Excel escapism.
It’s amazing, the experiences you can have sitting on the bog.
(I warned you.)
At work, the upstairs toilet has one wall that is a big glass window, so they’ve put up a curtain that covers it… but not the top bit. There’s a clear foot, probably more, above the curtain where the window is exposed. You can sit on the lavvy and watch the clouds roll by, so I did.
I love clouds, especially the big grand white creamy clouds that perch against a clear blue sky. Today was a very windy day and we had a storm that blew in and out of the area in about 15 minutes. The view I got afterwards was magnificent: low, feathery grey clouds were whooshing hurriedly in one direction, whilst the big white heavy clouds way beyond were travelling slowly, cumbersomely, the other way. It was like watching a shoal of fish hurrying beneath a fleet of enormous ships and there was something surreal about it. I watched it for several minutes before heading back to my office.
For some reason the thought of fish made me think of my time in La Rochelle, at the aquarium. There were these weird fish there that had side profiles like silvery human heads, but they were as near to flat as it is physically possible to get. Of course, I didn’t know that until they all turned suddenly to one side and it looked as though they’d vanished. I remember being quite fascinated by them. Shiny dismembered heads all swimming across a tank together, somehow all of them knowing when to turn and vanish, and when to appear again.
We’ve been trying to work out what to do with our unit (flat, apartment, whatever you want to call it). We want to update the kitchen and the bathroom, because… well, I really should post some photos of our sexy décor so that you could appreciate the need for a bit of change. At the same time, though, we don’t want to spend too much on it because – being the capitalist piglets that we are – we have been reading up on property investment and… well, long story short we want to keep our outlay on this particular place cheap. This pretty much rounds out decking the place out in timber floors (might save this idea for when we get ourselves a proper house), but I was going nuts about this particular patch of carpet right by the front door in the entrance corridor. It’s filthy. It’s worn out. It’s gross. It bugs the living crap out of me. I wanted to get rid of it. So as a compromise, we’re going to put floorboards in a small section of the entranceway so that the disgusting patch of carpet-rag is gone, and plus I discovered – by placing flattened bits of cardboard boxes on the floor – that it actually adds a bit of depth to the room.
This I hope to emphasise with paint, which is why there are also various colour swatches Blu-Tacced to the walls in the living area.
Oh, by the way, the bits of flattened cardboard boxes acting as makeshift floorboards came from the barbecue I assembled by myself the other day. My advice to any fellow DIY barbecue-in-a-box buyers is this: throw away the manual after looking at the picture, and do what seems most logical to you. I don’t know who gets paid to translate instruction manuals from Chinese to “English” (please note my use of sarcastic quotation marks here), but my guess is that they speak neither language. I spent WAY too long saying aloud – to the 0 other people in the room with me – “what the hell is that even supposed to mean? You haven’t labelled a “bottom shelf” anywhere and besides, look at the picture! The side shelf is connected to the legs, not any “bottom shelf”! Bloody… no, this isn’t even making sense, I mean…” (rapidly descends into a frustrating few minutes of a subdued Basil Fawlty impersonation). Either way, with a few brilliant plans that involved balancing the half-assembled barbecue on a stack of books and a bit of car-mechanic-style get-into-the-guts-with-a-spanner kind of gruntwork, I got it assembled, and even managed to get it outside with the aid of a makeshift ramp. I am a genius.
Now to get the gas bottle filled up.
I am considering moving to a new diary where I can be a bit more… me, but I’m not sure yet. If I do, I’ll continue to update here once in a blue moon like I currently do so nothing will really change anyway.
Late addition: I just found out that a young guy who lived up the road from me all my life died the other day. Luke had muscular dystrophy, they found out when he was five. I would have been about seven. When he was a little boy in kindergarten his younger sisters could outrun him, and he used to walk with a limp, so his parents saw a doctor about it. They found out it was muscular dystrophy, and were of course very upset. Apparently at the time the average life expectancy for someone with muscular dystrophy was about 21 years. His little sisters turned out to have the gene too, but didn’t have the symptoms: they were (and are) carriers, so there is a high chance that if they have children they will have the same disease.
Our tiny school had a special school assembly, basically designed to raise awareness and acceptance of the kid who was going to have a wheelchair. They got him a normal manual wheelchair at first, just to use now and then. His friends would push him round the playground in it, but he only used it a bit. Then he used it a lot, and eventually he didn’t walk at all. It didn’t seem to bother him too much. He’d use his arms to get into and out of the chair, and would sit in the loungeroom playing computer games just like a lot of other kids.
His grandparents didn’t understand it. I mean literally. They played the role of the modern-medicine-eludes-us immigrant couple very well. They thought he was just lazy, and that he could walk if he really tried. I’m sure that since then it has become clear to them that he wasn’t just faking it.
By the time Luke was about 10 years old he had an electric wheelchair. He put on a lot of weight because he couldn’t exercise, and he happened to be built just like his large Austrian father. They used a small crane to get him into and out of the pool. They had their whole house modified for him.
I lost touch with most of the kids on my street when I went to a selective high school instead of the local high school where they all went. I barely spoke to Luke after primary school, but he was always around. I thought he seemed to be doing OK; it looked as though modern medicine was going to allow him to live way past 21. He was even halfway through a degree at uni. But apparently he got a cold, which became pneumonia, and his weakened heart – which is a muscle and hence was affected by the muscular dystrophy – couldn’t cope. Luke was 22 when he died.
I haven’t even formed a reaction yet.
as the shorter words pose a choking hazard.