This is a short improv I recorded “on the fly”. Not sure exactly what I was trying to achieve but I am pleased it didn’t turn out too much of a mess…
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So what to report? Well if I told you what was really going on, I’d have to kill you. Or at least make sure that you didn’t squeal on me…
Of course, I am just being deliberately oblique in a sad attempt to make my life sound much more interesting than it actually is. Recent events began last week when the Missus dared me. You should never dare me to do anything because I might just call your bluff. And so as a result of this dare, we drove down to Plymouth and checked out a place. I am torn. Parts of it I like, parts of it make me recoil in horror, while the businessman in me sees the potential. I see it as a way of turning the two properties I own into a comfortable business. The future is very different to how I planned it, but if we decide to take this path it could be a very comfortable, if quiet, life. Oh what to do?
Plus the fact that the fumes from next door continue and despite the warning from the council no car parts have left the house this week. They have another seven days to sort their shit out, apparently. Again, if nothing comes of it and we are stuck with those ingrates using industrial solvents during the wee hours and the fumes seeping through our floorboards, then there’s few options left. Run away while I can still breathe…? Yup. What a cowardly fuck, I am.
So on the way to Plymouth I needed a pee and we were between services. So the Missus duly turned off into a field and let me get some air to my nether regions. This was about 9am in the morning and I am in the middle of nowhere (about 30 minutes from Exeter, maybe) and I am just in mid-stream, when a car appears from nowhere. Now it is almost impossible to stop when you are going with the flow, but with a gargantuan effort I stopped and adjusted myself and pretended I was just taking the air, just in time for the car to pass and some middle-aged woman to stare at me. After the car disappeared, I returned to the job at hand, but it is difficult to pee when you stopped yourself with such force. But I knew it was now or never, so I focused my mind and managed to empty my aching bladder. This type of thing has happened before when I needed a pee. You can bet that in a deserted side street or country lane, I’ll think the coast is clear and some old bloke will appear from nowhere, scuppering my plan for a crafty whizzle. C’est la pee, as they say in France.
Over the weekend, we bought the supplies for decorating the bedroom. The plan is that if we decide to sell up the house will look nice and my decorating efforts will add some value to the properties. If we stay, we’ll have a nicer looking house – so it is a win-win situation all-round. So I have been painting wainscotting (I love that word) and slapping my roller on the ceiling. Tomorrow, after finishing some writing work, I am hoping to wallpaper the bedroom. This fills me with excitement and trepidation. I am not too bad at decorating, but I pretend to be useless so that The Missus will leave me alone.
On the way down to the Westcountry, I spied Stonehenge. It looks much smaller in real life…
“Stonehenge, where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well
Stonehenge
Where a man is a man and the children dance to
the pipes of pan”
So the Housing Officer arrived with someone I presume was from Social Services and gained access to the property next door. I was sitting in the kitchen reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee and could hear here giving Brian the Liar a bollocking of epic proportions. Later, The Missus caught the Housing Officer as she left and asked her in to smell the vapours that were coming through our bedroom floorboards. At least this person could smell them and she said that they smelt like oil. The only problem was that she couldn’t find anything like car parts in the house, so the Missus informed her to go look in the cupboard under their stairs. The officer went back in there and hit paydirt. A direct hit!
Unfortunately, they’ve been given two weeks to clean up their act and we’ve still got the vapours coming through the floorboards. My sleep has been deeply affected by this as I can’t get used to sleeping the wrong way around! However, this is war and phase II of my campaign is kicking into life. Sometimes you have to hit these people where it hurts, and I suspect they are claiming benefits while working. All our other deductions have been pretty spot on, so watch out Brian the Liar and Idiot Bastard Son. Darren doesn’t take too kindly to being poisoned while he sleeps.
Yesterday, me and The Missus went out for a ride and did a little window shopping. We were meant to be doing some decorating at Chez Lock this week, but our plans have been halted by this ferrago. Do we up sticks and move or fight it out to the last? Anyway, I’ve got this idea for the place and want to get some nice art to hang on the walls. I am not one for flock wallpaper and chandeliers, but a nice bit of art soothes my soul. I even went into Habitat…how fucking middle class have I become? Anyhoo, I treated myself to a new webcam because I am getting a great response on YouTube and last night, despite the fumes, I managed to record this soundscape. It’s a bit flaky because I was having trouble focussing on the music, which I think you’ll agree is understandable.
