269: apt twats and Merzbow

On Facebook (it’s a social networking site on the World Wide Web; it’s quite popular) this morning people are declaring today to be a beautiful day.  It’s as warm as Cyprus; a day for barbeques and the park; the sun is shining and everyone feels carefree, gay and jolly good indeed.

Well, I can’t tell because the curtains are closed.  I can’t hear the birds over the hammering and drilling.  The neighbourhood echoes with mechanical screeching of buzzing drill bits against solid brick, and chundering electric generators.  The external walls above, below and behind my head continue to be attacked, beaten and battered by the builders from just before 7.30am daily.  The curtains stay closed because if I were to open them the tea-drinking, hard-hatted, high-vis’-jacket-wearers would be free to observe me strutting about in my socks and tiger-print undies... If that’s what I was doing... I’m not though.

If, upon showering, my towel was to accidentally fall to the floor (gosh, imagine!) in what should be the privacy of my own home, there is likely to be a power-tool wielding lunatic at the window ready to take offence...

Hanatarash (I didn't mention them, but it's more Japanese noise...)

And so went my morning outburst; it is now late in the evening.  The memory of the rude awakening is long gone, but there will certainly be further disturbances again tomorrow morning.  I regret not documenting the whole monstrous project; turning it into a daily blog (yes, another one) including sound recordings of the nrrggggggghhhhhh zzzzzzzzzzzzggggggrrrrrrrrr-gah-gah-gag.Grrrrrrr-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz nnnnnnneeeeeeeeerrrrrrr aaaaahhhhh, etcetera, etc, e& that constantly permeates our mornings....

Anyone ever heard of Merzbow?  He is a sound artist (sometimes wrongly called a musician) from the Japanese noise (sometimes wrongly called noise music) scene, mildly known for releasing a 50 CD album entitled Merzbox.  Let’s just both have a little listen to some Merzbow and contemplate why this might be on my mind:

Yep, that’s right – fucking awful.  Sure, it has its place, but that place is not outside my bedroom window at 7.30 in the fucking morning.  Every day, for eight weeks.  I’d hang speakers out of the window and blast the entire Merzbox at them (yes, it’s on my external hard drive; what of it?) if I didn’t think they’d just crank up the masonry drills and jam along.  I need to get them when they least expect it; in the peaceful confines of their own beds at home, when their partners are just enjoying their first lie-in for weeks.

I know 7.30am is not night and most people are up and about (or at least munching cereal in front of BBC Breakfast) at that time, but I stay up late reading and blogging, and between nine and ten is my natural time to be roused.  And call me old fashioned, but there are more pleasant ways to be parted from slumber that having steel bore through solid brick inches behind your head.  I’d prefer a cuddle.  Not from a builder though.  Or maybe...  Given the ultimatum I may decide that a cuddle from a builder is better than the fucking racket they make.

Anyway, here is an interesting video from “Merzbow”; a sarcastic take on Silent Night.  How apt.  Twats.

218: ladders, scamps, scallywags and imaginary onions

Stupid scaffolding has been up on the house for only a couple of days and already a gang of scally-wags has been clambering all over the house.  What I want to know is why the builders have left their ladder up as an invite to tosspots, tied it at the top so I can’t take it down, and ripped up the front gate just to make access even easier.  It’s like an invitation to aggressive and naughty little idiots.  “We’re not fucking robbing you, what’s the fucking problem.”  To keep quoting from their stupid defence I’ll have to remove all the rest of the “fucking fucks” or it’ll look like I’m cheating on the word count.  “Get back in your house or I’ll smash you.”  “Which is your window?”  “Go on then, ring the police.”  Etcetera, etc, &c... 

They were, of course, all talk and no trousers (tracky bottoms tucked into socks), scampered off, and almost immediately began climbing all over the next group of semis down the street.  I came back out to try and take down the ladder; they saw me and shouted “it’s him again” and when I came back out a few minutes later to get the bus, they were nowhere to be seen.  Now all I have to worry about is midnight reprisals.  Our bedroom window is at comfortable kicking height, and the scaffold is loaded with heavy metal clamps and fasteners to lob crashing and unwanted into our lives and laps.

