When you walk down the stairs into “The Boardroom” it hits you. A wave of hard damp. It’s like walking out of an airport in the tropics, but cold. Tristan and I have been there for two days now, taking things apart. Somebody had left a humidity monitor on the bar which I found while we were taking the bar to pieces. 89%. No wonder it feels like I’ve been gargling yogurt. Ach. The kid who used to get pneumonia is not impressed with the grown up running around with tools in a stinking damp underground shithole. The remains of various industrial level air fresheners lie scattered among the timbers. Most of those timbers are bitten with damp. Some of them reek with it. If your head touches the wall your hair comes away soaking wet. This is going to be a hotel. Maybe they should make this the steam rooms… Right now it’s no place to spend time. It’s like the dimension of the Mushroom King. ALL HAIL OUR FUNGAL OVERLORD.
I’ve been getting to know my tools in this nasty place. My fingers are chewed up and my body is hammered but they’ll grow back. I’m spent, as I always will be at the end of the day. It’s a good kind of spent but it’s still *mushroomy* spent.
I should be moving my stem to Hampstead tonight. Tom is staying and Kitcat is back from her wandering, so the best way for me to have a bed is to do my duty as a fungal house-sitter for Mel, and to let those two warm-bloods get on with it at mine until this darkdelved job is done.
I’ve got Burns’s Night on Saturday at home of course – (come and bring a poem) – but it makes more sense for me to be commuting from Belsize Park to Moorgate. It’s a straight shot. It’s not like I’ll be doing anything other than waking, working, sporing and sleeping for ten days. Belsize Park is about half an hour closer to the site than my flat is. I’m just gonna be workshroom until it’s all over and I can see how many moths are in my wallet.
Hopefully tomorrow we won’t be underground. I’ve felt a bit like one of those characters in eighties arcade games who have to walk through earth in order to clear it. Mister Do. Dig-Dug. Just with no bouncy ball. There were definitely rocks I could’ve dropped on myself. And I am now officially a mushroom.
My mushroombum is so cold. It got damp almost immediately, sitting on an ill advised bit of carpet as I took some stairs apart. It remained damp all day, as how could it not working as I was inside a giant phlegm flavoured blancmange. Just after lunch I put my pants on back to front as I was worried I’d rub my bottom raw. It worked to an extent but it’s nothing to write home about. I’m going to have a hot bath if I can later, but knowing I have to try to get to Hampstead means I can’t really relax until I know where I’m sleeping.
There are motivational posters and deliberately egregious slogans scattered all over this hideous dank basement. “Hit your targets” dominates one corner. I’ve been reading Solzhenitsyn recently.
Here’s Tristan getting started on taking the bar apart, lit dramatically by the sporadically failing temporary floodlights.
Careful if you meet me right now. After a second day in the basement I might start trying to eat your clean nice tasty face with my dirty dirty bad bad toothyteeth yesssssno gills. My people must live! And spread! Come to the damp. Anngravvvrunnth the mushroom king will welcome you with open gills.
AlBarclay 