Last entry for the day. After walking Alex the Wonderdog at lunch time, we noticed that Idiot Bastard Son had returned and was busying himself using a little hammer to break down the crap in the back garden and transfer it into the front bedroom of the house. We know he was doing that because we could hear him dragging the stuff into the room. We can hear this because our bedroom has no carpet and is varnished bare floorboards – the room next door also has no carpet and when the drag something across the floor, the floorboards act as a sounding board. The sound is even worse now we’ve moved the marital bed into the middle of the room.
The Missus is off on a break this week and we are meant to be having a good time. But instead, she is sharing my horror. I went to the Doc’s at 16.20 and got seen immediately. He was a nice doctor and this was my first appointment in a decade. He checked me out and reckoned that whatever had wafted through the floorboards had caused an allergic reaction in me. I listened to my lungs which were clear and recommended that any back pain was probably caused by muscular stress.
However, my throat was a little irritated and I was suffering from tonsilitis, complete with yellow pustules. So I am on a course of strong penecillin for the next week. Not sure if the tonsilitis had been caused by the noxious fumes or whether this was something dormat or a throwback to the really bad sore throat I had last year. But other than that, I was as fit as a fiddle. As I said to the Missus, I am an Ox and I’m going to keep on going till my heart bursts and I collapse in a heap on the floor with my tongue lolling out like the wild animal I am. I am pleased everything is OK because I must admit I was a bit scared about what I had breathed in that night. Whatever it was made me feel very, very off colour.
The young girl at the pharmacy in our local Morrisons was very surly…I don’t think she liked me very much…
I managed to get the Environmental Officer to come at 11am. I could tell on the phone that he wasn’t interested and probably wanted to just deal with a case of fly-tipping. I took him to the bedroom and asked him to smell the air. He could smell nothing, even though the aroma was still in my nostrils. Basically, he told me, there was nothing we could do and it is perfectly legal to store used car parts in your home, even if they exude toxic fumes that make your neighbours vomit.
I sent him on his way and he paid a visit to Brian the Liar who happened to be just leaving his house. I could hear the lie-machine crank into life and the usual cock-and-bullshit spew forth. The Environmental Health Officer didn’t even get a chance to look around the door. Pathethic. You can tell when Brian the Liar is telling porky pies – his mouth moves.
And so I called the Housing Officer dealing with the case. Unbeknownst to me, she had already paid a visit to the home this morning and told me that Brian the Liar was out. I corrected her and told her that they were in and were hiding from her as they had left at 11.15am when my man was dealing with them. We talked about what actions could be taken and how I had felt very ill and how I would take legal action against the council if I had thought I had been poisoned by this man. She was a good listener and she said it was an emergency case. I look forward to any response – it certainly must have sent her head in a spin because my neighbour Big Phil had been the one to contact her first and caused her previous unsuccessful visit.
After this, I realised that I might need to be check out by a doctor. I’ve lived here for nigh on seven years and never visited the doctor. That’s how fricking tough I am. I phone up the automated system and managed to speak to a receptionist who sounded as if she were 117 years old and would probably spit dust from her dessicated mouth as she spoke.
The conversation went like this:
Me: “Hi. I’d like to speak to the doctor. I just want some advice before I make an appointment.”
Her: “Well the doctors are busy.”
Me: “Could you give them my number and call me back.”
Her: “No. They can’t do that. What exactly is your problem.”
Me: “I think I might have been poisoned and want some general advice.”
Her: “Well you’ll have to call back in 5 minutes when the doctor is free.”
I am glad it wasn’t a real emergency…
Yesterday was a strange day and I didn’t quite feel myself. I had a dull ache in my lower back/kidney area and I wasn’t sure if this was the stress of recent events or some side effect. The Missus spoke to the neighbours that live the other side to the grease monkeys and when she told Big Phil what had gone on he said: “Well it’s obvious – they are cleaning car parts in there.” He then went onto describe how they are kept awake all hours of the night by the sound of heavy objects being moved around and banging and tapping. “They never sleep,” said Phil, remarking that when he goes off to work at 5am they are still up and working.
