And so there is a new occupant in the Hovel. It can’t be helped. The general consensus among my friends is that the poor woman must be either on the run from Interpol or a homicidal lunatic who has inveigled her way in here under false pretences but, as far as I can see, she is neither: she is simply a house-proud northern woman about my age.
You begin to see the problem right there, don’t you? “House-proud”. I am many things – well, one or two – but “house-proud” is not among them. I am house-shamed.
As I may have mentioned before, I was blessed at birth with the ability to make a room messy just by looking at it. If I want to render it uninhabitable, I have to sit down in it for about five minutes. This is much more than a class thing: it is supernatural. Then again, you will not find me scrubbing the doorstep every Saturday morning, whether it needs it or not.
Anyway, I came down on her first morning to find an entire room where the kitchen had once been. Everything had been tidied away. Where, I know not.
The kitchen, which last saw development around the time Clive Dunn’s “Grandad” was No 1*, has six drawers, three of which are unusable because the bottom has fallen out of them and three of which are unusable because they are full. The cupboard space beneath them is an area bitterly contested between the saucepans, assorted unnameable bric-a-brac and Mousie, apart from the cupboard under the sink, where even Mousie will not go.
Either this woman has access to Time Lord technology or some things have gone, perhaps for ever. William of Ockham told us not to multiply variables unnecessarily, so I will for the time being assume Time Lord tech. Not only theoretically but practically, I know that tidying up is possible. After months of looking around me with a sick feeling and putting it off for ages, I spent the hours of midnight to 2am tidying up the living room the night before her arrival – but who does it voluntarily?
Exhausted, I’d left the kitchen alone, apart from cleaning the breadboard and doing the washing-up, bar a few items of cutlery that were beneath contempt. I couldn’t see where anything else could go.
Anyway, things got off to an inauspicious start the next day. I have, since living practically alone, let myself go a bit. It’s a gradual process, like one’s children growing up; you don’t notice it so much on a day-to-day basis but if you haven’t seen someone else’s kids for a year or so it can be quite a shock.
Likewise, I think I might present an alarming spectacle to someone who last saw me (and only briefly) about two months ago, when I had made an effort to scrub myself up. I now have a straggly white beard, like a strange fungal growth, or a cobweb in a cellar. My toenails have sheared through the front of my slippers and scratch, claw-like, on the ground when I walk.
My eyes are red-rimmed and sunken from a strange combination of too much sleep and too little sleep. My expression is that of a man hunted by the Furies and hag-ridden by nameless fears. I look, in short, like late-period Howard Hughes, without the money.
“You cleaned the inside of the teapot,” I snarl.
Dimly, the last human part of me – think of the remnants of Sméagol still minutely present in Gollum – recognises that, as welcomes to the Hovel go, this is somewhat lacking in politesse. But one becomes attached to one’s mess, especially if it is all one has. Still, the inside of the teapot is another matter. If, like me, you are miserably fussy about your tea (because that, too, is all one has), then you will know that you never clean the inside of a teapot, because doing so ruins the taste. And, as it turns out, the poor woman does not herself drink tea. “My husband never cleans the inside of the teapot,” she says. “I always thought he was just being lazy.”
I conceive an immediate bond of sympathy with this man, wherever he is. I deliver a brief but impassioned lecture about the unwisdom of cleaning teapots, or, indeed, anything else that is My Precious, and claw my way back to bed. Jesus, the poor woman.
*January 1971. Clive Dunn was almost exactly the age that I am now when he recorded it
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