled into a tiny house at the end of the terrace. We'd been there for 5 years or so and recently started our business when things began to go downhill. My faraway Father died which brought a flurry of reproach from certain members of the family who expected me to drop everything and rush to his deathbed in spite of the fact that he had made it quite clear when I left home at the age of 17 that unless I went back immediately and unconditionally to his roof and total contol, I would no longer be welcome in his house (you get the drift?) I didn't go back and I was only invited to his house once or twice in the intervening years when it would have come to the notice of the distant but revered members of his clan who still thought him a warm and wonderful father, although we did keep in touch by phone - as long as we talked about him. It fell to my long-suffering sister to sort out the melee of his house and finances until it finally dawned that she would get no more than the rest of us - ie, nothing and passed the whole sorry mess to our stepmother's kids to deal with. Said Stepmother all the while languishing in the best nursing home in the area, threatening evil mischief to my small nephew and niece who she hated.
I'm sure you're getting the picture of emotional stability coming through! My always troublesome menstrual cycle took a turn for the worse with the development of fibroids which caused ever heavier and more unpredictable periods and kept me at home for a day or two every 3 weeks or so. Then our landlord gave us notice to leave the house as he needed to live in it himself - this seemed odd as he farmed 10 miles away but we had no choice but to leave. We were already renting a garage close by to store the tools of our trade - mowers,strimmers,etc and our trusty little Fiesta van, so we didn't want to go far. Fortunately someone we knew had a tiny maisonette on a big new estate about half a mile away. We were gutted. We had loved the cottage and the street and had made friends there, especially an elderly couple who had given us our first gardening work. The old lady, in her late seventies, had nursed and lost both her sister and husband in the previous year and was quietly living out her days alone, visited now and then by her daughter and granddaughter's family from 'upcountry' (a long and tedious journey).
A week before moving day our former landlord arrived with a very special offer - we could stay in the house but he would have to put the rent up! We had signed a new lease and the kitchen roof was about to fall in (it did, a week after new tenants had moved in) so we declined his kind offer.The day we moved out was utterly miserable, the help we had arranged was no help at all and drove us to distraction trying to keep things in the organised system we had devised to squeeze a houseful of stuff into what was little more than a bedsit. In depair I escaped round to have a chat with my elderly friend, only to find her suffering from a nasty pain in the chest which in time turned out to be the Lung Cancer which killed her. Subsequent weeks were awful as we tried to juggle the upheaval that life had become with stuff in different parts of the area, an increasingly sick and dying friend and a fledgeling business. I ended up in the A and E department several times with alarmingly heavy periods which just didn't stop and produced agonising cramps and weariness. Eventually I was almost housebound. I had to wait months for an ultrasound scan and consultations and had to stop going to clean my friend's house as any exertion made it much worse. The hospital put me on drugs to stop the bleeding which made me nauseous and didn't work, our friend worsened and died and I felt very isolated in this tiny place on a huge estate where nobody spoke to anyone else and I couldn't even get away to go to work. The weekly supermarket shop was the most I could manage and even that made me feel dreadful.
So when my friend's daughter offered us the lease of her Mother's house at a rent we could afford, we were over the moon! At the end of our 6 month contract we upped sticks and moved back. Apart from her few personal belongings, all my friend's furniture and 'stuff' was still in the house - nothing of any value - and we were at liberty to do what we liked with it. Some we kept to use, some we donated to a 'furniture for the homeless' charity and the rest we dumped or rather my husband dumped because I was still very poorly if less depressed. The house was filthy and mouldy from being shut up for a few weeks, but we were so glad to get back, we were happy enough to clean up. Three months later I finally got to see a surgeon who decided I needed a radical hysterectomy.After another seven months of waiting I went to my GP and wept etc,etc when it transpired that because my records had not been updated to indicate that I was now self-employed, I was still being treated as unemployed (and evidently unworthy of concern). Within three weeks I was in and out of hospital, minus my entire reproductive system and feeling better than I had for a couple of years give or take a bit of healing to do. Three months later I was back to work and pretty much back to what passes with me as 'normal'.That era, incidently was Pluto transiting my Moon!
