Handyman

                The handyman arrived early, while I was still cleaning the area behind the cooker. It was caked with grease and covered with cobwebs. The cooker itself looked like The Mary Rose after they brought it up from the ocean floor.

          He rang me from outside in the car park, and I had to put away my cleaning stuff, then run out to the car park and unlock the bollard, to allow him to park his van. We don’t have a car, but we do have a parking space, and without the bollard, other people park, and even dump their vehicles in it. We want our guests to be able to park whenever they visit us, but as we don’t get many guests (we deter them, actually) and as the guests we do get tend not to be motorists, the bollard tends to stay locked for years at a time.

          It was a good thing that he arrived early, because this was another day, like my nan’s funeral, which had been looming like High Noon; and as with my nan’s funeral, I needn’t have worried. The handyman, when he finally stepped out of his van, turned out to be polite, quick, competent and cheap. He’d sounded gruff on the telephone, but in person he was good natured.

                    He was in the flat 15 minutes tops, and then away again. He sawed three centimetres off the edge of our kitchen worktop, so we now have room for a new cooker. Best of all, we now have a handyman to call on if we ever have any other jobs which need doing. I’m ridiculously proud of having found him (on the Check A Trader website) and of ringing him. That might sound like nothing to you; but if you knew how I procrastinate and worry, you’d understand. I felt the fear and did it anyway.

          It was buying the new cooker which I’d underestimated. I thought we only needed to go to Currys, pick one out and pay. Instead, on a quiet Thursday afternoon, we had to wait around for salespeople to come and serve us. There were staff milling about on the ground floor, but when I went down and asked if somebody could come upstairs and serve us, they said no, you’ll have to wait. The placards above the cookers say that they’ll install your new cooker within three days, but for some reason Currys can’t deliver to us until Sunday week. And the saleswoman got huffy when we told her (about three times) that we didn’t want to join their protection plan.

                   Still, it will be nice to make welsh rarebit once again.

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                    My writing has stalled to a trickle. Mostly because I’ve been off work and have been sleeping in late. I kept up my morning pages, but as for any work on an actual project, I barely did anything. A sentence here and there on these character biographies.

                   I wish I could see my next story. Have scenes come alive in my head, get ideas for it as I walk along. I just can’t seem to visualize my characters doing anything.