My wooden floor is finished!!!

It’s lovely. So… wooden.

Certainly better than the nanotechnology-thick carpet that was previously laid directly onto the concrete screed. That was always somewhat chilly.

It means I finally wave goodbye to the Cheerful Builder today.

Back on my own during the day. Which is good in a way, as I’ve got bugger all work done for weeks, nor have I had a chance to read any blogs. For all I know, all sorts of things could be happening. If you all could post a very brief summary of what you’ve done since May then this will save me a lot of trouble. Thanks.

Don’t fret about the Cheerful Builder. I’ll probably refer to him again occasionally, and I’m sure he’ll shortly be appearing in pantomime at a venue near you.

I’m waiting for him to arrive now. I feel like I should do something, you know, put balloons out or something, or make a nice sponge cake.

There are tears in my eyes.

But I had to write the cheque out eventually.

The LTLP enjoys going to Ikea.

I do not enjoy going to Ikea. I would rather stay at home, driving nails through my scrotum whilst listening to the Stereophonics. It’s that sort of disenjoyment.

This would not normally be a problem. We have a modern relationship based on respect. If she wants to spend her spare time in Ikea then that’s fine by me. The stupid cow.

The problem with our two ‘not wanting anything to do with Ikea’/‘wanting to go to Ikea’ worlds is that there is sometimes seepage. This seepage takes the form of my non-Ikeaic day suddenly being invaded with bags of crap that she’s bought.

And just when I thought I’d won the battle to get her to stop buying unnecessary rubbish from there, the Government tells us all to stock up on candles.

Thanks, Tony.

We are all unprepared, they say, for an emergency. It’s because we’re all so used to be able to pop out for 24-hour shopping all the time.

Hmm. I suspect whoever wrote that hasn’t spent much time in this corner of Norfolk.

I’m not sure how I feel about the rest of the advice. Should the village be dirty-bombed I’m reasonably self sufficient. I have a gun and a plentiful supply of rabbits, and the Fray Bentos factory is local although, to be honest, I’d rather die slowly from hunger.

It’s this ‘turn on the radio’ thing that worries me. If I’m cowering under the stairs with the LTLP and three tins of beans, really the last thing I want is to flick on the radio and hear the cheery tones of Steve Wright going:

“Factoid – we’re all going to die!”

“Chinese herbal medicine first evolved in the mountains of ancient China as Taoist philosophers searched for the elusive ELIXIR OF LIFE.

Over the centuries they learned all the remarkable healing powers of carefully combined plants and minerals taken in Tao form.

The formulation is governed by Wood one of the Five Elemental Energies and contains the legendary elixir of life ‘He Shou Wu’”

As I lie in my relaxing bath I wonder:

Is this the most pretentious shampoo bottle in the world?

Around two quid from Tesco’s, if you want any.

My mother found a photo.

It’s of my Great Great Grandfather and his family.

He was born in 1855, so, by roughly guestimating his age in the picture, I’d say that it was taken in about 1890. I’m sure there are loads of boring things I could do on the Internet to verify dates and stuff, but for now just go with me that it was old. Very old.

She told me about this, and I was quite excited. I’ve got quite interested in ‘family’ lately.

Then I pulled it out of the envelope.

It took me a couple of seconds to focus before I recoiled in horror. Had I been in a film, I would have leapt back several feet, breaking a priceless Ming vase in the process, but for now you’ll just have to make do with a simple recoil.

To put it delicately, my Great Great Grandfather, Great Great Grandmother and their two kids, one of whom was presumably my Great Grandfather/Mother were… well… that it to say…

They were not exactly lookers.

People didn’t used to smile for photos in those days, which might have accentuated the negative (ho ho), and of course there was a certain amount of fading. However, as my head swam and I clutched the offending image in disbelief, I had to admit to myself that not only were my ancestors not the beautiful yet hardy frontierspeople that I’d imagined, but that everything that I had previously read about evolution was wrong.

In one of the early Tom and Jerry cartoons, before they got rubbish, there’s a lovely bit where Tom pegs it at full speed round a corner, only to be hit full on in the face by a steam-iron, held by Spike the dog. Tom’s face, of course, flattens itself into a steam-iron shape as he blinks in confusion.

This was my Great Great Grandmother. This pitiful yet sinister steam-iron squashed face creature glared out of the picture at me like some mutant refugee from the Cursed Earth.

The children glowered from the front. Both had wide, stretched, frog-like mouths as if they’d been brought up for ten years in a Chernobyl wind tunnel.

The girl, aside from that, wasn’t too bad in a Christina Ricci-in-the-Addams-Family sort of way, but her brother seemed to have a head that had been moulded from papier-mache, not set properly and, perhaps, reversed over several times by a large Transit van packed with heavy furniture.

My Great Great Grandfather seemed human. That is to say that most of his face was obscured by a massive WG Grace type beard, so really it was just his eyes and nose showing. He seemed to carry an indescribable air of sadness about him, which is not surprising given his family circumstances.

So there we go.

I replaced the picture, my head full of wonder at my monkey-featured ancestors.

And how, in just over one hundred years, the miracle of evolution has propelled me to the other extreme.

I know writers are meant to struggle for their craft, but this is ridiculous.

The Cheerful Builder arrives in half an hour and I am sat here on the concrete floor base, the PC keyboard balanced on my knees, squinting at the monitor which is three feet away from me perched on a garden chair.

There is still wood everywhere, apart from in the kitchen, which is piled high with everything else in the world that I possess. I think it would be fair to say that conditions are still not 100% conducive to producing my daily diary. In fact, it’s a pain in the arse.

Anne Frank never had to put up with this.

To make things worse, we were attacked by another swarm of thunder flies yesterday. They are the tiny, tiny little annoying ones, no bigger than a speck, that appear from nowhere and end up everywhere. They generally land on anything that’s white, because they are stupid.

Unfortunately I was painting a door at the time. White, of course. I gave up in the end, because they kept landing in the paint and the door was ending up more specky than a BBC Micro (Model B) owners’ convention.

Do enjoy your weekends, everyone. I hope to have a desk back in here for Monday, and shall perhaps be a more entertaining read next week.

(insert really good last sentence here).

Due to cheerful building activities, today’s writing has been curtailed.

If you enjoyed Salvadore’s posts whilst I was on holiday, he’s blogging over at Unluckyman today.

The Cheerful Builder is back!!!

When your blog is getting a bit stale and tired, sometimes it is a good ploy to reintroduce a well known and much loved character.

This should arrest my recent alarming decline in female readership.

“Wotcha!” he says, poking his head round the door. Little does he know that he is the Harold Bishop of blogs.

He is here to fit my new wooden floor. This is good, as at present my house is full of wood. There is wood in the lounge, wood in the dining room. It is piled high, leaning against things, getting in the way, blocking doorways.

There is more wood than the front row at Spearmint Rhino’s.

The Cheerful Builder’s phone rings. The ringtone is the theme from ‘Only Fools and Horses’.

I should not employ such people.