I digress! The house was always a puzzle. It looks pretty enough but the multiple layers of wallpaper, reaching back into the 1940's hid a multitude of sins. We soon learned not to strip it off unless we were prepared to spend weeks and a small fortune patching up crumbling plaster and filling holes in lath and plaster partition walls. None of the doors close, the tiny kitchen has an undulating earth floor covered with geological strata of decaying linoleum and topped by as hard wearing a carpet as we could afford (understandably nobody would lay vinyl for us) the house only stands at all by dint of support from its neighbours which have,like the rest of the street had thousands of pounds worth of structural engineering carried out on them. The original back extention kitchen and bedroom were found to have no ties to the rest of the building and no lead on the roof joins either which has resulted in the bedroom ceiling cracking up from the ingress of years of Cornish rain. All the woodwork is original and excepting the doors you can put your finger through it anywhere - Goddess knows what the joists are like, the front bedroom window rattles when you walk round the bed in the backbedroom! And there's a ghost. Oh, and rats.
Any way enough is enough and we have told the proud owners that although we are very grateful for their kindness in keeping the rent low, we have found somewhere else to live before the ratty bathroom ceiling has to be carried through the house and the asbestos water tank (for crying out loud) has to come out as well. This was received with feigned dismay and incomprehension. Relieved the unpleasant task was over, we were then astonished an hour or so later to be told that they would return the following afternoon with an estate agent to 'See what needs to be done to rent it out again'! (We didn't have an agent). Slightly put out (tr Mars square natal Mars) to have to wait in again but glad to be getting the thing done, I was getting some laundry in off the line when they arrived. I let them in and retired back to my washing line, trying to subdue Jester the collie who wanted to scare them away by barking his wretched head off (this tactic always works on the postman who always goes away when he barks - such is dog logic). I assumed I was safe for awhile but alas, no! within a few minutes, landlady and estate agent lady came skipping and laughing out into the very narrow back yard where the washing line is. Like all West Cornwall houses our washing line is a nautical affair of ropes and pulleys designed to use in minimum space and maximum Atlantic winds. They pull up on metal poles to a fair height - 15 ft or so, and unless well secured when lowered they collapse to shoulder height. This was the state of play of the remainder of my laundry. A sundry collection of M&S knickers and bras brushed their fair cheeks as they rushed by hooting 'OOH, IT'S GOT A STREAM!!' 'Yes' I thought, 'that's where the rats live' but kept my counsel as I retreived my best purple spotty knicks with bucolic patience while firmly and unobtrusively preventing Jester from expressing his (wholly worthy) instincts and all the while wondering what Mr Landlord was doing all this time on his own upstairs in my/his house. Eventually they went back indoors where they dillied around for the best part of half an hour before calling out 'Thanks, Morvah', and left. With a sigh of relief I sank down into a chair to take a few deep breaths when I was astonished to see through the window, Mrs Landlady pulling back some sacks of the frostbitten Jasmine I had been pruning whilst waiting for their arrival, and sitting on the bench under my window with the estate agent lady where they proceded to have their discussion at normal volume, feet away from the windows of the nosiest neighbours in creation. The only person who couldn't hear what they were saying was myself, because I had left the TV on to give them some privacy from me (that worked then!). By the time they left, Jester and I had to hit the Rescue Remedy bottle and the Smirnoff looked pretty tempting but we resisted. Neither of us wanted any dinner for a while though and were glad when Mr Leo arrived home with cuddles and sympathy.Now its only a memory but I felt as if I had been in a fight. Why? Should this not be a win/win situation? I am positive that no hint of either reproach or triumph came from us so why the war zone after eight and a half years of a civil relationship? Oh well, hopefully from here on in it's a new beginning. The last rent has been paid and legal requirements observed before Mercury retrograde next week, so now we can get everything in order to move when it goes direct again in about a month. Lots to do! The cardboard box collection is growing daily, probably Mr Landlord is still in there somewhere, trying to find his way out!