For obvious reasons I don’t want them up there; invasion of privacy, they might hurt themselves, they might snap our telephone wire or aerial or the neighbours satellite dish, they’re in my garden on my house, aggressive and ignorant, little Viz Rat Boys.  Anyway I don’t want to look out of the window and see teenagers tumbling past at terminal velocity, with only the newly laid tarmac to break their fall.  That would be terrible (terribly inconvenient... am I being unfair?  Probably, but...).  Only another six weeks to go, and then the house will look marginally different from the outside, woo hoo. 

Looking up from my desk during the week and seeing the feet of builders walking passed the window at ceiling height creates the perspective of living in a basement flat.  I can produce a comfortable delusion for myself by imagining it’s not a basement, it’s a garden flat or lower ground floor.  There, it’s not a building site after all; it’s a garden flat, full of strawberry plants and fresh herb bushes, yummy!  Home grown potatoes and carrots for tea roasted with home reared lamb; perfect.  I’m hungry.  See you later. 

213: codenames and wheelbarrows

Most of this weekend passed, I spent at my friends’ house eating their delicious food and playing with their 9 month old son, my godson.  My fiancée was away in Belfast planning the wedding; trying on dresses, worrying about money, and visiting hotels and wedding fairs.  Rather than sit at home playing computer games and procrastinating, I hightailed it to the friends’ where we could talk about music, politics, parenting, family, weddings (!), and the like.  It’s seemed like it had been a while since I saw my godson, but in reality it was only a few days.  Usually my fiancée takes over and I don’t get a chance to play with him.  So this was a good opportunity to teach him how to wave bye-bye and help him practice walking by holding his hands while he toddles and stumbles bravely around the living room.

I think it’s important to not start naming names and discussing other people’s lives and stuff in this blog, which is why I keep having to use phrases like ‘my fiancée’.  I’m not repeating this over and over just to show off in some pathetic little way.  Maybe I should come up with code names for all the people I mention.  ‘My fiancée’ could be replaced with ‘Codename F’, and the wedding could be renamed ‘Operation: Bankruptcy’.  That might get complicated for everyone if I have to start remembering codes, and I might become obsessed and start using them in real life.  That way madness lies, I think.  Best if I stay away.

Our wedding

Now it is a fact that I seem to have got behind with my blogging, and missed a day out in the last week.  I’m not sure how this has happened but off the top of my head I think I missed Sunday out.  Maybe more; I’ll have to double check.  But I am definitely playing catch-up, so this post is standing in for Monday’s, and then I’ll have to rattle out something for today (Tuesday).  I’ll try and make it about something.  I’m applying for copywriter jobs (I’d be brilliant at that!) so maybe something related; I don’t know. 

I’ve been struggling with Richard Dawkins’ The Extended Phenotype, which I had high hopes for but am finding quiet tedious.  The Ancestors Tale, The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable and The Blind Watchmaker were all brilliant; fascinating and lucid.  But Extended Phenotype just seems like a tedious essay or paper with thousands of references to other writers and their work in every sentence.  This is disappointing because I have read somewhere that Dawkins considers it his most important contribution to the field.  Once I get my head around it, or break through the crap to get to the good stuff. I may be able to write a bit about it.

The workmen from the council are at this moment unloading a load of scaffold poles in the garden and beginning the process of building platforms up the side of the house so they can look in our windows, and use our toilet by peeing in through the window.  The council are re-cladding the exteriors of all the houses on the estate, and I think they’ll be on the roof messing with the tiles and chimney stack.  My flat is the tops storey of a two storey semi-detached, and any minute now I will glance over my shoulder to see a big bloke in high-vis’ jacket and hard hat staring in at me through the window.  The next six weeks will be spent being woken up by hammering on the walls at 8am and keeping the curtains closed so I can scratch my arse and pick my nose in private.

