Old Houses, New Life

The best thing about an old house is that you get to butcher insects; hoover up woodlice who are too slow to care and dish out swift caesareans to heavily pregnant spiders who set up maternity wards on my bedroom wall. The house is super though and every morning I find myself either gasping when I open the window (sailing boats, people with bad bones inching along the prom, the sight of a giant ferry sluicing its way towards Belfast) or sometimes I just forget to breathe I am so excited about what I'm seeing. After two years of starting at a magnolia plywood wall in suburbia, I find it genuinely exhilarating. The other morning I pulled back the curtains to see a big blanket of mist curving its way over the stone wall and the white cat from next door was just sitting on the wall sniffing at the mist. I thought this was marvellous! A mist sniffer. I also thought I would be molested in my sleep by a dead sailor or that the house would throw up at least a few poltreigeists as soon as I unpacked (it's the oldest inhabited house in Whitehead) but nothing at all. My soon-to-be-flatmate is spooked out by her bedroom being so near the old maid's quarters and I've lied and reassured her that it's not spooky at all. It doesn't help that she may read this blog either so for the sake of arguement let's reiterate by saying even her bedroom with its glass panel door looking onto bedrooms where servant girls were forced to give birth with apples in their mouth, isn't creepy at all. The maid's rooms are stacked full of ancient books...some are hundreds of years old, others are just collectibles of Shakespeare and other such dead morons and the dust makes you sneeze modern snot all over their leather covers. Sweet. I keep finding strange objects everytime I pull open a drawyer...old fashioned card games and tarot cards fall out, parchments with soldier's talk and old poems about drunken butlers. The sitting room is awesome: lots of light and two windows out to sea and another two out into the front walled garden. The walled garden is my favourite as it's so private and looks onto the castle, while the sanded garden out to sea looks straight onto the Ranger's Club porch and they can laugh out loud as you bend over with your big arse to get coal out of the shed at night-time. Enough to make me cry with paranoia. The most frustrating thing about the move has been NTL's outrageously bad behaviour...moving from a cabled area to a non-cabled area and having rung up for three weeks solid to make sure there'd be no fuckups with my email, they have still managed to delete my email account without notice and fuck up my week's work. I have decided not to use them again and have signed up for a 3STORE internet dongle that I can use in Whitehead and on the train on the way to work (or anywhere)....great coverage and only £7.50 per month cos I also signed up for their £15 per month (incl VAT) mobile phone option and received a spanky new white Nokia, so it's happy days and my monthly bills fall by about £60. Now there's just the small hurdle of getting BT to give me a line at the house without having to pay a hefty deposit. They tell me I've bad credit. It shouldn't matter a fuck if you offer to pay your bills by direct debit and if they continue to refuse me I will hunt out the CEO and stick a banana up the exhaust pipe of his car and poison his dog.