Slow life | 29 November 2008

So cold: I tried lighting a fire, but smoke just kept blowing back down the chimney, setting off the fire alarms. It’s a design fault with that fireplace. It happens whenever the wind blows in a certain direction. The architect really messed up there and I cursed him, the idiot, as I rubbed the heat on my hands into my trousers, having run outside several times, a sparking, smoking log in each hand. The wind was really howling and it was raining sideways. The fat logs continued to be on fire, lying on the grass, drinking the breeze, sending sparking, glowing embers flying around the back garden.

Well, I suppose I just didn’t know much about fireplaces when we built that one. That fire is one of those things I’m always about to sort out, I made some headway with it last week, in fact, but then there are always so many things that need fixing: endless lists of old stuff breaking and new stuff not working properly.

The under-floor heating in the smoked-out main room was broken as well and, come to think of it, half the lights. It was particularly cold in there, the heart of my house. Bleak. A new television, half installed, wired but not yet attached to the wall, sat on the dining table, rendering even that unusable.

I’d been looking forward to my 40th birthday. I’d been looking at it as nothing but a celebration. But now it had arrived suddenly and my wife was in bed, full of Pepto-Bismol and I felt cold and alone, in a complicated mess of a house. I thought having my two best friends there would have helped, but instead of being twice as nice, their presences were cancelling each other out a little bit.