Steve leaves on Sunday for Africa - he is climbing Kilimanjaro and has been planning this trip for several months. For some strange reason it had completely escaped my attention that whilst he is away for 17 days only 5 of those will be spent climbing the mountain. It never crossed my mind to wonder what he might be doing in the twelve days prior. It turns out he is pretty much going to be on safari. He is staying here:
And will be enjoying this:
If he can tear himself away from the spa or the elephant spotting walks! And there was me worrying he might be roughing it. Please be aware that this is only one of a raft of rather fabulous Tanzanian safari hotels he will be staying in and he will be driven to them all by his own armed driver. An armed driver who will be aware that the soft English tourist is carrying a very very large amount of US dollars, in cash. Lets hope armed driver is well paid. Or he might just decide to relieve said English tourist of his cash and feed his body to a hippo.
Steve has now started to stress about the trip, he had a mad five minutes this morning when he thought he needed a Visa for Kenya as he is landing in Nairobi before flying into Tanzania, a quick phone call sorted that one. He has also started having stressy dreams, some of which are quite brilliant! Last night he dreamt that he was leading a party of elderly ladies out of the toilets of a Paris railway station, on the first leg of a long journey. The correct route was up a very steep hill but as the ladies were elderly and he was concerned for them he led them down a lower, less steep route, even though he knew it was the wrong way. Which demonstrates that he is both stupid and considerate in equal measure.
Whilst Steve is off enjoying his Kilimanjaro moment, I will be enjoying 2 weeks peace and quiet, with a great big pile of books and a never ending supply of cake. I wish. I will be running the guest house and doing my day job and the only concession to Steve's absence will be that dinner will be red wine and crisps every night. As you might imagine blogging is likely to be thin on the ground, but drunk tweeting may reach a new high!
In case you were wondering the title of this post is a phrase in Swahili that I thought Steve might find useful, should he ever find himself in the awkward situation of having a hovercraft that is full of eels.
Well my littlest bird has now flown the nest and we have all survived!! It has been a bit of a rocky road but not as terrible as I had anticipated.
Steve, Tom and I went to the house last Sunday and pretty much moved him in, all the big stuff got done. I spent an hour cleaning the filthiest fridge freezer you have ever seen, Steve put up roller blinds and Tom rebuilt his desk in his new bedroom. By the time we left you could see he was really looking forward to getting into his new home and being free from parents that have spent the last 2 months insisting he was up and working 5 days a week - since he left college he has been earning his money working at the guest house, stripping and re-making beds, washing laundry and ironing all the bedding as well as cleaning and relaying the breakfast room - he is seriously house trained now!
Monday I was a total wreck, phoned my mother in floods - poor woman thought something terrible had happened! She was saying "but Debbie he's not going to be very far away, you can go and visit and you know he's looking forward to it" and I replied "I know all that, but he wont be here and I LIKE HIM" sob sob!!! Whenever I thought about driving away without him on Thursday I burst into tears, think I drove everyone mad.
Thursday finally rolled around and to be honest by then I think everyone felt that things had been dragged out long enough and it was time. Of course Tom didn't realise that his dad was going out so he was in the shower so their goodbye was through a closed bathroom door - a blessing for them both I think tbh. Tom and I got the car packed up with the rest of his stuff and headed off. We got his clothes unpacked and his food in the fridge and then one of his new housemates turned up with her dad. She is lovely and she and Tom seemed to get on very well. Tom isn't into partying and socialising and he doesn't drink - which I think is unusual for an 18 year old and he has never given any reason why he doesn't drink, he just never has but I am a little bit concerned it will make it harder for him to fit in as he was very unhappy at college and part of that was due to having no friends. Tom can be very withdrawn and quiet and make no effort to chat if that's how he is feeling, so I was massively relieved to watch him chat away with C and to hear the two of them laughing away in the kitchen as he was helping her put up pictures did my heart good, I can tell you!
By about 3pm it was apparent that there was nothing left for me to do, he was putting up his pictures, C and her dad were sorting her room and it was time for me to leave. Tom gave me the biggest hug, told me he loved me and promised me that he would be absolutely fine - he did mention that he would be really glad when everyone left and he could put his pizza in the oven and hitch his ps3 to the big plasma TV in the lounge! I'll admit I crumpled a bit as I drove away without him and then because of all the work that's being done at the front of the Uni there are long traffic light controlled delays I had a very self indulgent wail whilst I sat through those and then got a grip before hitting the motorway.
