Recall a dishevelled-looking bloke? He was maybe wearing his pants like men do in their sheds, with a barely buttoned shirt, pre-dribbled, topped by an old cardigan. The glass doors behind him? Faked on a green screen. In reality, one was smashed.
I loved my husband dearly, despite what you might have suspected (or been told), and certainly if you saw inside our office and came to a very definite conclusion - here was a sad man abandoned!
Nope. He was loved! Utterly. The landfill he made of the office was not loved.
Think yourself fortunate. You saw this chaos from your safe side of a plastic screen. There you could sigh and tut and do whatever before slipping back to your normality. I bet you felt sorry for him. Hmm. Misplaced sympathies. I lived with this state, powerless to do anything about it, too respectful of, 'don't touch my stuff'.
'It's my stuff!' covered the hole in the ceiling, piles of ancient papers, collections of magazines and manuscripts from 1974, a cellar full of computer equipment from the 1980s, peeling paint, 100kg of cabling, cassettes, floppy disks, piles of gadgets and a variety of indescribable items whose only redeeming feature was that they didn't have real hair.
And the smell. Let's call a spade a bloody shovel. If you have lived with a teenager who locks their bedroom door, closes the windows and draws the curtains, then you can imagine the smell coming from the office. It was very similar.
Did I mention that time my office colleague absent-mindedly threw a dead bird in the bin? That is not endearing. That is a health hazard.
Anyway, those days are gone! I no longer feel the need to put a bag over my head when I realise someone saw the office.
These days, my office / flat / rooms of elegance / hand-made kitchen is now transformed. And it is fecking amazing.
I threw open the doors and windows, scrubbed the carpet, hired the roofers, painted surfaces, dumped furniture, offered a ton of stuff to happy hands on freecycle, sent 50 metres of books to the charity shop, dismantled shelves, installed a Victorian overmantle above the fireplace previously blocked by a bookcase and seven blankets, enjoyed my repaired glass door and sold anything of value on ebay.
I'm happy to say - if you are one of many previous guests invited via video link to this office - you'll never see this wonderful space. Maybe you can look at the ceiling - the old office is transformed to my new rooms.
Enjoy your happy memories.
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