The Daily Novel

And only myself to blame. My dream has become reality. I have condemned myself to hard work after managing to avoid it for most of my life. In my first five days in Charmouth I only managed to get to the beach once. And that was partly a social duty, accompanying my sister who had come over for the day to help us move in. I missed the drum majorettes at the Charmouth annual fair on Sunday. I never even got down to the High Street let alone had a drink at The George.

There were a few snatched moments on the terrace when I was filled with wonder at the ever changing seascape of Lyme Bay. On the first day Portland Bill was light brown in the sunshine. On the second it was a black outline on the horizon and the sea was dark and forbidding.

The norm was set by the removal men. Although we were up well before 7 AM on Thursday and had a traffic free drive from our friend’s house in Weymouth, the van was already there when we arrived just before 8 AM. The men were eager to start work, earn their bread and get back to the North London they love.

The ramp was down before we had got our suitcases in from the car. The men came running in with the first of the boxes demanding to be told where to put them. As if we knew. We had spent the previous evening re-thinking our plan as to which rooms to use for what. My vote to have our bedroom on the ground floor had met with a resolute veto. The attic it has to be. At least there is only one flight of stairs to climb, which is quite a change from the four flights in Roderick Road.

Despite all the voluminous literature we had read from removal firms and my lawyer instructing us how to make moving house pain-free we fouled up on the essentials. We had taken food and drink with us in the car but had failed to remember we needed cups and plates and knives and forks. A helpful neighbour over the road lent us five cups to make tea. But I hadn’t the nerve to ask them for knives and forks so we got through lunch by using our fingers.

By dinner time we had still only found one box labelled cutlery and that turned out to mother-in-law’s silverware. So we dined in the style of the posh folks at the top of the hill.

The removal men off-loaded the last box just before 3 PM. And I started work with the un-packing. Most of the rooms are now free of boxes. But the small room at the back my vendor called her Office, now renamed the Garden Room, is still piled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. They were supposed to be just books. But somewhere buried amongst them must be the keyboard and the mouse for Janet’s computer which is here in the Savernake Road flat.

Another failure. Just as aggravating as my inglorious attempt to get the television working here last night. It was tuned to Telewest cable and to get it working on the aerial the onscreen instructions say you have to press a button marked STR. But the Telewest engineer who set it up must have disabled this button. I cannot get them on the phone because my mobile needs topping off and the BT engineers have still not got my Roderick Road number working here, although they turned it off an hour before the appointed hour of 1 PM last Wednesday.

But my worst failure was not being able to get online and write a blog from Charmouth. ‘View all wireless networks’ produced only two possibilities. One was security enabled. The other was deemed out of range.

Here in Savernake Road I have a choice of six. So this blog comes to you courtesy of a man or woman called linksys. One day I hope to discover the person behind the name and buy him or her a drink.