The Landlady’s house is falling apart

It is still raining and I can hardly believe how lucky I am to be going to Cuba tomorrow. The Big Daughter’s boyfriend is taking me and my friend B to the airport tomorrow morning at 7.30am. Son-in-laws-in-waiting are most useful! Landlady Towers is still very much a sieve and my bedroom wall is literally crumbling, in the style of an unloved Havana bordello. Worse still, when I examined what I thought was a huge fly on the ceiling, I discovered under closer investigation that it was actually a mushroom. It looked more like a magic mushroom than a dry rot mushroom – I’ve seen both during various phases in my life – so I’m not going to get unduly alarmed just yet. The Small Daughter’s room, which is on the top floor of the house, has sprung a rather unpleasant leak and I’ve had to move her bed so that she can balance a bowl on the end of it in order to catch the errant droplets. The water had previously been dripping on to the middle of the bed, apparently, but The Small Daughter had not thought it important enough to mention, even though she’d once put her slipper on and found it full of water…kids!

“When I examined what I thought was a huge fly on the ceiling, I discovered it was actually a mushroom”

My builder, who has been promising to come round and fix these issues for the last six months, finally came round today and is going to do all the work while I’m away sunning myself on my favourite Caribbean island, which is just fine by me, as I shall come back to a perfectly plastered non-leaking wall and will no longer have to worry about The Small Daughter drowning in her own slipper.

I am well in need of a holiday as The Boyfriend and I spent all day yesterday doing an emergency paint job on one of my Hastings’ properties.

A couple of rooms in the flat had already been painted, but the estate agent claimed that now the rooms had been painted, the woodwork looked scruffy and needed glossing. Furthermore, he said that good tenants in Hastings are now as rare as hens’ teeth and therefore if it didn’t look its very best, the flat would be sitting empty for a long time. Given that Hastings Council now charge council tax on empty properties, I thought the sooner we got over there the better, in spite of the fact that it was my first day off in weeks. My next potential painting day would have been three weeks hence, by which time I would have accumulated another month of council tax payments. The Boyfriend proved himself to be quite an expert with a paintbrush, which he might live to regret…