Hinged and hung

Newly carved window frames and doorways hang suspended by ropes from the rafters of the stone built arches in the farmyard. I watched them breeze swing awhile. Hung out to paint. Hung out to dry. They frame space; miss panes of glass and wooden doors. You think, not of hanged men, that would be macabre. You think of possibilities. You could step through the empty door to find a finer world; open a magic window on to a sunnier life. Gordon Brown has something similar, hanging in his attic. The frames hang like a promise."Open this window and you will see the view is of a beauteous Britain, more beauteous than the one you've known. " My house in well-plastered tatters, walls now just memories, the frames say: "The future is walking through our doors any minute now. Keep faith awhile and see. "

I know I can relax. Where there was a wall along the back of the kitchen, there will be doors to a courtyard garden. The builder placed a penny coin, as shiny as could be, beneath the first stone of the door surround to wish us luck. Is that not kind and noble? A well-meant wish for luck. Can a house fail to be happy when founded on another person's kindess? He does the same in every house he builds. Mine, of course is not a new house, though I could argue it is a new life we are building up here. The house though, the house is a renovation, restoration, knock through. Not new. More noble yet then to wish me luck. He made an exception. Perhaps, he thought we needed more luck than most. I did not ask him which way it lay. Heads or tails? I wonder, if he cannot quite remember, will he lift the house to check?

Totally unfunny

I am fed up. I am so fed up I do not think I can even be funny about how fed up I am. It is not funny when a mother of three seriously contemplates running away to London for a day's purposeless shopping, and not coming home, at least for tonight. I decided I couldn't. It would confuse the children. It would confuse me. I might not want to come home at all.

I say "home". Obviously, it is not a "home". My "home" is occupied by smiley, dusty men with big boots who have revealed they are four weeks behind schedule. We cannot move back in to the cottage when we thought we could. It is not their fault. Two weeks went on slating a roof which was not in the orginal spec; another two weeks , replastering all the walls when it was hoped they would just need repair. Both roof and walls look better; I feel worse. I want my house back.

I do not think the funeral helped. Death, I have to say, is a bit of a downer. Not just for the dead. Funerals give you the chance to catch up with those you love and never see; meet those you like and will never see again. I met a deal of kindness there. Other people's kindness fills up an empty part of me. Someone who walked me across a field with a bull in it. A bull can fill a field. Very fast. He made me braver. One of life's natural carers who made us tea and fed us ham. A girl in a lakeside hotel, who brought me a teapot, cup and plate of digestives as I perched, gloomy, in the hotel foyer with a laptop. Dancing between customers in the bar, busy as busy; yet, she took a moment to glance through an open door and see me. She could have looked away, poured a smiling, eager face another foaming drink. She didn't. Another. An old friend of my father's who said to me: "You're a lovely looking girl." I am 42; I suspect he had cataracts. I am 42; I take a complement where I can get one. I liked all these people.More besides. But still, I got "peopled out".

There are times, when I feel my life has no "pause" button. Something you could press for a few moments of silent time, thinking time; the time to ask: "Where am I now?" I grope around. No button. The clock ticks on. You tick on. Even this morning, I crawled back to bed after the school run. At least I tried. There were two adults downstairs but my four-year-old came up to me three times within half an hour; hectoring, demanding, loving.

I am fighting back panic, that swept-away feeling of: "What am I supposed to do here?" Yesterday, the boys had a spaghetti sword fight. Inch-long pieces of (uncooked) spaghetti, shattered over the kitchen floor. At bedtime, the six-year-old water bombed the four-year-old's bed. What am I going to do when the baby is old enough to join in concert with her brothers' mayhem? We are outnumbered. We will be washed quite away. In 20 years time, I am sure I will laugh at their antics. If I am not dead, I will play "remember when's" with them. I will say: "Remember. When you flooded the bathroom. Twice in four days." Today though. Today, I want to weep. I feel guilty. If I was not writing, that is to say, working. Working at home. Still. Working. If I was more focussed on the children, they would stop moving seamlessly from one outrage to the next. If I was more willing to make papier mache piggy banks and take them on forays to the playground, they would transform themselves. They would be Granny's dream boys.

I am constantly "the bad guy". I take treasures away; rant; drone on, endless and relentless. They must "listen...do as you are told". They carry on. Regardless. I am reconstituting the star chart (rewards and praise for good behaviour.) I do not want to draw up any star chart; I want to run away. I am just not sure London is far enough.

It's official. I'm a bore.