I feel a lot better today and the pain in my back has gone. Mind you, after I heard that yesterday, I started drinking lots of water because I was scared that I’d been poisoned by some kind of industrial cleaning solvent. After writing this entry, I shall be picking up the phone and speaking to the local council. And so the battle for normality begins…
Wow, what an exciting few days at Chez Lock. I’ve mentioned before about our neighbours, Brian The Liar and his Idiot Bastard Son and how last week they dumped a load of engine parts on their front lawn last week. Now things took a turn for the worse on Friday and I was taking Alex the Wonderdog out for a drag when I noticed that Brian the Liar and IBS, plus an unknown grubby assailant, were scurrying too and fro their house with used car parts in their oily little mitts (except they were all wearing latex gloves to protect their little handy-wandies). This preturbed me as I thought it was all going in the back garden.
So anyway, when I gets back to the house with Alex, I have a sneaky peak out the back window and there are a few bits and bobs there, but not the amount that I saw taken into the dwelling. When The Missus came home I told her my story and insisted that we sell up and move on immediately – we have Neighbours from Hell. That night I went to bed and I noticed a strange smell coming from the neighbours wall. I didn’t think much of it as I descended into sleep.
During the night I awoke several times, feeling nausea and sickness, which is not like me unless I’ve been caning it on the ale. I thought about getting up and being sick in the bathroom, but everytime I considered this the waves of nausea didn’t seem so bad and I drifted back to slumber. While this was going on, my sleep was disrupted by Alex the Wonderdog who was pacing the floor and couldn’t get comfortable.
Saturday morning I awoke relatively early and felt really sick. Me and The Missus scurried out leaving Alex the Wonderdog behind so we could get the morning papers and some milk with relative ease. During our breakfast, I heard Alex making a noise and when I called him into the kitchen, I realised that he had been sick all over the sofa. He enjoys a nap on the sofa in the mornings (and in the afternoons and evenings too) and he’s never been sick on it before. Normally when he is feeling bilious he goes to the back door.
By now, alarm bells were ringing because my nausea was getting worse and this acoompanied by sore eyes and throat. During the morning, I noticed the Idiot Bastard Son taking more car yard junk into the house – bumpers, exhausts, buckets of oily debri – not very palatable at all. When Brian the LIar made an appearance, I made my move and asked him what he thought he was doing.
I told him that I didn’t fancy living next to a breakers yard much and warned him that he had a nice council given house and that he should be careful not to lose it. His reply was that a garage was being demolished and he had nowhere else to put the stuff and so the whole house was being filled with the kind of crap you’d expect to see at one of those oil strewn places where they wreck cars. He told me not to get stressed about it and that they would be sorting through the mess to keep the good stuff and throwing away the bad in the near future. I did my best to explain to him that you can’t turn a domestic dwelling into a mechanic’s storage facility, but the guy is so pig ignorant that he just stared right through me. And so I told him about the bad smell, the sickness and nausea and how sick Alex had been. I told him to fix it or get reported and walked away with him blabbering some lies as I left.
I was firm but fair with the guy, but on reflection I realise that I am on a losing streak. This guys are a bit soft in the head if they think living with half an engine under the stairs is normal. I also discussed with him about the various strange cars that had been appearing and disappearing from outside our house. It is obvious that he is holding some dodgy motors for his pals. Again, he denied it was anything to do with him and even said that the current black Ford Modeo that was parked there belonged to a man around the corner. LIttle did he know that while on another walk with Alex the other week, I’d spied the Idiot Bastard Son checking the car out. So Brian the Liar wasn’t that good a liar. I subsequently discovered that the aforementioned “man around the corner” had a word with Brian the Liar on Friday. Apparently, he was narked that all these mysterious motors had appeared and prevented his wife – who has just had a baby – from parking in their desired spot, meaning that she has to make a longer journey. He wanted to know what these cars were about, but Brian the LIar just ignored him.
While we were out Saturday afternoon, I was informed that another van appeared and more and more junk was loaded into the house. When we got home the smell was just as bad and last night we moved our bed away from the wall, turned it around, so that we could sleep with our faces as far away from the chemical stench as possible.
Tomorrow, I shall be contacting Environmental Health about this and reporting these idiots to the council. While I don’t mind people having a hobby and being interested in cars, I do take exception to slowly being poisoned by the noxious fumes eminating from their house.
I’ll keep y’all posted. And if you hear nothing from me, you’ll know that I have succumbed to the vile vapours seeping through the walls.