Monday, January 21

Introducing... Mental Lady Downstairs

She's never made an appearance in this blog before, but it's high time she graced these pages.

We live in an apartment block consisting of 7 floors. As a result of 100 people of so living in close proximity to each other I can often hear the people around me (muffled) flushing their loos, watching to their tvs (upstairs love EastEnders and American Idol) and making home improvements. It doesn't bother me much. I chose to live in this place so I expect to sometimes hear my neighbours.

Mental Lady does not seem to understand this as well as me. She comes up to my flat about once a month and says to my boyfriend and I that she can 'hear everything'. She told us that we 'bang things all the time' and that she can hear us 'moving around in our kitchen and going to the toilet'. She can also hear us 'dropping things' and 'hoovering'.

I really don't see what we can do about any of this, apart from lining everything in our flat that opens and closes with cotton wool, refraining from going to the bathroom, never ever washing our clothes and allowing our carpet to mount dust.

My favourite one is
'I can hear you opening and closing your front door to go to work every morning'.

I leave the house before James to catch my train. I'm really quite quiet. I have nobody to talk to and therefore just walk down the stairs and close the block door like everybody else.

We don't have our tv on loud (because I hate loud tvs). We only really listen to music on Saturday mornings. I vacuum in regular, daytime hours. We both go to bed before midnight and we have never had any parties. We have never paid our rent late and have an excellent relationship with our landlady.

She says that 'this flat, twelve, is always problem'. I don't know what to do! How can I tell this woman to FUCK OFF next time she comes round and tells us off for living in our flat?

Wednesday, January 16

Update

Yeah, I've been a crap blogger recently. This PGCE is a killer.

I'm making the sauce for my famous chicken parmegiana, soon to be served to my friends Elin, Rob and Steve, and watching 6ixth Sense with Colin Fry. What a charlatan. He's even worse than my favourite psychic Sylvia Browne, but I don't think anybody can top her and her crazy eyes. I wanted my flat to be clean and smell welcoming when the guests arrive at 7.30-8.00. Instead it reeks of garlic and there's stubborn fluff all over my carpet. I shall have a bath soon and tidy myself up to try and compensate for my shabby abode.

I have a MASSIIIVE assignment due in next month, and I've decided to concentrate on underachieving boys and literacy, which is a meaty topic for a first project, but one that there is a lot of existing research on. In a nutshell; boys don't seem to be able to make the same connection between cognition and writing that girls do, and require structured frameworks and gradual introduction to extended writing tasks in order to achieve similar results. But it only works if you keep it up over months, and make sure it's used in writing across the curriculum (in maths, science, history etc...). It's actually really interesting stuff, I've been reading the library books in the bath just for fun. However I am dreading writing it all up and putting my own twopenneth in, because I'll probably just sound like an incoherent moron.

What an interesting life I have. I'm sure I have enriched yours significantly by revealing the banal minutiae of my own.

Tuesday, January 8

Does anybody know...

What can be done about damp? The black, mouldy stuff that accumulates on walls and ceilings.

Is major structural reconstruction required to shift it? (men in boiler suits hacking at walls, crowbars, hammers, that kind of thing...)

I ask because there is damp on the inside of the external walls of my flat and I don't have the first idea what to do about it. I have put off dealing with it since September, because I didn't have the energy (couldn't be bothered) to find out.

It's probably not such a good idea to have it around, because of my asthma and sensitivity to mildew and suchlike.

I have this image of men in radiation suits sectioning off my kitchen with yellow tape and blasting enormous holes in the side of my flat. I'm probably over-reacting, but the medication makes me get things out of proportion sometimes.

Please don't tell me to rub it or clean it off myself. I refuse to touch it, because spores freak me out. My walls are ALIVE.

Do Google searches and that...

Google