Em was out on Thursday evening so I cooked dinner for two for the first time in a very long time - probably since Tom was on a trip to Germany last year with college in fact. And we opened a bottle of wine and we were both fine. And then as I put the dinner on the table Tom rang - he couldn't get the oven to light and it was bloody freezing in the house. After digging through all the letters in the kitchen he discovered that the gas had been cut off. Suddenly I was in floods of tears and fighting the urge to go and bring him home. Was so cross as I had been doing so well too. Tom assured me he was fine, he was going to microwave some soup and watch TV wrapped in his duvet, he'd text his other housemate H who was sorting all the bills and she had assured him that she and her dad would be sorting the gas out when they arrived the next day.
We had some to'ing and fro'ing with his landlord and I have to say I am not impressed. We have a property that we let out and not only do we ensure it is immaculate before new tenants move in we are a lot more willing to help if they have issues in the first few days and we are letting to adults with kids, not kids away from home on their own. And we aren't earning £900 a month in rent either!
H and her dad arrived and managed to get the gas sorted and she cooked sausage and mash for the three of them for dinner so that was all good. Saturday morning they discovered that after the 3 of them had showered their was water coming through the ceiling in the kitchen below the bathroom. Tom rang the landlord - if you knew Tom you'd know how amazing this is! - and he is sending someone out on Monday to have a look at the shower so as they don't have a bath its a stand up wash only til Monday evening. Again not ideal, but stuff happens at I am really happy they are dealing with it. C was supposed to move in on Saturday too but she text the others to say she had been out on Friday night and her drink had been spiked (and I worry that Tom DOESN'T drink?) and was too ill on Saturday to move in, she is due to arrive today. Tom tried the oven again for his pizza last night, Saturday, and again it wasn't working well enough to cook it and he sounded a bit fed up last night, he said that its getting annoying now that things aren't working properly. I did suggest that when C arrives with her parents today he asks one of them to have a look at the oven to see if they can sort it out. Tom is in Uni each day next week to get to know the students on his course, the tutors and the layout of the Uni and I think he will be glad to get started. We had planned to go and see him on 6th October as Steve heads off to Africa on the 7th to climb Kilimanjaro, but I have now said we could go next weekend as well if he'd like us to especially if things need sorting.
So its been up and down but not as emotionally wrenching as I had anticipated and for that I am grateful. I think once all 3 of them are in, their courses are underway and the house isn't falling apart around their ears they will all be very happy!
So here's to Tom and 3 years of hard work, great fun and making life-long friends!
Haven't written a guest house related post for a while and today I have been "inspired" by the loveliness that surrounds me!
Being a guest house owner isn't quite as glamorous as many people seem to think. Oddly we don't start work at 8am and finish at 9am and then sit around working out how to spend our millions, although I would have millions if I'd had a quid for every guest over the last ten years that has asked me "what have you got planned for the rest of the day, now that breakfast is over?". One or two have made that mistake when I wasn't having a good day and been forced to listen to the litany of tasks I had planned. Oops.
Being a guest house owner does give you a real insight into peoples lives, often much more of one than you'd care to have. Take for example one of our regulars who stays four nights a week. He comes down for breakfast and chats away to me in sure and certain knowledge that within the hour I will be cleaning his toilet. I can tell you that this man pisses like an incontinent goat whilst scratching his bollocks; I know this because the rim of his toilet is splattered with old piss and liberally scattered with hundreds of pubes. Seriously that is way more information than anyone needs to have, but I have to have it so I thought it only right I share. I do not understand this. I would not be able to look someone in the eye if I knew that they knew that I was a filthy bastard, but he has no problem with it at all. Amazing.
Then this afternoon a new guest arrived. As he was heading back out to his car he spotted our laundry room and wondered if perhaps I might be able to do a load of washing for him, life has been chaotic lately and he was en route to Paris so if I could just do a load of laundry for him that would be a big help. I was sort of inclined to point out that oddly enough my life was pretty hectic and the mere fact that he had arrived to check in an hour before the earliest check in time, right in the middle of my working day, had made it yet more hectic, without having to stop and do a load of washing for him, but I didn't. And so I found myself 5 minutes after meeting this man filling a washing machine with his dirty underwear and socks and wondering what other walk of life would find you manhandling someones used y-fronts as part of your job. Obviously anyone medical I guess, god love them. I am not a caring sort and yes, I did just hear you all say "no shit Sherlock" in response to that startling revelation, so I never had any intention of getting up close and personal with the nether regions, their out pourings, off droppings or outer garments of the great British public and yet here I am doing just that. Funny how things work out.
