As the solicitors are still dealing with my mother’s will I have been unable to sell the last effects from her rooms at the care home. There are pictures and some furniture. I had put them all in the little front bedroom which the OH was going to have as a media room.
When we came to this house 30 years ago the fact that it was open plan was a benefit. In the previous house I had spent hours locked away in a kitchen through two doors, so the way you could look from the kitchen through the dining room to the living room in this house was nice. Until I started writing for magazines. When I first started writing a funny column for Dolls House World, I did it on a clock work computer on a plastic patio table in the lounge and then walked up the road to the post office with the copy to post. I think a while after that I posted a small floppy disk with hard copy and then we had dial up and I could send copy through the ether by magic, if the dial up was working and, once it had vanished into the ether, I could telephone to see if it had arrived and then go to the post box with the hard copy of it in case it hadn’t really.
Sometimes the writing was tricky if the television was on, halfway up the wall, next to my head. I like quiet.
Some years ago when the computer shrank to a laptop it was possible to return the patio table to the garden and type on the desk I bought from the local paper when I was a child for, I think, a fiver which I still owe my Dad. That did not solve the TV noise problem but while the OH was commuting to work and the S&H was at school that was a time limited problem. I did housework at the speed of light first thing, started writing and was proof read and done by home time.
Then the OH retired. His plan was to either be in the pub, in bed, on the golf course or watching TV. He loves TV. He likes programmes with bangs and people killing each other as loudly as possible. So once the S&H had actually married and left for good we thought a good use of his room was a media room for the OH. We bought a bed settee and he repainted the room, I cleaned the carpet tiles which came up a treat then it all unravelled a bit when my mother died, we realised there wasn’t a set top box up there and we can’t receive Freeview TV because of geography, somebody put a hill in the way.
Then I got this diagnosis, which I just heard today is worse than we thought, it’s in the muscle, I will have to have the operation in another town at a hospital with the necessary machinery.
So.
I cleared the bedroom, I put the pictures behind the settee, I cleared the junk and put the inoperative TV and related equipment on the chest of drawers and I filled the remaining floor space with a chair and a table and finally I have an indoor writing room. Yes I do have a garden shed to write in but it is January Northern hemisphere and I am not going to write outside with a little heater as suggested by the OH, I’m going to write upstairs with a radiator as suggested by me.
Meanwhile, when I get a minute, I’ll photograph all the dolls I have assembled and glued but not yet fleshed or dressed, for Miniatura at which I will be.
Andy Hopwood says there will be a table for me and if I am not there it will be a leaflet table for you.
Keep the faith. Let’s meet at Miniatura.
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