Week 20: Ciao Italia

We are struggling through Rome airport, trying to find the car rental desks, cases for six people crashing into the unwary. Nana is fretting about Pops, who has wandered off to find the loo, or coffee or something. No doubt he will be deploying his best Pigeon French to talk to the Italians. He does this, determined to Not Speak In English, he defaults to French, no matter which country he is actually in. GT (Girl Teenager) meanwhile, who can speak Italian, is off asking if anyone has seen an older gentlemen who sounds like he is probably English, but is speaking garbled French. BT (Boy Teenager) is instantly hungry having spotted Burger King and is undeterred at 10 Euro a pop cost (he would be. It’s my money he’s spending). Gin, so called because she has loyalty cards for every craft Distillery within 50 miles of home, is already gagging for her first of the holidays. A bit much at 10.30am, but old habits and all that.

Ah holidays, eh?

Well, that’s how I imagine it would be, had we actually been able to go. But no. We decided some weeks ago that none of us fancied being cooped up on a three hour flight with Covid Air, breathing in all that lovely, shared, re-cycled oxygen. Nope, if we are going to catch The Covid, it ain’t going to be because Doris refuses to wear a face mask and is happily sneezing the virus around the inside of the enclosed cylinder in which we are all contained. So we took the option to cancel. Still awaiting a refund of course.

But good news! All this spare time has meant there has been opportunities for More DIY. Now dear chums, you know that we have great love of DIY in this household, being so deeply proficient at it. Our idea of adventurous is to put up a Velcro-fixed fly curtain across the back doors. So it was with some trepidation that I approached replacing the back gate (a victim earlier in the year of Arch Rot, in which someone leant on the brick arch above the gate and the brick arch decided it could no longer defy gravity). There was the matter of procuring and carrying home on one’s shoulder a 2.4 meter gate post (two grannies and a van are now intimately acquainted with the trailing end), getting Big Fixing Things to fit the post to a wall, sawing the post to size using a Work Mate (a sort of adjustable grabby table for gripping things whilst you work on them. It’s a useful bit of kit, although I prefer the sort of Work Mate that turns up to do the job for you), drilling Big Holes with the Big Drill (the Big Drill is bloody scary. A fully grown man (me) can just about lift it with two hands. It treats Hard Substances like a Sabatier knife treats blancmange. And it is very easy to accidentally pick it up by the “on” trigger. Before you know it, you’ve self-operated on that troublesome knee cartridge and put new air-circulation holes in the Kitchen wall. It’s so powerful that if the drill-bit sticks, the drill spins the operator. Who needs The Saw ride at Thorpe Park when you have a DeWalt in Coulsdon?). And then there was the matter of roping Gin into trying to hold the gate level whilst I fixed to the post. Three foot high Gin wrestling with a six foot high gate is a recipe for Gate Abuse and several new entries in the Profanisaurus.

After a couple of hours and a few near misses with power tools, the job was done. And only one injury to record in the Accident Book, involving the as-yet-uncut eight foot gate post trying to take the Sawer out of action by falling on his foot. Said Sawer tried to hop, only to remember the other foot still has a tender ankle from the Horrific Sporting Injury five weeks ago (sprained it playing golf).

Hold on .... better check .... yup, the gate is still hanging. Three days now. Will it make a week?

Week 20 then. DIY, innit. Even put up some more metal trellis wires (involving the Big Drill and a Ladder. Accidentally triggering the drill ten foot above ground level is ... not recommended). Gin broke up for the summer holidays and immediately went into holiday GnT mode. The Loyalty Cards have been getting a pounding.

BT has had a difficult week, his anxiety raised along with a deep gloom in the first half of the week. He doesn’t know why (and in any event, won’t talk about it), leaving me to guess at causes. Gin keeps telling me that depression “doesn’t work like that” in that there may not be a cause. I know this, but it is such a contrast to recent weeks, it’s hard to imagine it is “just because”. One possibility is the sad news that BT’s favourite local shop owner “Uncle Raj” passed away unexpectedly, closing the shop. It was one of the few shops that BT would go to alone. That said, by the end of the week BT was back to his version of normal, laughing and shouting with his mates over the PlayStation network. And as a rule, when BT is on good form, the rest of the house sees its spirits lifted.

GT tends to suffer when BT is out of shape, and therefore was also anxious for much of the week. Like BT, she emerged from that to a happier place, but somehow managed to catch a stomach bug. How you get a stomach bug when you’ve spent months avoiding sunlight indoors is a mystery. I blame the cat. He is usually at fault for something.

And so we enter Week 21. Because we aren’t in Rome, we’ve decided to treat the week like a holiday at home. We’ve selected some complicated dinners for me to cook and Gin will be drinking gin on the patio. Hold on, just like weeks 1 to 20 then ...

Love & elbow-grease,

Mr H

x