The Dom, The Dick & The Wardrobe

“I swear he gets ot of bed and stands and looks at the wardrobe door for 20 minutes! Why the hell is he doing that? It’s a bleeding wardrobe door! Honestly I don’t know how much more I can take of this!”

I’m away in Devon playing golf with 15 other chaps on the annual 3 night break. We’ve been doing this for more years than I can remember, but 2020’s trip was deferred to ‘21. And because of the pandemic, several regulars have dropped out to be replaced by some new chums that most of us don’t know so well. Two of those, let’s call them Dick and Dom, know each other a bit and have been asked to share a room. And this is where the trouble has started. It transpires that Dick, a full-blown geezer (and I suspect one with undiagnosed ADHD), can’t cope with Dom, whose behaviour and mannerisms all scream of being well and truly on the Autistic Spectrum. I don’t know who decided that it would be a Good Idea for these two to share a room, but its like watching a car crash in slow motion, where on of the cars really is in the slow motion and the other is spinning faster and faster towards it’s inevitable destruction. And so it came to be that Dick, at the end of his 3rd round of golf, yelled that he “hated this @%*£& game”, snapped his 3 wood in half, cleared his room and buggered off home without saying goodbye to anyone, leaving poor old Dom utterly bewildered as to why this had happened. And leaving me to reflect that there are people all over this planet with mental health challenges which come in all sorts of sorts shapes and sizes, and some are very hard to understand.

“But what about the family?” I hear you ask. Well, the pace of change continues. Let’s start with BT (Boy Teenager). Good news! His desire to secure himself decent future is growing, such that he has agreed that he will do all the DIY jobs around the house that need to be done (to learn how to do them). And there are stacks of ‘em. Better still, Pops has offered to train him in such matters and pass over a bunch of tools that he no longer uses. BT hasn’t exactly been known for getting off his butt to crack on with stuff, but this time he seems to mean it and has made a start on the massive list of jobs. To begin with, something simple: clearing the flat roof of birds nest twigs and washing the solar panels and extension roof windows with a long boom washer thing. And he did it. To be honest, he had to have a lie-down after 45 minutes, but you know ... DOING STUFF! And then he’s followed up by replacing a faulty light switch in the downstairs loo (which, with no windows, is not a place to be suddenly plunged into darkness). Bloody hell! Next up is to sort a faulty socket in the spare bedroom. Good isn’t it?

Of course BT being BT, it would be too simple for everything to be going linearly, in the right direction, and once again there has been some sort of shenanigans in his friendship group. He won’t tell me the details, but it seems a few of them were left out of a new messaging chat group that was set up and poor BT imagined he would then be left out of everything else. As you may know, when BT is worrying about things at that level, his sleep gets horribly messed up; consequently, for the first time in many, many months he is nocturnal. Needless to say, since this happened, a whole bunch of football loving friends came round to watch the final of the Euros with him, and his fear of exclusion is receding. Now he just has to reset his sleep pattern …. Again. GT (Girl Teenager) is on summer holiday, the College breaking up earlier than schools. She decided that she wanted to do something to boost her CV and broaden her experience, and announced that she was going to try to get a volunteer‘s job in a local charity shop. I admit I thought this was a great idea, but unlikely to yield anything, so blow me down (as Nana says) if she didn’t come back on her first attempt with an unpaid job two days a week at the Cats Protection League. And she loves it! And they love her. I imagine the Cats Protection League accountants love her as well; she was already an avid Quality Second Hand clothes purchaser, creating quite an amazing wardrobe (and look) in the process. Now? Her bedroom is beginning to resemble the stock cupboard of the shop; she’s bought home clothes, boots, shoes, books (old and smelling of smokers) and jewellery. Not a lot new is getting as far as the shelves of the shop. Her Best Buy though for a fiver: an original (retro) Arsenal top for her brother, which he is now wearing all the time. I half expect David Dickinson to pop up and announce that she has secretly been filming for Bargain Hunt!

Milo (the Sprocker Spaniel) was officially One on 7th July and probably lucky to have made it that far. His lunacy shows no signs of abating ; his new favourite game is “tip over the drinking water bowl, scrabble the water everywhere and bark at it“. Great. He’s fine though with his only real affliction being matted ear-hair. We didn’t know that could be a thing and have had to purchase a spray-on, oil based hair conditioner to try to tackle it. This presents us with a challenge as he doesn’t like spray on conditioner being sprayed anywhere near him, and because he has an incredibly sensitive nose, he knows when the lid is taken off. He has also worked out that he can’t be sprayed if he is hiding behind a sofa. They aren’t always as daft as they look, dogs.

Talking of dogs, or at least working like one, Gin (so called because she can sniff one out at 500 yards) is now eye-swivelling tired and hanging on for the end of term. The last week of school sees pupils and teachers engaging in fun activities like a “Ukelele Jam”. She loves this sort of thing so much that I’ve confiscated all of her sharp implements to prevent unfortunate deaths of Music teachers and the like. Just a week to go Gin, then Freedom!

Still talking of dogs, my future work-status remains unresolved whilst the wheels of industry turn slowly to determine whether it (my previous employer) wants me playing a small part within, so the Dog Walking For Wonga remains in abeyance. I don’t know, there’s an increasingly loud internal voice nipping my brain saying “Forget work, sell-up, downsize”, but that would be one Big Decision. Gah, it’s probably just a reaction to six weeks of waiting to hear whether there will be a job or not. Never been very good at waiting.

And thats that for this update. What will come next I can’t say, but onwards we hurtle towards the Great Unlocking of all restrictions, riding a Tsunami of D-variant Covid infections. What could possibly go wrong?

Love & elbow-grease,

Mr H

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