Here's a little list of the things that I can assure you if you do in a guest house, B&B (what is the difference, I have no idea) hotel, motel or Holiday Inn you WILL be judged:
1. Not using the toilet brush. Do you leave it like that at home? Oh and if you keep flushing that will eventually go away, so please don't leave it for me to discover when I lift the lid on your toilet.
2. Blowing your nose on the paper napkin you were given at breakfast.
3. Leaving the paper napkin you just blew your nose onto on your side plate next to your toast crust and marmalade. Even typing it makes me gag. One of our other regulars does this frequently. There is a special place in Hell for him.
4. Park like a twat. Look around you. Are there white lines? Here's a plan - use them as a guide and attempt to park between two of them.
5. Ring at 10pm on a Sunday night to make a booking. For November. Or any date that is more than 12 hours away.
6. Try to book a room to use with a prostitute for two hours in the afternoon in a local B&B. Go to the Travelodge, they don't give a shit why you want the room.
That's a little starter, I am sure given more time I could come up with a hundred more minor violations which would be hanging offences if I had my way, as I said, I'm not big on caring. Do you have a similar list of things that the people you come into contact with via your work do that makes you want to kill? I bet you do! Don't hold back, tell me all about them please.
Roller coaster. The most stressful and traumatic 48 hours since the sale of the guest house fell through (bastards). I am shell shocked and need booze but it's done!
After much chopping and changing Tom has accepted a place at Edge Hill University to study English and he is delighted, absolutely thrilled. His didn't get his first choice and went through clearing and by his own admission has somehow ended up doing a much better course than the one he had originally applied for.
Had it not been for Twitter Tom would not being going to Edge Hill. Yesterday morning when I was looking at his results (C English, E Sociology, E History) and his UCAS Track with "unsuccessful" all over it and was in despair Leanne from OCD tweeted in response to say not to panic and had I considered Edge Hill, she used to work there and "The Boy" (her partner!) still does. Tom and I will be eternally grateful for that suggestion and if I ever get the chance, which is looking increasingly likely, I am going to buy her the biggest bloody drink!
I am off for a lie down and then on Monday we are all going to Sorrento (we have house sitters so piss off robbers) and I can not wait. Bit of a blogging hiatus but I'll be back at the start of September with blog posts no doubt charting the intense emotions in the run up to 23rd September!!
It's A Level results day tomorrow.
Tomorrow we find out if Tom is going to University or not. He thinks not. I, the world's biggest optimist, think maybe. His Dad, who is never wrong, thinks that he might be fine but on the other hand he might not. Emily thinks he needs to hurry the hell up and move out so she we can sort out our basement flat so she gets a much bigger bedroom.
Tom walked when he was 10 months old, a good couple of months before most babies would expect to be up and on their feet. That was the last time Tom did anything more quickly than might have been expected. He was five and still insisting that he couldn't ride a bike without stabilisers - it took Steve running alongside pretending he was holding on to get him up and running. Tom hates to fail. When he was at primary school he had a spelling test every Monday morning so we started every Friday evening with a straight off 20 words spelling test. Those he got right we ticked. The rest he wrote out three times, then we did the test again. Write out 3 times, test and so on until by Monday morning he was able to spell all 20 perfectly. He once got 19 out of 20 and was so upset, bless him! You are probably thinking he aced his GCSE's with a plethora of A's and A*'s. Sadly you'd be wrong, somewhere along the line Toms fear of failure was overtaken by his abject terror of doing any sodding work at all.
We ended up having a crisis meeting after we got his mock GCSE results. Tom, Steve and I in the kitchen. Tom in bits because he was staring failure in the face and Steve and I petrified that he was going to throw away a golden opportunity. I will never forget watching him walk up from school in the pouring rain clutching his GCSE results envelope. I was sat in the car waiting and he didn't look up until he was nearly at the car and when he did he looked straight into my eyes and smiled the broadest smile, I burst into tears there and then! They weren't great but they were enough to get him into the very good local college to study his A Levels.
