My bags are packed! We're offski!
...No, not off ski-ing, as if!
Think Michelin lady = Me in Piste-Wear!
You see, we're de-camping at some stage this weekend (Goddess willing!) to a friend's house in the town where my son goes to school, from whence the roads might make our long journey to work in the city a little less Dukes of Hazardous...
We've had four or five weeks of this now, mes bloggy loves... The past two weeks we've been clamped indoors as if we were on a submarine... Albeit a two storey one! We've been stuck inside, venturing only briefly out every few days to risk the steep and dicey two miles of road that leads from our row of red-brick miners' cottages to the main road to Neurotica, when it was occasionally cleared of snow and some of the ice by a local farmer and his tractor... And we really do have to get back to some semblance of normality in spite of this worsening weather... We've never known these temperatures, and our neighbours who've lived here far longer can't even remember snow falling for as long nor as deep in forty years...
Grizz has exams next week, and this is his last year in school, so it's crucial he not miss these deadlines. And GJ's and my offices have been very understanding and enabled some working from home, but it's just no longer possible for us to continue like this...
I'm beginning to channel my inner Lizzie Borden, never mind La Moss!
Our friend moved back up north to live with his mum last year. He'd sold his business and moving here to live in her capacious attic in a Georgian three-storey, beautifully narrow, house in town, has helped him to survive a difficult couple of years... His mum, Monica, who's now in her eighties, is wonderfully elegant, posh and wild - Imagine what an octogenarian six foot tall Audrey Hepburn would be like... And she's fed up with not being able to walk around safely, (who can blame her?), so she's re-locating temporarily to la Isla Gran Canaria. Result!
So, we're moving, 'In like Flynn', lock stock and barrel... The barrel is me, just in case you hadn't noticed my Christmas Cake shelf/spare tyre!
You see, this is the danger when you're both godparents to my Grizz... Fhina and her Demon Brood can and shall land upon you at any time like a storm of Stevie Nickses, all Nag Champa, tea-lights and trailing chiffon scarves...
Except... Monica's elegant roses and cream home is packed to the rafters with beautiful (and probably irreplaceable) Georgian and Victorian antiques...
There are tiny squishy sofas, beautiful wooden lounge screens and fragile tables practically hand-made by talented, but blind, Victorian street-urchins from match-sticks; Bisque Napoleonic soldier figurines perch precariously on windowsills, and the pale walls are lined with ornate golden mirrors that Jane Austen herself could have glimpsed her harried maiden aunt reflection in...
Even cups of coffee are served in a hand-painted 1920's china tea-set that Jonathan's artist grand-mother hand painted, people!
And I'm the crazy mother of a lanky gobshite of a Teen Terrorist with bad eyesight and long flailing limbs... My Other Half, GJ, is heavy, and cack-handed at the best of times, with a penchant for getting straight down to his boxers when relaxing of an enchanted evening in an 'easy-listening nudity' kind of way...
And me? Well, did you ever hear about the proverbial Bull in a China Shop??!
(NB: I have no Wedding Present crockery, cutlery or glass remaining from my now long-distant wedding day...
We eat off plastic, and enamel tin-ware, like the Swedish Army, I swear I'm not lying!)
Coming to a Georgian home near you soon...
(And if I'm absent from mine and your blogs for a few days, that'll be me (Goddess Wiki forgive me svp!) clamped in a dimly-lit Georgian garret, ruining my eyesight by trying to piece a side table back together with Scotch tape!)
Nooooooooo, you must have confused me with someone... Seriously!
