Grit's choice

Dig takes the kids out for the day. Well, OK, the afternoon, because first he makes a few telephone calls for work and then I make a picnic lunch for everyone, and then he can actually depart.

Now what can I choose to do with my afternoon off? Do I skip into town, splash out on a new perfume, sparkle with a new lipstick, or even try a new hat because hey! I might be a person who could wear a hat! We never know until we try! A new hat might just point me in the direction of being a new person! Or maybe I will wake up tomorrow with my new hat and look like Audrey Hepburn because where there is a new hat there is new hope, right?

Of course I do not choose those things. Perhaps because there is no hope. Or perhaps I am a woman in despair. In despair mostly, at the state of the bathroom. So I eject Dig and the kids from the house because Something Must Be Done.

The bathroom we are referring to here is the kid bathroom. It was not always the kid bathroom. Once it was MY bathroom and I painted the walls white, and hung white and gold stuff everywhere and when I was in that beautiful palace of a stylish bathroom I felt like a Princess who had just eaten the last Turkish Delight and got her fat tummy tickled by a perfect prince.

And then three toddlers arrived from nowhere and overthrew me. No-one was interested in taking returns or even offered to come and collect them. They were here to stay. And to bypass the screaming and squealing at bathtime, Mummy Grit, over three evenings, went downstairs, probably in despair, and painted stuff like this all over the walls, ceilings, tiles and doors of my beautiful white bathroom.








Apart from Mr Tiger getting whitewashed three years ago when Shark said he was going to eat her, they have remained more or less there, on all the bathroom walls, tiles and ceiling, long after we have outgrown them, staring and grinning at us, just like that.

The problems started straightaway. And my first problem was one that I did not forsee. Because in this egalitarian household of ours, we could not then say to our child No you must not paint on the walls. We could not say Well I know mamma painted on the walls. But hers looks like art and yours bloody looks like scribble, so YOU cannot paint on the walls but I CAN. And so, to the extended arm to metre height of a toddler there is a huge lot of daubing in paint, crayon and pencil, and we have put up with this because this is the KID bathroom, and this is one of the by products of EGALITARIAN HOME ED.

I would like to say the kids are the worst culprit. But there is problem number two.

Several years ago we had a constant drip drip drip in the office bathroom which adjoins the kid bathroom; a steady seep of water trickled through and soaked off most of the plaster to knee height. For several years Dig declared 'This is nothing to do with me'. Right, matey. Just as well you did not use that line when three screaming kids arrived because if you did, you would be standing there right now without fingernails.

Now my third problem is a consequence of all this kid and water damage. Which is unfortunate, because no one can reasonably use this bathroom without first being chemically sedated, or having a bag forced over their head so they cannot see the mess, and then pushed into the bathroom and told By the way, there is problem number three. The toilet does not work.

I cannot remember now why the toilet does not work. It just does not. Ask Dig.

If this was not bad enough, there is problem number four.

In pursuit of knowledge and a well rounded education, the bath, sink, shelves and toilet top have been a main place of science experiment for the last eight years. Here we have exploded fizz bombs, made sludge, painted Blutina's hooves green, tried volcanoes, boats, ice hands and put soil and oil down the toilet.* Consequently, there is quite a bit of collateral damage from industrial strength paint and chemical product.

If only the problems could all stop there. The green forest background now hides mould, spider webs and darkens the entire room so it looks like a mildewed cave in a woodland. Confused, a blackbird flew in here the other day and when it finally escaped, was so drenched in mould and cobwebs it looked like Miss Haversham straight out the Amazon.

Well I can take no more. I have to clean up. First because this bathroom is going to be ripped out and replaced, and I cannot bear to have the workmen actually see the bathroom in the state it's in, and second, because we may have a visitor passing through The Pile and I am thinking Ohmygod what if she wants to use the bathroom?

So I arrange for Dig to remove the Gritlets so they cannot see what I am about to do to their Gritlet sty which is attack it with a large can of whitewash and other cleaning essentials.


After three hours scrubbing, whitewashing and weeping, I am recalling Mr Pooter painting his bath red. He clearly used the wrong type of paint. I have to remove the top millimetre layer of the entire surface to get our bath clean. And after an hour, the top of the non-working toilet still looks like this:


And this, sadly, is how I choose to spend my free afternoon. Or forced to, by necessity and despair. Scrubbing a toilet top, washing down mould, pulling off plaster and whitewashing walls.

I bet Audrey Hepburn never did the like.

* Without parental consent.

Bathroom etiquette

I am a proud mummy.

Shark, Tiger and Squirrel have reached a new, important stage in their intellectual development as Proper Growing Up Little Madams.