It was like this....We were happily settled into a tiny house at the end of the terrace. We'd been there for 5 years or so and recently started our business when things began to go downhill. My faraway Father died which brought a flurry of reproach from certain members of the family who expected me to drop everything and rush to his deathbed in spite of the fact that he had made it quite clear when I left home at the age of 17 that unless I went back immediately and unconditionally to his roof and total contol, I would no longer be welcome in his house (you get the drift?) I didn't go back and I was only invited to his house once or twice in the intervening years when it would have come to the notice of the distant but revered members of his clan who still thought him a warm and wonderful father, although we did keep in touch by phone - as long as we talked about him. It fell to my long-suffering sister to sort out the melee of his house and finances until it finally dawned that she would get no more than the rest of us - ie, nothing and passed the whole sorry mess to our stepmother's kids to deal with. Said Stepmother all the while languishing in the best nursing home in the area, threatening evil mischief to my small nephew and niece who she hated.
I'm sure you're getting the picture of emotional stability coming through! My always troublesome menstrual cycle took a turn for the worse with the development of fibroids which caused ever heavier and more unpredictable periods and kept me at home for a day or two every 3 weeks or so. Then our landlord gave us notice to leave the house as he needed to live in it himself - this seemed odd as he farmed 10 miles away but we had no choice but to leave. We were already renting a garage close by to store the tools of our trade - mowers,strimmers,etc and our trusty little Fiesta van, so we didn't want to go far. Fortunately someone we knew had a tiny maisonette on a big new estate about half a mile away. We were gutted. We had loved the cottage and the street and had made friends there, especially an elderly couple who had given us our first gardening work. The old lady, in her late seventies, had nursed and lost both her sister and husband in the previous year and was quietly living out her days alone, visited now and then by her daughter and granddaughter's family from 'upcountry' (a long and tedious journey).
A week before moving day our former landlord arrived with a very special offer - we could stay in the house but he would have to put the rent up! We had signed a new lease and the kitchen roof was about to fall in (it did, a week after new tenants had moved in) so we declined his kind offer.The day we moved out was utterly miserable, the help we had arranged was no help at all and drove us to distraction trying to keep things in the organised system we had devised to squeeze a houseful of stuff into what was little more than a bedsit. In depair I escaped round to have a chat with my elderly friend, only to find her suffering from a nasty pain in the chest which in time turned out to be the Lung Cancer which killed her. Subsequent weeks were awful as we tried to juggle the upheaval that life had become with stuff in different parts of the area, an increasingly sick and dying friend and a fledgeling business. I ended up in the A and E department several times with alarmingly heavy periods which just didn't stop and produced agonising cramps and weariness. Eventually I was almost housebound. I had to wait months for an ultrasound scan and consultations and had to stop going to clean my friend's house as any exertion made it much worse. The hospital put me on drugs to stop the bleeding which made me nauseous and didn't work, our friend worsened and died and I felt very isolated in this tiny place on a huge estate where nobody spoke to anyone else and I couldn't even get away to go to work. The weekly supermarket shop was the most I could manage and even that made me feel dreadful.
So when my friend's daughter offered us the lease of her Mother's house at a rent we could afford, we were over the moon! At the end of our 6 month contract we upped sticks and moved back. Apart from her few personal belongings, all my friend's furniture and 'stuff' was still in the house - nothing of any value - and we were at liberty to do what we liked with it. Some we kept to use, some we donated to a 'furniture for the homeless' charity and the rest we dumped or rather my husband dumped because I was still very poorly if less depressed. The house was filthy and mouldy from being shut up for a few weeks, but we were so glad to get back, we were happy enough to clean up. Three months later I finally got to see a surgeon who decided I needed a radical hysterectomy.After another seven months of waiting I went to my GP and wept etc,etc when it transpired that because my records had not been updated to indicate that I was now self-employed, I was still being treated as unemployed (and evidently unworthy of concern). Within three weeks I was in and out of hospital, minus my entire reproductive system and feeling better than I had for a couple of years give or take a bit of healing to do. Three months later I was back to work and pretty much back to what passes with me as 'normal'.That era, incidently was Pluto transiting my Moon!
