A good portion of today was spent cleaning. Not for myself of course. Much as I would be well served by occasionally spending a good portion of my day cleaning in my flat, it seems as ever that I’m better at doing such things for others than for myself. Still, there’s learning in it.
“I’m thinking of pushing the nuclear button and just getting rid of all the stuff I’ve accumulated over all these divorces and changes and lessons,” says my friend as I drive her from Battersea to Chelsea. Bergman is full of scooters that her children have grown out of, and car seats that she no longer needs. She is surrounded by good m food and has a heavy case full of something on her lap. The scooters all get slung into a damp basement. “I know what you mean,” I tell her. “It’s hard in the moment to do it. But when you zoom out a bit you see how it all only slows you down.” We drive from the basement to her new flat and I unload the bags of food while she has an argument with the removal guys.
The removal guys are familiar to me. Paid by the hour, no leader. A deliberate lack of common sense meaning they need every job to be detailed to them and if they are on their own and have finished the job they were told, they are just standing in a huddle waiting for the next one. My friend is, of course, paying them considerably more than she agreed now. She’s knackered. The best use of my time today really was getting off the sticky stuff. Decades worth of children’s stickers firmly jammed onto all the surfaces in this rented flat. She was unexpectedly turfed out at short notice so I was involved in the end of tenancy clean. All the landlords in London are doing it these days it seems. Hoik the tenant, give it a lick of paint, put it on for double. Scrub scrub scrub scrub. The removal guys had polyfillad all the drill holes without pulling the wall plugs out. Part of the service. “Have you got any pliers?” I ask them. “No,” they shrug. Of course not.
Clean clean scrub scrub and now I’m home and I’m knackered. Bath and early bed. Up tomorrow at 4am to drive a friend to Heathrow, then one more friend to help with one more moving of things and then I can finally focus on myself, my flat and the fact that there are lots of people coming here for Christmas and there’s barely room to move…
Gotta learn one day to know when to say no, but they’re all paying me and it’s expensive to exist right now so it can only be a good thing.
AlBarclay 