This essentially sums up the past 12 hours quite neatly.
I decided to be radical last night and have an early one (in bed by 11.30-previously unheard of in this room!) but I was not rewarded as I had hoped. Instead I just didn’t really sleep at all because my mattress has been becoming extra uncomfortable and falling to pieces lately. I maybe nodded off about 4am but needn’t have bothered. I should have known really, I mean, who doesn’t expect builders to turn up with pneumatic drills at 4.30 in the morning to dig up the road just outside your bedroom?! It was irresponsible, ignorant and naive of me to expect anything else.
At first I thought it was strange to be drilling at this time. Then I realised it was VERY strange, and I ought to check the world was in order. Upon looking out the window (single, thin glass panel, no seal, doesn’t fully close, some might call it ‘insufficient’, as a positive thinker I say ‘vintage’) I did indeed see three men digging up the road with pneumatic drills. and this did indeed explain the noise. Fair enough. So I went back to bed. Then I got up again to look out the window a second time to check that I wasn’t imagining this because it occurred to me WHO DIGS UP THE ROAD AT HALF FOUR IN THE MORNING!? WHAT IS THIS CRAZINESS?! WHY WOULD ANYONE DO SUCH A THING!?
Turns out it is actually against council rules unless it’s an emergency. All I can say, with the kindest tolerance, is that I ‘jolly well’ (replace with imaginative more colourful vocabulary at your own pleasure) hope that the world would have actually ended had this work not taken place and that all of the children in the county of Oxfordshire would have gone hungry and thirsty without the digging up of the road, or that it was essential work for the second coming or something… who knows.
On the positive side I now have a new mattress! The old one had almost definitely been there since the seventies and practically fell into pieces as they removed it. It was also highly suspiciously stained. In fact, it wasn’t really suspicious at all. If you can conjure up some disgusting substance that a mattress might have soaked up over the past 40 years, they were probably there, end of.
Anyway, now I’m trying to cheer myself by indulging in (although it is rather ‘on’) my new mattress. I have piled up all the cushions and pillows I own and am lying swathed in white sheets with the sun streaming through my windows pretending I’m in Rivendell. Doing harmony exercises. To be honest I know that I should be doing them at the keyboard but I have reached point of not caring due to sore back and sleepiness. I stress, I am determined that this is NOT a negative thing, but I’m merely using it as an opportunity to pretend that I’m Frodo in the most comfortable-looking bed ever known to man (elf, dwarf, wizard, hobbit, rabbit etc). So it’s all good. Apart from all the reading I have to do on ‘classical form’. And that I accidentally requested all four volumes of Schumann’s diaries in their original German to be delivered at the Bodleian library in Oxford from the storerooms in Swindon, just before finding them all online in a searchable PDF format. Whoops. The only option is to go along and peruse them for a while pretending to be productive and that I reeeaally needed them and in the meantime enjoying pretending I’m at Hogwarts, which to be honest isn’t too hard to do in the Duke Humphrey’s Room because Harry Potter was actually, really, genuinely filmed there. No jokes. So one could argue it isn’t as fun as the imagination has less to do. But I’m sure I’ll manage.
Aufwiedersehen und Danke, bis bald.
Musical Musings Anonymous 