There is no saving me; I have become a building bore. Traipsed up to the cottage this afternoon to meet the architect who is acting as the project manager. There was good news. According to the architect, we do not have dry rot, we have wet rot. Apparently, this is better. There was more good news, we can level the kitchen floor. This was a puzzler. The builder left us in little doubt that we needed a split level kitchen. It was a question of joists, ventilation, outside levels and steep steps. Technical stuff. Consequently, we had two different meetings with men from kitchen companies who measured walls and ticked boxes; men who went away to design a split level kitchen. These meetings involved head-shatteringly boring conversations about where to put the Aga and hinges. It turns out these meetings were a complete waste of time for them and us. We are back to plan A - the traditional kitchen on one level. Strangely enough, I wanted to understand for myself the reasons that suddenly all things were flat and possible. The architect explained it to me. Technical stuff - similar to the first conversation but different conclusion. No; not clear enough. Still could not get my head around why we could suddenly rip up boards, pour concrete and not have horribly steep steps to climb elsewhere. My husband had arrived earlier to talk this through. "Just leave it to us," the architect told me, inviting my husband into his very own boy's club of two. He could have added the word "pet" - that would have been worse.

I have let some comments slide by me here and I am not proud of it. Sometimes, if you are liberal and someone says something incredibly un-PC, it takes a minute for your brain to connect with your ears and go "Woh! Tell me he didn't just say that." The conversation moves on and being a namby-pamby liberal you think: "I'll just let it go." You cop out. Warning. Alert. Alert. I am not doing that any more. I am not a visitor. I live here. This time, my fluffy girly brain caught up that bit faster than it normally does. The amount of money we are spending may have helped speed up its Barbie pink and synaptic connections. I may have said I had no intention of "leaving it" to them. I may have used the word "chauvinist". I may have said half the money to do the work was mine and I wanted to understand exactly what was going on. I may not have smiled while I said these things. As an aside here, my husband was, throughout this exchange, admiring the dug-out floor. Assiduously.

I admit I may not have helped by own cause when I arrived and walked in to see half the floor up and piles of hard core heaped up everywhere. I did say: "Gosh, have you found coal?". But I know, our project manager did not hear the comment I made upstairs when I saw yet another wall has come down ( this time between the master bedroom and what will be the en-suite bathroom.) He definitely did not hear: "Golly, this is like shoes - the less you have, the more expensive it is."

Anyway, we got over it. I think he is talented and doing a very good job of overseeing the project. He rescued the space for us and says the wet rot is no big deal. Next time he gives us a bill, I will be interested to see whether my name is alongside my husband's.

Oops

I have just been up to the cottage to see how the builders are doing. They weren't there. Well, I tell a lie. The decorator was there. He gets the prize for being the first one to say "That's not in the spec. That'll probably cost you extra. It's a big job mind," when I asked about stripping the wooden beams that run along the ceiling of the sitting room. The other thing that was not there which I was expecting to see was the outside kitchen wall. When I rang my husband in rather a hurry to ask him whether he took it back down to London with him, he told me that the builders had been knocking a hole in the wall for a door and it sort of fell over. Something to do with the lime in the mortar. My husband is a trusting sort of chap. I asked: "Are you sure they weren't holding the plans upside down?" but he said "No", he didn't think so.
Before he did that "Mind it's a big job bit," the decorator had been stripping the walls of elderly paper. Over the breast of the blackened hearth, there was a picture of a boy drawn by his sister on the plaster. Their names proudly spelled out in wax crayon above the family portrait. I would have said she was about seven when she did it and that she was standing on a dining room chair to reach as high as she did. Her brother was an unfortunate child. He had orange scribbly hair and blue crosses for eyes and teeth. He looked happy though.

Mouses and houses.

