No, not for a star, or Australia’s next top model, or an enthusiastic amateur chef who knows what to do when the sauce curdles on camera. No, the £150 question was: where are the flipping car keys? Or even: where are the flipping car keys, huh huh?
As I left you, I had fruitlessly got everything out from under the stairs, including a load of old dress patterns in size 14 that I had made long ago because I thought I was too huge to buy clothes. Size 14? They’d have you down the anorexia clinic on intravenous Christmas cake at size 14 these days. I then decided the universe was punishing me for being a slut in the lounge, so I bottomed that out too. I moved the sofa. Crumbs! (That’s what I found, crumbs.) I dragged the cushion off the chair of my other half. Nuts! (Yes, I found nuts, I worry that I married a monkey, then I watch him scratching his armpit and yawning and I stop worrying. Certainty is a wonderful thing.) Then I moved the coffee table and found nuts, seeds and salt – perhaps the cats have adopted a sailor with a parrot and not mentioned the fact. So I got the vacuum on to it and it wouldn’t even suck up a small nut. So I took the vacuum to bits and put it back together and it wouldn’t suck up fluff. So I repeated the procedure and then it wouldn’t even suck up salt. Then it made a horrid smell and stopped altogether.
So that was a help then.
So I stopped too and had lunch. I put the vacuum in the hall ready to go to the dump because it was smelling like a burnt out motor and hot hot hot. I reeled the electric cable in and it got stuck, so I reeled it out again and it was practically melting.
So very assistful.
So I had a quick look at the price of vacuum cleaners online and added that to the cost of the car keys and wondered what I had to sell that was worth that much.
And then something changed.
Was it because I had offered up a prayer to St Jude, patron saint of lost causes? Was it because of the grand trine involving all of the cardinal signs of the zodiac? Was it due to a change in the earth’s magnetic field causing some terrific aurora borealises? Or did my luck just suddenly change?
I don’t know. All I can tell you is that things felt different. Different how? Perhaps you’re thinking. Well do you remember how you felt when you were summoned to the office of the headmaster and you didn’t know why? Can you recall that feeling in the pit of your stomach as if the entire vastness of the empty universe was in there? Can you recall the feeling of weight so huge it felt as if you couldn’t move? Do you also recall finding out in there it was just because someone had found your lost left glove with your name in it and all you got was a teeny tiny telling off about taking care of your possessions and the subsequent shedding of ten tons of cold sweat as you stepped out of the door and the resultant lightness of your being as if the entire planet was so new there could be no consequences of anything? Well the change in the air felt like that. So I plugged the vacuum cleaner back in and it sucked so hard it almost dragged the carpets up. So I finished the lounge, went upstairs, went through all the pockets of every pair of trousers and then went through every handbag and found the keys in a moment in a zipped shut empty handbag that I haven’t used for a year.
I dunno, I dunno, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe someone just took the pins out of the doll of me because they were bored with it. Maybe my karma changed. Maybe I was sitting on a ley line and moved off.
No the handbag was not in a place where my keys could have fallen into it, it was hanging up on the back of a chair. Yes it was zipped shut. Completely zipped shut. No I have not used it for over a year. No there was nothing else in there. If you’d like to hum the theme tune from the Twilight Zone or murmur: the truth is out there, feel free as a bird. Frankly I really have no clue. At all.
What I have to show for a week of clearing out and searching is the car keys, thank goodness, and another huge bag for the charity shop, this time of handbags because I’ve decided it’s dangerous to keep old handbags. Even zipped shut, when empty they are the vacuum that nature abhors. The only problem left over from the incident is that I will have to deep clean the other half of the house, which looks worse than ever now. I may have to have a book cull. I may even shred my old student notebooks. Who knows where it all may end? I do! Space the Final Front Ear as I listen for the call of the wild empty carpet.
I’m a short, wide, one woman revolution, until tea time at least.
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JaneLaverick.com – spacier than Kevin.