‘I see you’ve got the posters up then?’ said the little lodger as she came home from work. She’s got the idea now that she is living with a person who could best be described as eccentric. But she seems to really like it. She seems to find all aspects of living with me thoroughly entertaining. She was the only applicant who saw the value in the deal I was offering: bed, board, bills and unlimited horse-riding on the pony Gracie.
She loves Gracie, and Gracie loves her. She canters off up the field with the lodger looking horribly unstable and I shout ‘Sit up! Pull her up!’ And she pulls and Gracie stops like an angel.
She says she is thoroughly enjoying herself. She says she doesn’t mind the manic landlady. Nor the bits of the property still hanging off or missing. Nor the ex-builder boyfriend coming and going like a bull in a china shop, half-fixing things.
And neither does she seem to mind me spreading my research over the entire dining room table and sitting there on my laptop with my hair standing on end all day every day, muttering to myself like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory.
She goes out in the morning saying ‘Bye’ as I’m tapping and she comes back in the evening saying ‘Hi’ as I’m tapping. She’s lucky if she gets a hello but it doesn’t seem to bother her.
On the evening after I got involved in the seized horses, as all hell was breaking loose, she suddenly called up from the kitchen to say dinner was ready. I trotted down, matted hair standing at right angles, to find her standing at the stove with a delicious meal of chicken stir-fry all ready for me.
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