I hope they are going to tarmac the driveway, because this morning I woke up to see the paving slabs being ripped up and thrown willy-nilly on the lawn.  Then for good luck the gates were smashed up a bit and a little mobile digger was brought along to mangle the gateposts into crushed concrete and twisted re-bars.  Any day now I’m expecting to be cut in two length ways by a falling roof slate, or to be disrupted from my evening meal by a wheelbarrow crashing through the ceiling.  At the moment there is soil were the drive should be.  I might run out and plant rows of onions and potatoes before they make it back with the tarmac.  

195: Builders, bin men, wrestlers and swans.

We’ve had builders bumbling around outside the house on and off for weeks now.  They are gradually multiplying and the frequency of their swarms is increasing.  Yesterday, as my fiancée was trying to enjoy her first day off work in about two weeks, the morning and early afternoon was a nonspecific cacophony of hammer against concrete from all around the building.  With tedious predictability, just when you thought they had finished it started up again.  Last week there were a couple of the shiftiest looking workmen you ever did see; they were knocking the lintels off the downstairs flat, shacking the whole building in the process.  Every time they needed to ask the downstairs tenants a question, they knocked on my fucking door first.  I had to tell them four times to try the other door.  Anyone that stupid is suspicious to me.

Today we were woken just before 8am by more hammering against concrete; that solid thud which you feel as building vibrations as well as hearing.  I looked out of the window to see the garden path being ripped up by a crew of high-vis’ hard-hats.  We rent a flat from a private landlord.  It’s the top floor of a semi-detatched.  The downstairs flat, and most of the other properties in the area are owned and maintained by the local council.  They also maintain the exterior of our flat so we are always getting communications that would only make sense if they were our landlords. 

One day a few months ago they came asking to measure our front door and asking me to choose a design from a scrap of paper.  I told them to ask the landlord.  Last year a couple of them came around when I was out demanding to see in the attic.  This was before the confusion about them maintaining the property was sorted out, and they basically barged their way in by intimidating my fiancée, and repeating ‘we need to look, you’re on the list’.  Nice blag if you want to go around trying to rob people in their homes.

Next week our lintels will be demolished, and then later in the month we enter a six-week period of hell.  Our building and most of the street will be surrounded in scaffolding, chimney rebuilt, new lintels and guttering, new cladding, probably a bit of accidental roof damage, and a fuck load of noise.  We got a letter through the door advising us to move around the house from room to room in a desperate and futile attempt to escape the all-pervasive racket.  Expect a few more blog posts about the noise as it gradually becomes all I can think about.

The path has been dug up for about five or six hours now, and paving slabs are piled all over the place waiting to be installed.  In a couple of hours the dark will be setting in.  The extremely thin road is almost entirely blocked by massive red and white barriers weighed down at the base with sandbags.  Tomorrow is bin day, and if those barriers aren’t moved the dustbin lorry won’t fit down the street.  Usually it can only just squeeze through, as long as cars are only parked on one side and they are right up on the pavement so far that prams can’t get through.

This counts as excitement.  Bin men and builders.  I am a curtain twitching old granny, watching some youths defacing a ‘this is a neighbourhood watch area’ sign and not doing a thing to prevent it.  I am a reclusive ‘what’s he building in there?’ type; the scary house – mysterious parcels from Transylvania and Malaysia go in; nothing comes out.  I conduct sinister experiments from behind closed curtains, and a strange impenetrable rain cloud hangs perpetually over the house.

Indeed.  Ok, time for some proper writing, and a cup of tea.  Going to the cinema later to watch Black Swan.  I’ve heard great things about it, plus my fiancée loves dancing, and I love the film The Wrestler by the same director (Darren Aronofsky).  Plus it stars nerd pin-up Natalie Portman (multi-lingual, atheist, science geek; what’s not to like?).  Plus Aronofsky has this to say about it: "Wrestling some consider the lowest art—if they would even call it art—and ballet some people consider the highest art. But what was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves."  That kind of thinking is right up my street.  I can’t wait.