The Daily Novel

Yesterday I did some real work for a change and it almost brought the sweat to my brow. Clearing out the living room so that the window cleaner and his mates can redecorate it. Hundreds of books and papers into boxes. Vases and other objets on the top shelves carefully handed down by my wife on the step ladder. Heaving the piano stool up to the next floor. These feels like hard physical labour for someone whose daily exercise is flexing his fingers on the keyboard.

The last item I removed from the room at 8 AM this morning was the 1930 chair which I use to sit at my desk. This is just the sort of item which decorators think has been left for them to stand on and park their cups of tea. When I got it into the kitchen I realised that I had not really looked at it for years. The pattern is only visible around the edges. More than 70 years of squirming bottoms have revealed the bare wood. And there were a few specks of white paint, the droppings of some previous decorator.

This chair is the one I used to sit on to do my school homework at the dining table. It is also the one on which my mother suckled all three of her children. According to family myth I was the most the most difficult birth and my mother had a painful time feeding me. Some shrinks think that is why I am only smoker and enthusiastic drinker of the three of us. But maybe it is because my brother and sister, like Tony Benn, have remained addicted to the favourite family tipple, tea. I can survive on just two cups of tea a day without suffering any withdrawal symptoms. Benn needs at least twenty-five cups a day and, if my memory is accurate, his daily consumption spiralled to forty a few years ago when he was living with the stress of being Labour’s leading rebel and the Daily Mail’s favourite target. Actually I have no idea how much he drinks today. But since he is now an elder statesman, and revered on both sides of the house, as a defender of the British constitution, he may be able to manage on ten cups. Must ask him sometime.

Today I don’t feel the need of anything at all. (Correction. I must confess there is a cigarette smoking away in the ashtray.) It is the perfect day for idling. Grey sky and gentle drizzle. Not the kind of bank holiday weekend you feel you really must brave the traffic queues and rush out to enjoy the countryside. There is nothing to disturb my tranquillity so long as the decorators do not knock a can of paint onto the wireless transmitter downstairs. Now that would really make me agitated because I would not be able to write this blog on my wife’s computer on the first floor.

Oh, yes. Why is it the window cleaner who has come to do the decorating? It is his ‘night’ job. And come to think of it, both jobs involve climbing ladders, making surfaces clean and shiny, and drinking endless cups of tea.