… so bad as I felt this morning.
There was no alarm call in the room this morning so I was quite surprised to be awake and sitting up on the edge of the bed at 07:40. But never mind getting up – the way that I was feeling, I was ready to crawl straight into the grave and I wouldn’t have cared at all. You would never ever have thought that I had had a really early night either.
Mind you, I had been on my travels during the night. Back in Brussels in fact, and I was back working at the EU which had somehow managed to transport its offices to Boulevard Reyers. I had a ground-floor two-bedroom flat somewhere in a traditional built-up area such as that on the bottom end of the Avenue Molière. Two-bedroom, it was, and a typical 1920s “3 pièces en enfilade”, but tidy as it might have been, the two bedrooms were under renovation so I had my double bed in the kitchen. This was rather inconvenient when I invited a young lady from the office back to my apartment to stay the night, but nevertheless, she came and stayed, and I was quite happy. Next morning, who should I bump into but Nina, a girlfriend from way back in the early 1970s. She grabbed me and said something along the lines of “now that I’ve got you, I’m not ever going to let you go again” – rather inconvenient seeing as how I’d invited the other girl to a rock concert that night. So I asked Nina if she fancied going to the rock concert, to which she replied “no”, which took a weight off my mind so that I could carry on with my plans, but Nina then said “but we can do something else instead” – and that threw me back into an even more confusing situation.
So with all of that, it’s no surprise that I was thoroughly out of sorts this morning.
Anyway, to cut a long story short … "hooray" – ed … after having an agonising couple of hours, I made a pot of coffee and drank it. And then I do have to say that I’ve never felt better after that. In fact I attacked a few things that had been built up for a while and dealt with them with gusto.
After lunch, I attacked the ceiling in the shower room, now that I have bought the tongue and grooving. And I was glad that I had had that coffee, because it was a struggle. I had to –
- cut a few pieces with some fancy, intricate cuts
- drill a large 60mm hole in one plank for the recessed light up at that end
- rewire all of the lights
- fit a batten to the beams under the suspended ceiling to attach (with some very long screws) the light cord switch
- reroute a great deal of the wiring
- wire in the 12-volt extension to the circuit that runs to the back of the wardrobe in the bedroom
And then I could start to fit the rest of the planks of tongue and groove.
Two more to fit and the ceiling will be finished, and even so, it was 19:25 by the time that I knocked off.
I’ll have to have a good pot of coffee tomorrow. I need to tidy up here because Rosemary is coming for an inspection, and she phoned me tonight to make sure that I hadn’t forgotten.