When they were aged five, or six, one of them, usually Squirrel, would be dispatched on a mission to find me, wherever I was in the house. Mummy! she would whisper urgently, with eyes wide and expression grave. Do not come into the bathroom!

This injunction is, obviously, a fundamental mistake, as any supervising mother will know. Of course I uttered Oh my god, then left my appearance a decent time, possibly three minutes, before striding into the bathroom as if I had forgotten the request, or come to claim Oh that was a long time ago, and anyway, come out quickly because there is jammy toast on the table!

Then Squirrel, Shark and Tiger would all scarper out of the bathroom and I would find out what they have been up to, do a bit of complaining, issue rules about wood, soil, plastic snakes, toilets and Sindy dolls, and clean up.


Now, I am proud to say, my little girls are becoming much more sophisticated about their bathroom usage.

Today I pass the closed bathroom door. I hear running water pouring into the bath and a great deal of earnest talk: three little voices, twittering, with lots of giggles inbetween. He is going for a swim now. Put his head under the tap. He likes the shower, doesn't he? He would like this on his head. Get it ready! Swing him round! He likes flying!

I pause outside the bathroom door to eavesdrop long enough, then shout What are you doing in the bathroom? There is a moment's frozen silence, apart from the sound of water splashing into the bathtub. Then Tiger shouts, Nothing.

And I hear the sound of something heavy, slowly being pushed against the door.


...


And after some time had elapsed, and some tempting jammy toast laid out on the kitchen table, this is what I found hanging up over the bath.


You would not have guessed washed unicorns hanging over a bathtub filled with snakes, lizards, and pots of paint, would you?

New bathroom

Tra la la! We have a bright, shiny new bathroom! And trouble free! No noise, no fuss, no broken bits of wall, no men wandering about the house with sad expressions and shopping lists for B&Q, no-one saying at all 'Where's that widget? I put it here five years ago and LOOK. Now it's GONE. I'd finish the bathroom today if it wasn't for PEOPLE who come along and MOVE THINGS.'

No. None of the above. These bathroom men have been proper professional bathroom men and just got on with it. I'm wondering now if they'd like to have a crack at the leaking shower downstairs, the front of the house where the rain comes in, the windows, the office ceiling, the kitchen floor, and the front room. I'd add mending the stair rope where the fixings have come away from the wall and we've propped them back in, but I won't because I get to see the expression on someone's face when, unknowing about this small hazard, they gently hold onto the stair rope only for it to rip clean out the wall.

Professionalism

I have to admit it. Bathroom Man is very quiet and orderly and professional about the bathroom ripping. So far there has been no screaming, no yelling, no strange and prolonged silences after a house-shaking thump, crash, bang, or tearing sound, and so far no one's had to pop off for a couple of hours to B&Q where they have a special sale of He-Man power tools.

It's quite a contrast to the last bit on work done around here, that's for sure. Several years ago, before babies started crawling all over the house through every entrance and exit, me and Dig did some dramatic reorganisation of our living accommodation. We bought the cellar from the flat next door to convert it to an underground bedroom. With the help of some local builders, we next smashed through the walls and ceiling of the former bedroom to make a lovely open space with a wooden chapel roof. Then we set about the kitchen, rearranging the walls. Well, those were the days. And they were a million miles away from the quiet professionalism of Bathroom Man.

In those days there was a lot of shouting of 'Offer it up' and 'Bring it down' and 'It's your fault. You broke it'. Then there'd be stuff all over every surface, plaster everywhere and tools piled six foot deep, most of them which required bits that were lost, stuck on so tight they wouldn't come off, or broken, which meant another trip down B&Q. After six weeks of living on chips, the Indian take-away and the Chinese take-away in rotation, we were no further forward on the wiring or the floor, were up to our eyeballs in house poo and just had to drive to Wales to pick up the sink.

We must have been mad.

So it's no small relief that Bathroom Man is organised, efficient, and quiet. In fact I think I'll forget about the bathroom now and let it all happen around me while I go make a cup of tea.

Bathroom

Some men are destroying the bathroom. I'm not absolutely certain that I knew about this, but Dig says he warned me, and don't forget there'll be no toilet from now until Thursday.

The last I consciously remember about this was when Bathroom Man came round in July to quote for ripping out two bathrooms, one after the other, and then nothing happened. For a long time.

Because nothing happened, I remember Dig ringing up Bathroom Man about twenty times and visiting the showroom at least three times. On the last visit he must have been particularly struck by a young lady polishing her nails, because he keeps telling me about her. Apparently Dig had to stride about the showroom in full rhetorical voice, pausing only to strike dramatic poses with his hand on his heart, his eyes to the shower fittings, and a pained expression on his face, while Young Lady Nails replied, 'Yeah ... Yeah ... He's not in today ... Yeah ... Yeah ... I'll tell him you called ... Yeah.'