I have never had so little control over my life - ever. Unless you count that one time in the hot-tub when far too much wine had been drunk and a guard had to be posted incase I slipped beneath the bubble-filled waves and was permanently lost at sea.
Here I am in windswept, muddy Northland when I have Beatrix Potter's townmouse written all over me. I know the marriage vows say something about "in sickness and in health" - I am sure, however, they didn't mention "up in the North and down in the South" because I wouldn't have signed up for that. I come from Leeds - I have "done" the North and you know what, I like dear old London town just fine. I feel like I am a character in one of those epic sagas of a Northern lass who gets hersen' down to London and suffers vicissitudes along the way, oh yes. But does she let them get her down? She does not. She's got grit has our heroine and she makes a reet success of her life in London and she gets a posh job and brass and nice frocks and a fella and then bugger me, if the fates don't decide to blow our scrappy heroine back up North to the mud she thought she had escaped so long ago.
But it is not just the mud and the loneliness. Three small children hang off our heroine at every available opportunity (or at least when they can't find the nanny) and they should know that really their Mam is not just their Mam, she is a career girl. Well maybe she is a little passed her sell-by for the term "girl" but there was a time when she definitely wanted to conquer the world. I mean, in what chapter did it all start to go so horribly wrong?
Was it that fateful moment, clutching a tear-stained photo of her little ones, she handed in her resignation at t' Big t'Office where she had t'Big Salary. Now, her glory days behind her, she works at home and when I say "works at home", at the moment she pretends to work at home because she hasn't actually done anything she got paid for since October. Soon, the nanny will notice and then there will be talk in't t'village about our soft-focus heroine being no better than she should be.
Anyway, enough of her. Cut. Pull focus and back to me. And the house.
To say we have dithered about what to do about the house is putting mildly. Let's spend nearly nine months waiting for planning permission to knock two houses together and go through a very painful tendering process. Yes let's do that. Then let's take some advice from estate agents and our accountant and decide we can't knock them together after all because we won't get back a big chunk of the £120,000 building costs when we come to sell one big house rather than the two little ones. OK, then let's decide to go househunting. (This involves vast and incomprehensible arrays of numbers on bits of paper and calls to a variety of building societies - some of whom laugh at us.)
I know what! On the same day (today) as having a meeting with a prospective builder about the original plans, let's go see another house we could buy for the laughable sum of £615,000 which we could just about afford if I sell the children's kidneys. Luckily for them, I didn't like it although my husband did. If, however, he thinks I am letting him decide which house we live in up here, he has another think coming. By four o'clock in the afternoon, we are so fed up with not knowing what to do, we decide we will go back to London. That's straight then. By 7pm, I decide that is a bad idea because we will feel we have been beaten by the system and if we go back to London I want it to be for positive reasons and not because we can't make up our mind between scrambled or fried eggs on a morning.
There was a time when I used to be quite good at making decisions. The latest decision, incase you are interested, is to knock the two houses together (what do estate agents and accountants know anyway?) and stay. I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow. Over breakfast when I shall be having cornflakes. Or porridge.

Who made the builders? Tell me.

One of my acute frustrations living up here is the lack of space. Outside it's all glorious green rolling acres everywhere while the beaches are empty, endless stretches of silvered sand. Inside my particular country cottage though, it is hell. Five of us squished together (six if you count the nanny) in what is effectively a two-bedroomed, toy-strewn hovel in which three adults are working full-time. It is like something from 18th century pre-revolution England - all cottage industry and screaming children with a little less smallpox. Needless to say, it wasn't supposed to be this way, we were supposed to buy and then knock through into next door's rural idyll to create a perfect domestic environment - full of living spaces rather than rooms and positively bursting with agas, en suite bathrooms and underfloor heating. Instead it is a sorry tale of planning delays and overpriced tenders from merciless builders. We waited eight months for planning permission without which you can't even put the job out to tender. Frankly I could have built a house in the time it took Berwick planners to give us their reluctant tick. But they begrudged us our dream. First they turned us down because of some ridiculous caveat about sewage. Then they started getting precious about bats. This meant getting the Batman of Embleton out to listen on his little black receiver for the screams of the common pipistrelle. If there was any screaming by this point, it was mine rather than any bat's. The boys got very excited at the prospect of the arrival of Batman but were less impressed when a pleasant chap arrived from the the National Trust. Luckily we didn't have bats in the arches we want to convert into a lounge, bedroom and shower-room. This was a difficult one to play. Ofcourse, we didn't want bats anywhere near our arches. Indeed the prospect of bats circling overhead as we slept, scuffling as they roosted with their leathery tinies and pooing furiously was appalling to an urbanite like me. But the Batman, naturally enough, was a fan and we didn't want to make him cross so we did a lot of fascinated nodding, took his leaflets and tried not to look too relieved when he said we didn't have them. He did manage to find a nesting wood pigeon though which we couldn't disturb until after September. I mean - a pigeon. I admit my sympathetic nature-loving smile slipped slightly at that one. But believe me - over the past few months as we waited for our planning permission, there have been times when I have envied that pigeon and its egg their des res. And as for builders. If I practiced voodoo I would be completely out of wax and pins by now. The knock-through we were told last November would cost us around £75,000 according to an estimate from our cheery chartered surveyor. By February, that had gone up to around £100,000 according to the architect (and don't get me started on him). Unfortunately, noone told the builders and when it went out to tender, the estimated cost had climbed to £240,000 - including VAT (that's alright then). Even the Polish bloke we got in amidst much teeth-sucking from our architect gave us a price of £193,000 (before VAT). Apparently, we managed to find the only Pole who does not know that the reason you employ a Polish builder is because he is cheap. As we speak, I am waiting for a man called Bill who has a mate called Dougy who are coming to have a look, go to the pub, get totally drunk, write down the biggest figure they can think of and attach a pound sign to it before they pass out.