And then came the wilderness years. For two years I have heard myself say "are you sure you aren't supposed to be working?" "show me what work you have done" "seriously, are you shitting me? Is that it?". I have gently coaxed "Sweetheart, why don't you get your History text book and come and sit with me whilst I work" I have cajoled "History text book now" and I have castigated "Work you bastard, work" all to no effect. And tomorrow the results of Tom's torpid approach to learning will come home to roost. I am bricking it.
He has an offer of 260 points to study Criminology at Lincoln. Its a lovely University, great accommodation, right in the centre of Lincoln and its about an hour and half down the A1. I am desperately hoping that he'll get 200 points, they'll want the £30,000 fees and they'll take him.
Which is great. Or it will be, until we get to September 17th and I have to drive my only son to Lincoln, unload his world from my car to his accommodation, kiss him and drive home. Without him. Oh god. I can't do it. Part of me almost wants him to fail so I wont have to. So I will have to remind myself that having kids is about giving them wings so they can fly away, even if it breaks you heart a little into a million tiny pieces.
I'll update this post tomorrow with the results - if I am not frantically trying to get him sorted through Clearing before we go on holiday on Monday!
If you do nothing else today please click on this link and read the post.
Anyone else that reads beauty blogs will already be familiar with Mrs Hirons, skin care guru, second to none.
Everyone who isn't should click on the above link and then run to Boots and buy her recommendation.
Have a lovely weekend.
Yesterday I was unpacking after our weekend away and as I put the box of tampax back into my knicker drawer I thought this box of tampax is well travelled, its been to Cereals in June, Yorkshire show in July and here it is now returning from Cambridge at the start of August. And then I did a double take. Because this 3 month old box of tampax is still closed. A quick check on my phone confirmed my thoughts - the last time I had a period was back in May! Now this may be a temporary blip, or of course I may be pregnant as Emily very hilariously pointed out - I did reply that were that to be the case in a complete role reversal of Catholic families through the years I would be passing this baby off as hers!! - or this may be the real deal and my reproductive years are now behind me.
I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that to be honest. I remember the Wednesday evening when I was 14 and I went upstairs to wash my hair to discover that after 2 years of patiently waiting I had finally started my periods!! I remember blowing the dust off the pack of breeze block sized sanitary pads that girls used back then with great elation and finally feeling that I was a WOMAN! I was deeply pissed off that no more than six months later my sister who was, and remains to this day, 18 months younger than me started her periods too, I didn't want to share this womanly right of passage with her dammit I wanted it to all be about me for once!
My period was most at the forefront of my mind the 12 months I spent trying to get pregnant. Using the power of my mind I managed to make it up to 3 weeks late some months, only for it to appear as I walked back from the chemist with yet another pregnancy test we could ill afford. My sister and her husband, by then parents themselves, were staying one weekend in October 1991, my period was a week late and I was trying not to hope. We had dinner and I suddenly felt very very sick, rushed upstairs and hurled for England. I had never felt so ill. My sister took this as a sure sign that I was with child and insisted that Steve went out first thing the following morning and purchased a pregnancy test, against his better judgement, convinced as he was that I was about to ruin a rare weekend with my sister. How utterly and gloriously wrong he was!!! When one night in April 1993 we had dinner and I was violently sick after an Easter weekend spent trying for number 2 we looked at one another with a knowing smile and Tom appeared in January 1994. (Appeared - anyone who has squeezed a 9lb 2oz human out of their vagina will be enjoying a wry smile at that choice of word!)
Other than that my periods haven't really featured greatly in my life, they came, they went, they arrived unexpectedly when I was wearing white linen trousers, the usual really. I hadn't really given any thought to how this next stage of my life would affect me, other than perhaps hoping that by the time it came both of my "babies" would have left home and Steve and I would have enough money and enough time to be enjoying life a little. Ah well.
I am surprised at my lack of knowledge about all this though. So my periods have stopped. Am I now officially menopausal about to grow a beard, have terrific sweats and burst into tears at the slightest provocation? If so, no biggy the beard and the sweats have been around since last year at least. Or is that it. Over. Gone. I'm barren, nothing to see here, please move along, menopause done and dusted. Seriously how can I NOT know this stuff. And where do I sign up for the HRT? Do I need HRT? Will it give me breast cancer? I am here at, if not a major junction, at least a litter-strewn, pot hole filled layby in my life and I have no idea what lies ahead. Luckily I like the unknown and prefer change to being stuck in a rut so lets I hope I can embrace "the" change and work with it. And if not there's always the drugs, right?
Unless of course I am pregnant and then I'm in deep shit.
