I Got Life...

We have cranked up the crazy in the House of PantyHead this past weekend. I told the aging martinet (martinet |ˌmärtnˈet|noun a strict disciplinarian, esp. in the armed forces.) that I was leaving and in the spirit of all good break-ups the old girl has gone vindictive on my ass – she is on said bottom more frequently and painfully than a pile. After I informed her of the details of her replacement carer - a younger, less experienced, (still) South African model, she spent an hour mulling over her heartbreak before issuing me with a written list of regime changes that should be adhered to before the impending change-over:

Item: 1) No open-toed shoes to be worn in the house (as these apparently scuff the polished wooden floor – I have been assigned the task of pricing a new mechanised floor polisher. Presumably this exercise in futility is to illustrate the exact expense incurred by my habitual slop (flip-flop) wearing. No consideration is given for it being as hot as Hades in this house, or that as the average person excretes 2 tablespoons of sweat from their feet in a day and my freakish feet produce closer to 6 tbsp they therefore grow inelegantly smelly when incarcerated in humid conditions.)

Item: 2) New carer is not to bath upstairs at night in case she is urgently required, she should instead shower downstairs before PantyHead wakens, so that she is on-call at all times and the bathroom is free for PantyHead’s laxative-induced ablutions.

Item: 3) PantyHead should be consulted about each item that comes out of the washing machine in order to clarify where it should be dried. For example towels must be dried in the tumble drier in the garage but, wools & vests must be hand-stretched before being hung up on wooden or wire hangers (depending on the item), whereas panties must be pegged on wire hangers and dried in the window above PantyHead’s armchair for no fewer than 2 days before being hung in the airing cupboard for a further 2 days (I think PantyHead might be hydrophobic this would explain her fear of damp clothing and bathing – we have had a record breaking one sponge bath in the 5 week’s I have been here. All very continental and a possible dereliction of duty but I really couldn’t fight any longer about the resultant ‘damp on her chest’ that a stepped up hygiene routine would cause.)

The list continues, but peters out to more boring items, like the correct storage of milk and the compulsory use of the yellow jug for skimmed milk and the white jug for semi-skimmed…

…That’s where I stopped listening. My eyes glazed over and I wondered at which stage in life one grew so dissatisfied with the dirty art of living that you simply shut the door and filled your time by obsessing about milk jugs, scuffed floors and the salt to sugar ratio of salmon.

And just when I was thinking life was a frankly a little bit shit I went for a walk and got caught in a sudden shower. I sat brooding, shielding myself from fat, juicy raindrops under an ancient oak tree, lost in my melancholia and annoyed as my meticulously straightened fringe pinged into wayward corkscrews. A cold wind stung my cheeks as Nina Simone sang into my ears “and what have I got, why am I alive anyway? Yeah, what have I got nobody can take away…I got my hair, I got my head, got my brains, got my ears, got my eyes, got my nose, got my mouth. I got my smile, I got my tongue, got my chin, got my neck, got my boobies, got my heart, got my soul…”

And I thought how marvellous it is to feel the rain on your skin. I got life and a ticket to South Africa, leaving Wednesday…