fiftyfreeandsingle

The Cosmos is on an all out mission to teach me a life lesson

This lesson is about patience, about humility, about acceptance, it comes in a bundle, around 5 feet 2 inches in its sixties and it goes by the name of Mary-Anne.

Mary is my Auntie and she has been touched by fairy-dust. In fact I think she is for the most part away with the Fairies  most of the time.   Mary telephoned a week or so ago from her little cottage in Pembrokeshire to tell me her heating had broken down, that she was freezing and that she had nobody to talk to, the killer punch, that she was lonely. Can I come and stay with you? Of course I said yes. Then she asked when my son would come home from University, as she preferred his room as it was bigger than the spare room. I replied not until quite late in December………….. “Oh Good” she said ominously……………….. We didnt discuss how long she was going to stay, I was afraid to ask. It’s strange to think that a little old lady  could strike fear into the heart of a grown man, but she does.

She does a lot off curious stuff, mostly involving bits of tissue. Why does one person need to leave little bits of tissue all over the house, can you tell me? They are all damp? I am wondering if people who spend a lot of time in Pembrokeshire just absorb a lot of ambient moisture from the atmosphere, when they leave Wales and come to drier climates does the water just start to leak back out?  Then there are bottles of liquids everywhere, used milk bottles with stuff in them, I’m afraid to ask what. Then there’s the cold cups of tea, Mary likes to drink cold tea, I find cups of half drunk tea all over the house, I am not allowed to clean them away as she is always just about to drink them.

I have after twenty years got used to having things in my house in a certain way, one is the kettle, it has sat happily in the same spot, next to the toaster and cooker for the duration, but now mysteriously it moves to the other side of the kitchen when my back is turned, I move it back again, but within 24hrs it has moved again, this has now happened four times in the space of as many days, either I have a poltergeist or that woman is moving it, I suppose the later is more likely.

On friday I did a little clothes shopping, I rushed home as I was off out that evening and left my shopping bags in my bedroom. When I returned later that evening Mary-Anne said to me I noticed that you had a Lana Del Ray CD in your shopping bag, I really love her can we listen to the CD?  I said yes of course, but couldnt bring myself to ask how or rather why she had gone into my room, gone through my shopping and found the CD I had bought at the bottom of the bag? Its best not to look for reasons I think.

Bless her though her heart is in the right place, she frog-marched me to buy a new Vacuum Cleaner, my house was in dire need of some TLC so she made me do that, then the fridge, well, the fridge. Lets say that I havent been doing a lot of cooking onver the last six months, there is little point in cooking for one, but whenever I go to the supermarket I have not managed to adjust my brain to shopping for one, so I end up buying stuff and simply not using it. The result has been a fridge that, with time has accumulated a selection of produce vastly past its sell by dates. Mary seemed to take a perverse joy in cleaning my fridge, and at strategic points showing me the dates of expired food before she threw it out, she also counted out nine packets of betroot, yes i seem to have bought nine packs of betroot, a little OTT I must admit, she counted them out to me one by one, humiliation is a powerful tool.

I find myself going to bed earlier in the evening than I might otherwise, to escape Mary, last night as I escaped she caught me on my way upstairs to bed, a long conversation ensued, about nothing important, towards the end Mary said that she would probably go back to Wales in a few days, and then something very strange happened, words came out of my mouth that I just really didnt mean to say.

” Oh no Mary, you cant go back to a freezing cold house, you have to have the boiler sorted, no you must stay as long as you need to, I insist”  My dear heavens, what did I say that for, and why did I say it with such conviction. I must be a masochist, or at the very least maybe I have had a complete mental breakdown and not realised I have totally ceased to make any rational statements?

Or maybe it is the Cosmos giving me the lesson that I need to learn: accept the present, but most imprtantly of all never avoid speaking your truth or you risk your sanity.

PS If this post mysteriously dissapears from view, it means that I suspect Mary is trying to crack my Ipad access code and I’ve deleted the post from the Blog as a precaution, lets keep this one to ourselves.