I am having great difficulty in thinking of things to write about in this blog as my kids are now old enough to knock about with their friends during the summer holidays so they are no source of inspiration, and they just come in when they want something to eat. So Meditation on a Tin of Spaghetti Hoops? I have just been outside for the dreaded weed when my eyes alighted on our back windows, or rather the corner of the window. We have had the front windows double glazed but rather in the manner of a film set for a Western it's all a facade and the rest of the house is slowly crumbling. The back windows are the original thirties windows and when they were actually hollow, because we didn't have enough money to do anything about it, Mark decided to take action and concreted the corner of the window. So yes, we have a concrete window. Interestingly ( I'll just break with the banal for a moment,)the plaster in our ceiling has a lattice of crack marks on it which was caused by the bombing in the war. If you enlarge the picture above you will see the cracks around the light fitting. (What a great facility that is, I'm always doing it) Hull was heavily bombed in the war, and they went for the docks, but the earth tremors it caused reached where I live and made the house shake enough to cause the ceiling damage.
More plaster issues are illustrated by the pic above. Once we were asleep and suddenly there was an almighty whoosh which made us sit bolt uptight in our beds. What had happened was that a whole load of plaster had fallen out of the window bay leaving a gaping chasm. I don't know whether the bombing in the war had slightly loosened this plaster so that it was gradually coming apart all these years so that the slightest thing would cause the avalanche (like the flutter of a butterfly's wings may eventually cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but in timescale),maybe the lads coming home from the pub outside as it was a Saturday night. We lived with the chasm for a year (notice my attempts to prettify our bedroom with the jewelly light and rose curtains, but ultimately a futile gesture when there is a gaping hole in the ceiling) but the plasterer in our house was on strike so it was up to me to fix some boards over the hole, paint and polyfill. Quite a dangerous activity as I was on a step ladder and we didn't have double glazing at the time.
I can't even think of a concluding line to tie up this essay in banality. How banal is that?
4 comments:
I should post a pic of the ceiling where my daughter's shower comes through. I keep reminding her to shower in the bathroom and she keeps forgetting. As I regularly used to leave the bath to overflow when I lived in London, and it used to pour down into the hallway onto people from other flats, I can't say much about idiocy...
And since I am not there very often, my ex seems to regularly do the same thing, so that the water from his bathroom seeps through into the flat downstairs.
I haven't been doing too many gritty pics, maybe I should be brave and do that... while the house is still standing. LOL
Banality begat some poetry so it can't be so bad! Ah...the joys of homeownership a constant battle against the elements which would like to reduce our homes to rubble. But it is all part of wabi-sabi and the art of becoming...
It certainly was a detailed story about cracking plaster, which luckily we don't have to worry about as the apartment is newish. Living in a thirties house will leave you guessing about what will go wrong next, I guess, but such character! I don't think Maastricht was bombed during the war and I don't know of any problems like that here. I suppose your home owners insurance doesn't cover that?
Frances, once I was called back from my place of work because I had left a plug in a sink and a dripping tap had let it overflow into the flat below.
Bobbie, thank you. I wish I knew what this wabi-sabi was. I be it's go something to do with something Frances has written on her blog but I can't get on it to find out.
Sweet Irene, yes it was detailed about the plaster but I couldn't think of anything else to write and had to spin it out a bit. LOL
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