Quiet Descends

Kim has set off for Coventry and left me and the house for the first time in five weeks. I don't mean we haven't been out, but a trip to the shop 100 yards up the road or a quick trip to pick up something or other from up the road is about the sum of our excursions over more than a month. Apart from my trip to Birmingham, I don't think we've had many minutes apart. The first couple of weeks were mitigated by morning trips along the lovely lane, seeing deer and pheasants, rabbits and partridges, but that all stopped and I began to feel more and more... claustrophobic and imprisoned. Sounds dramatic, but it was more of an insidious, creeping feeling that started to drag me down.

Suddenly, the house feels very quiet and still. I have managed to complete lots of niggling paperwork from my desk and clear the deck for the week + of preparation I have to do before I go to London on a teaching assignment, though it did require me to work until 9 p.m. last night. The cat is dozing in the kitchen and the list of TO DOs is not quite as hysterical. I still have to do two more CVs, one for another Whitewiccan and one for my son who is off on Saturday to stay in America for a fortnight in hopes of finding a company who will sponsor him to get an EB3 (I think - some sort of work related visa). Kim spent ages telling me about the different sorts, but my head was so full of noise that I didn't absorb much at all. The only thing that stuck was useless - that an EB1 is for someone who is pre-eminent in their field - and I only remember that because I made a joke about being a pre-eminently grouchy Witch with a few other less-than-attractive attributes that would put me in that category.

That's been the trouble over the past weeks - I have had a head full of noise. It's the only way I can explain things and it's not very articulate. I don't seem to have been able to concentrate on anything, absorbing information has felt more challenging than climbing Everest and I started to loose the clear edges of 'me'. All the 'home' things that should have been finished by now are still unfinished, like the sticking up of dado rail in the dining room so I can get the decorators in, the hardboarding of the floor at the little house so I can get it measured for carpets, as well as piles of things that I still have to do for work. The slowness of the work on both houses is certainly making me feel glum. The dining room was destroyed by the incompetent plumber on 13th June 2007 and the room has been out of use since then - first through battles with the insurance company because plumber hadn't paid his excess, then because we decided to remove a vile, tiled fireplace and put in something more suited to the period of the house, then because... well, I just don't know really, but there's always a reason why things can't be finished or moved along. The little house has been much the same - a great deal of that was my own fault; I thought I would be able to do a certain amount of the work myself and discovered that my back wasn't cooperating. Then, if I wanted to move something along with the little house, there would be a flurry of activity on the big house, never amounting to any substantial action, but enough to prevent progress, or vice versa. As each month passes, it feels as though the state of both places deteriorates and that's depressing. I had wanted to get the little house sorted out and finished before we even started on the big house, but somehow it never happened. We started on getting a new bathroom, then, with the ruination of the dining room (the only room we had decorated and were happy with), that got added to the mix - then the kitchen sort of half happened and there are base units floating all over the place.

Part of my problem lies in the way I work - I like to do one thing at a time, get it finished and then start on the next. Sadly, we have not one house-full of unfinished work, but two and there are no opportunities to say "Ah, that's great, I have finished the XXXroom!" It feels like Vietnam - doing one thing causes us to have to do five other things, that cause us to have to do ten other things and... well, you get the idea! Thinking about this house reduces me to tears - it was a beautiful house when we bought it - high ceilings and decent sized rooms - but now, it seems to be a big shambles and we'd never be able to sell it in the condition it is now. Anyway, I'm trying not to think about it for now as I have to concentrate on studying.

There is nothing but a deafening silence here now and it feels wonderfully liberating and like a salve to my addled brain. I shall make myself a pot of tea, park it on my pretty new tray and bring it to the wreckage that is my sitting room and start revising my course... after I've dealt with the cat, who is now bellowing for attention...!