Then more nothing happened.

Until last week when Dig went to Poland and told me over the phone that some men might come and rip out the bathroom while he's gone. This bit of infomation I ignored, deciding that it happens when it happens.

Well, apparently, it's happening today.

Feeling vague

As I am feeling vague today I'm posting a picture of a back alleyway in Smalltown. This might help me focus my mind on the broken toilet which is now constantly running water through the cistern. I think someone may have stolen the ballcock.

Never put soil down the toilet

Everyone's got their windows open today, enjoying the sunshine and fresh Spring wind. I've chatted to Anny, the neighbour, and Shark, Tiger and Squirrel have been playing in the garden under the trees. In the few five and ten minutes they have popped into the house to gulp down a fruit smoothie, complain about a sister, fetch a plastic bowl or have a wee, we have learned the words soil, boil, coil, foil and oil.

Shark says that the word oil is also in the word toilet. 'You are absolutely right!' I applaud. Clearly, my daughter is a genius, and may publish her first novel by age ten.

Later, when I haven't seen Tiger, Shark or Squirrel for some time, I do my rounds, just to check that Tiger isn't lying flat out dead under the blackberry brambles while Shark says 'We told her to come and get you mummy', or that Squirrel's not locked herself in the little play house at the bottom on the garden and is screaming her head off in there because she's just turned round and found the cat that someone lost last October. But nothing's wrong. Everyone's fine, making Roman cities in the mud, and populating the Circus Maximum with toy unicorns. I wave to Anny, and think what a lovely day it is; just how home education should be.

Then I come back up to the house and go into the bathroom. Now, how do I describe the scene that meets my eyes? There is no delicate way. Inside the toilet bowl there is no ceramic visible. The sides are etched in black, with what looks like unmoving rivers of black slime making no progress into the bowl. The long black chains of slime cannot make any progress because inside the bowl there is what looks like lumps of grey and brown, with tiny black seeds mounted atop. Thinking this has come out of someone's bottom, my first response is to bellow 'Oh my God!' at the top of my voice. It's as the words, 'Get a doctor!' are forming in my synapses that it dawns on me that this is not any ordinary bottom-made soil, but garden soil, complete with mud, rotted leaves and ivy seeds.

There's only one response now called for. Burst through the door into the garden in a fury, tea-towel waving, index finger out, shouting to a startled Tiger, Shark and Squirrel, 'Do not put soil in the toilet! And under no circumstances are you to experiment with toilet, soil, oil or foil!'

This is why, once a year at Christmas, we get ourselves on our best behaviour, get out the bottle of port, and invite the neighbours round. I want them to see we can be normal.

Bathrooms

There's a leak in the top bathroom which is dripping through the ceiling onto the landing. Dig got rained on with a plip! plop! plip! when the children pulled the plug on the bath. This is bad news.

We are now in the bizarre and unusual situation of living across three flats and have a total of five toilets, two baths and three showers.

None of the showers work. The one downstairs in the old cellar hasn't worked for ten years. When it was installed, the chief shower tile technician and his oppo put the shower tray tiles on upside down, so the water channelled into the grout, stayed there, and eventually dissolved the grout. After regrouting and resealing the problem and solution remains the same: take out the old tiles and retile with new. Unable to face that task while the rest of the house falls down, the shower got used as a cupboard.

The shower in the office flat is disgusting. The tiles fell off the wall about four years ago. I'm not sure whether Dig's removed them from the shower tray or whether he just stands on a tile pile when he showers. I won't go in there to find out. I stopped going in as a protest about the leak from the shower tray which has knocked the plaster off the wall and destroyed the wooden floor in the flat next door. And the last shower we've got is upstairs in the top flat. And now it leaks.

So it might be that we're all back down to the childrens bathroom again, where there's only a bath and no shower. There's also a revolting toilet which has seen seven years of child use including paint, toothbrushes, bath foam, and a Sindy doll with a bag on her head.

What makes it worse is that in a post-pregnancy fit six years ago I painted a green leafy jungle all over the walls with animals peeping out, so there are zebras and hippos and monkeys staring at anyone who chances a wee in Sindy's paddling pool. I had to whitewash the tiger out because Squirrel got scared. So now there's a strange white misty patch in the green leafy jungle with the chin of a tiger poking through where Shark took a scrubbing brush to the walls.

Oh well, there's always a bucket in the yard. And for me, I might start going back to the gym again every morning. They do a lovely warm towel service with scented shower gel to go with their wonderful high pressure hot showers. And I don't have to take responsibility when they leak.