Day 33

Wednesday March 24

Mark:

Sarah continues the breakfast theme and wakes us this morning with toast and tea. We will really have to be careful to not get too used to this.

She tells us she’s decided that if we can patch the shower up so that it definitely, definitely does not drip anywhere, we can use it. This is something of a relief so we get to work. We go out to the local hardware store and buy what we think we need to do a patch up job. With different types of cut out parts of bin bags and shopping bags and a lot of tape, we fix the holes around the bath where water has been leaking through. It isn’t pretty but it sure looks effective. It looks like we’re back on.

Maja:

Well. As long as I don’t do anything permanent I should be able to find a way of making the shower usable again. So I drag Mark to the hardware store. I’m going to fix this. I’m not allowed to actually fix the cracks with grout – that has to be done by the council that refuses to come – so I’ll have to find a solution that works without doing anything permanent. 

I pick up three of the cheapest available shower curtains, and some tape. With which I fully waterproof the bathtub area so you can shower. As I finish, it is once more usable, and no water will fall on the floor and drip to the neighbours. This is a big accomplishment for me. Only one thing. The bathroom is left looking like one of those rooms that people use for murders in horror movies. 

Mark:

Through this job we’ve discovered a couple more things that we could get on with. One of them is to maybe replace the lino in the bathroom. This seems like quite a big change so I think it’s prudent to ask Sarah if it would be OK. She’s almost offended by the question. In a weary tone, bizarrely managing to snap at the same time, she says, ‘Mark, I’ve told you. This is your place. Do what you want. I couldn’t care less what you do. Stop asking.’ Despite the tone, I guess there’s a kind of love in that response.

We haven’t heard at all from Sarah’s lawyer friend, but she says he can be a bit like that and not to worry about it. Then, standing in the centre of the main room, she says, ‘Hang on a minute.’ She closes her eyes, goes into deep concentration mode and faces her head towards the ceiling. When she opens them again, she looks at us with total confidence and says, ‘I just asked my guys and got the answer back. You two will be fine. Maja isn’t going anywhere.’ Two words. O and K. When I speak to Maja about this later, she rationalises it, saying that what Sarah is actually doing is concentrating and going on gut feeling and claiming, or actually believing, that that is coming from some other place to give her a message. 

Since it was declared that we would rehearse two or three times a week, no messing, we haven’t yet managed one follow up. There’s an attempt at it tonight with a rehearsal declared, but with no explanation, we later learn it’s been cancelled. Oh well. We take the opportunity to instead take a bottle of red wine up to Hampstead Heath to sit on our favourite bench on the top of Parliament Hill and look down on the beautiful and spectacular city centre view with some Gruyere as a perfect accompaniment. A wonderful escape from what is increasingly feeling like a chaotic, ever changing and unpredictable lifestyle. Oh yeah. Dee apparently lives with us now. We’ve not been working with him so much but he has been spending more and more time here. That was cool, but then today Sarah announced that he’s moved in. Fine. We guess. Whatever she keeps telling us, it is of course her place and she can do what she wants with it, but what’s happened to the thing where she was never going to be here and it was to be our place to do what we wanted and then she was going long term travelling and leaving it all to us? This is increasingly looking like not being a thing. She hasn’t even been away once yet. Instead, what we’ve experienced is being told a whole bunch of times that she had plans to go away, then those dates have come and gone and have been completely unobserved with no mention of any kinds of plans or cancellations. Again, totally her prerogative of course, but it is all a little strange, slightly unnerving, and starting to veer ever so slightly off course from the brochure message we received at the start of all this.