I digress! The house was always a puzzle. It looks pretty enough but the multiple layers of wallpaper, reaching back into the 1940's hid a multitude of sins. We soon learned not to strip it off unless we were prepared to spend weeks and a small fortune patching up crumbling plaster and filling holes in lath and plaster partition walls. None of the doors close, the tiny kitchen has an undulating earth floor covered with geological strata of decaying linoleum and topped by as hard wearing a carpet as we could afford (understandably nobody would lay vinyl for us) the house only stands at all by dint of support from its neighbours which have,like the rest of the street had thousands of pounds worth of structural engineering carried out on them. The original back extention kitchen and bedroom were found to have no ties to the rest of the building and no lead on the roof joins either which has resulted in the bedroom ceiling cracking up from the ingress of years of Cornish rain. All the woodwork is original and excepting the doors you can put your finger through it anywhere - Goddess knows what the joists are like, the front bedroom window rattles when you walk round the bed in the backbedroom! And there's a ghost. Oh, and rats.
Any way enough is enough and we have told the proud owners that although we are very grateful for their kindness in keeping the rent low, we have found somewhere else to live before the ratty bathroom ceiling has to be carried through the house and the asbestos water tank (for crying out loud) has to come out as well. This was received with feigned dismay and incomprehension. Relieved the unpleasant task was over, we were then astonished an hour or so later to be told that they would return the following afternoon with an estate agent to 'See what needs to be done to rent it out again'! (We didn't have an agent). Slightly put out (tr Mars square natal Mars) to have to wait in again but glad to be getting the thing done, I was getting some laundry in off the line when they arrived. I let them in and retired back to my washing line, trying to subdue Jester the collie who wanted to scare them away by barking his wretched head off (this tactic always works on the postman who always goes away when he barks - such is dog logic). I assumed I was safe for awhile but alas, no! within a few minutes, landlady and estate agent lady came skipping and laughing out into the very narrow back yard where the washing line is. Like all West Cornwall houses our washing line is a nautical affair of ropes and pulleys designed to use in minimum space and maximum Atlantic winds. They pull up on metal poles to a fair height - 15 ft or so, and unless well secured when lowered they collapse to shoulder height. This was the state of play of the remainder of my laundry. A sundry collection of M&S knickers and bras brushed their fair cheeks as they rushed by hooting 'OOH, IT'S GOT A STREAM!!' 'Yes' I thought, 'that's where the rats live' but kept my counsel as I retreived my best purple spotty knicks with bucolic patience while firmly and unobtrusively preventing Jester from expressing his (wholly worthy) instincts and all the while wondering what Mr Landlord was doing all this time on his own upstairs in my/his house. Eventually they went back indoors where they dillied around for the best part of half an hour before calling out 'Thanks, Morvah', and left. With a sigh of relief I sank down into a chair to take a few deep breaths when I was astonished to see through the window, Mrs Landlady pulling back some sacks of the frostbitten Jasmine I had been pruning whilst waiting for their arrival, and sitting on the bench under my window with the estate agent lady where they proceded to have their discussion at normal volume, feet away from the windows of the nosiest neighbours in creation. The only person who couldn't hear what they were saying was myself, because I had left the TV on to give them some privacy from me (that worked then!). By the time they left, Jester and I had to hit the Rescue Remedy bottle and the Smirnoff looked pretty tempting but we resisted. Neither of us wanted any dinner for a while though and were glad when Mr Leo arrived home with cuddles and sympathy.Now its only a memory but I felt as if I had been in a fight. Why? Should this not be a win/win situation? I am positive that no hint of either reproach or triumph came from us so why the war zone after eight and a half years of a civil relationship? Oh well, hopefully from here on in it's a new beginning. The last rent has been paid and legal requirements observed before Mercury retrograde next week, so now we can get everything in order to move when it goes direct again in about a month. Lots to do! The cardboard box collection is growing daily, probably Mr Landlord is still in there somewhere, trying to find his way out!
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