About Me

My photo
Book out now on amazon! Buy, read, enjoy, tell your friends, buy a spare copy.

Sunday 17 February 2013

Kindling

Well the resolution to write more didn't last long. Is it any defence that January is an appalling month and I didn't get paid till the end of the month so I haven't actually done anything? No I suppose not. I've got a few more rejections for the book so that's confidence boosting, perhaps I shouldn't have written it in crayon and included a word search. You live and learn. 

I am going to my brother's tonight and I go with some trepidation. We were there twice over the Christmas period and each time a chair was destroyed fairly dramatically. I am wondering if I'll go for the hat trick tonight. The first occasion was during lunch. A small child was told off for wriggling and made to swap chairs. It soon became clear why he was wriggling, the catch had come loose on the fold away stool, the result of which was to send my sister in law chin first in to the table. She was fine but seeing someone suddenly plummet to the ground like they're on a ducking stool is quite distracting. 

The second incident was on Boxing Day when my mum lent out of rocking chair to get something and just carried on going, accompanied by the sound of wood breaking. It turns out the chair had broken before and had been mended with copydex or something similar.  After the second incident we all became enormously fond of sitting on the floor. 

I have never broken a chair but I've destroyed my fair share of furniture. When attempting to switch wardrobes I utterly over estimated how much is achievable in a night and by the fourth trip to my parents my brother and I had lost the plot and turned in to the Chuckle Brothers. We dropped a many section in the middle of the road (fortunately there was no traffic) and I got to the point, which I get to so quickly, of telling people to leave it and go home and I'll sort it in the morning. Thankfully I was ignored and some sort of order was restored. Something similar happened with the magically growing bookcase. A set of shelves (all in one piece) that had got in to my bedroom but when I tried to get it out was too big for the door way. My idea was to smash it with an axe but I was over ruled and sent to stand in the bathroom whilst they did mysterious things. I think it went over the bannisters. 

However my most spectacular incident was with a bed. I was living in Sydney and had recently moved flats. I had assembled my bed and it didn't look quite right. I realised that I had put the sides on upside down. So instead of the slats resting in a deep well they were instead balanced on a ledge of around a millimetre. I couldn't be arsed to sort it out so I heaved the mattress on top and made the bed. It worked quite well for a few months. Then one night I got in quite early in the morning and crept in so as not to wake my flatmate. That is until I got to my bedroom and for reasons unknown decided to leap from the door way in to my bed. The slats fell off their narrow home and fell in the middle taking the mattress, bedding and me with it. Once again lethargy took over and I slept in the rubble. The next morning my flatmate helped me to pull the mattress out and I slept on the floor for longer than I care to admit until I sorted the mess out. 

It is worth noting that my flatmate didn't wake up during the leap and the recurring sort out. But on the day he moved in he went to the bathroom, locked the door and fell asleep on the toilet until morning. I was probably quite safe to go to bed the normal way