Skip to main content

Old Tricks

 


 It was an old trick, to force a ' difficult ' tenant out who was causing a nuisance to the landlord or their management company by making repeated requests to have things like the toilet fixed . I was familiar with landlords and the way the worst of them behaved sometimes and so had more than a little sympathy with Vanya, who just wanted a decent place to live and bring up her little girl. 

The upshot of the meeting in the room that day was that I gave the keys back to Ms X who gave them to Vanya, so allowing her access to the bathroom facilities in return for Vanya picking up Ms X's post and keeping an eye on everything for her who now had a long term arrangement to live somewhere else the other side of town. 

Ms X's supreme kindness touched me deeply and my own tiny gesture of taking a few provisions, although gracefully received, now felt somewhat clumsy and insignificant, even egotistical. 

But I trundled home happily nevertheless. The feeling that there were people quietly, persistently helping others in these dark and often combatitive days was reassuring, heart warming, hopeful and energising. 


On the arduous way back up the hill home, my mind was so filled with small memories and thoughts that I made it without noticing. 

At the bottom of the final steps lay an old, sodden mask, throwback to the pandemic days. A few people had never stopped wearing them and others had started donning them again in the depths of this bitter and flu ridden winter. I paused to remember. Kindness had been the motto then. Kindness and rainbows. In my reverie, I began bumping the trolley up the steps, then, suddendly, remembering how birds sometimes took them for nesting and got tangled in the elastic, I scrabbled about in my trolley for a bag and used it to pick the filthy thing up.


All the way home I chunnered and complained to myself, muttering aye aye aye what is to become of us under my breath over and over again


                                                                            🌈









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Time Ticks

It snowed heavily and I had to stay home for a few days. The back roads and footpaths were treacherous, besides, the one small electric fire in the room had been woefully inadequate, even when the temperature was merely moderately cold.  Besides, I told myself, this hiatus created a natural impasse between me and the owner of the room and so stubbornly I left the question hanging between us.  until  I remembered the lamp There followed an anxious day and a restless night, during which all worries, connected and unconnected to my responsibility for the room and the well-being and safety of the other inhabitants of the house, paraded before me in all their shadowy gloom and, fitfully, in vivid, noisy dreams until once again I woke with a jerk after a very short nap just after dawn and could see and feel that the temperature had changed, perhaps the Gulf Stream had changed direction or something because a thaw had already begun and I could hear the ice drip drip drippin...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Steps

  I’d   taken a room for the winter.  No rent to pay,  I was merely picking up the post for someone and keeping an eye on things, but it was mutually beneficial being potentially somewhere for me to go and lick my wounds in the midst of life’s painful turmoil. Not far from where I was living, yet the route I took went down such old worn and overgrown paths to the long road it was on, my daily trek felt like a trip to a different town and so, to some small extent, took me away from the troubles I was experiencing at that time, or at least gave me a different perspective.  I remember seeing the house for the first time;  set back from the road, a few stories high with unswept steps up, the leaves of many autumns left to rot on well worn stones, they looked treacherous to climb and so I paused at the bottom, unsure, nervous.  Branches from the unkept high hedge hung over the way too.  I felt like I might be taking the wrong approach - was there anoth...
Post a Comment
Read more
It wasn’t surprising that the post box was empty, but it was amazing that the steps had been cleared and that a light came on in the hallway on entering.  Music and voices, some of them children, even a dog barking brought the house to life. The place, though still dingy and smelling of damp and dirt, no longer felt derelict. When I shoved open the door to the room and saw the lamp, I gasped a little, I’d almost forgotten, rushing to the plug I felt it for overheating  cool, I let out a grateful breath and uttered a prayer under another breath  which was making ghosts in the air it was so cold and so I put the electric fire on, having inspected its plug and flex for wear.  The   kettle boiling, cinnamon tea in a large mug waiting to be revitalised, I stood at the window looking at the hills above the snow line, still coated white and picture postcard beautiful when there was a quiet, tentative knocking at the door  On opening, a frail, wan, thin young woman...
Post a Comment
Read more