The Landlady & her rainy day activity

Now that the summer holidays are nearly over, I am beginning to realise that they are no longer as stressful as they used to be. This is largely due to the fact that The Small Daughter is no longer quite as small as her title and is now perfectly capable of going out and entertaining herself without me being involved. In fact, she would definitely prefer it if I were not involved in her social life and now treats me like some sort of embarrassing, dysfunctional friend that she’s obliged to hang out with, if we ever, heaven forfend, spend time together in the public arena. There is a lot of eye-rolling at my little ‘jokes’ and attempts at fashion advice, so for the most part, I let her get on with it.

I have to add at this point that in spite of me being desperately ‘uncool’, my make-up bag and all its contents are still erring on the side of ‘extremely desirable’, and I therefore have to hide it from my 12-year-old magpie, who rifles through the contents, plasters it on and manages to lose at least one item per day. Having had to search high and low for my eyeliner on one fraught morning too many, I decided to hide my make-up bag from The Small Daughter. The next morning, however, I’d hidden it so well that I couldn’t find it myself and had to go to work in the extremely brightly lit supermarket wearing no make-up at all. The shame!

“I awoke to realise that it was actually raining in my bedroom”

The success of these particular summer holidays has been further embellished by the fact that we have actually experienced a summer this year and it seems to go on and on. The endless sunshine does, of course, have a downside and – quite literally – the cloud attached to this silver lining is the intermittent thunderstorms that have peppered the good weather. Last Friday night, I had gone to bed early suffering from a double-header of a hangover. I had to work at 7am the following morning and was deeply asleep when I dreamed that it was raining in my bedroom. I awoke to realise that it was actually raining in my bedroom and that water was pouring through the light fitting above my bed.

Although still half asleep, I realised that I would have to get onto the roof and stick a kebab skewer down the gutter in order to dislodge whatever the seagulls had thrown down there. This would involve waking my Japanese lodger at this unearthly hour brandishing a kebab skewer, so I chose the easier option of shoving a washing-up bowl under the torrent and going back to sleep. The following day after work, I waited for my lodger to go out (I didn’t fancy explaining the issue to her) and went onto the roof to be greeted by an angry audience of seagulls, who backed off when they saw an even angrier me with my kebab skewer. Quite right too, being as it was all their fault…