Recursive Words

We are having the downstairs bathroom ripped out at the moment. A complete replacement for the bathroom I have used every day for the last twenty five years. It’s the worst bathroom in the house but I put up with it, clean it, and make the best of it while everybody else uses the bathroom upstairs.

After the first team of builders turned up early in the week for a “one week job”, and ripped out the fittings and plaster, we were left with an empty room for a day before the electrician arrived – this morning.

It turns out we have lived here for 25 years with the risk of being electrocuted. The ground at our electrical circuit breaker has never been “bonded” to the metal pipes that deliver water on the opposite side of the house. This is apparently quite dangerous. Fixing this situation has added to the cost of the bathroom quite considerably, because getting said grounding wire from one side of the house to the other was… interesting.

Along the way, floorboards had to come up. This meant moving a bookcase, which meant transporting the contents of it from one end of the house to another, and making my own bedroom un-passable for some time. I returned it to normal before my other half returned from work.

Anyway.

After finishing work today, I was given the task of walking into town to buy some tortilla chips. We had ordered them with the shopping to make dinner tonight (we had nachos), but some enterprising eating machine in the house (one of my daughters) had eaten the tortillas already. Of course none of them owned up.

So off I went – in the pouring rain.

While walking towards town I happened upon a young woman walking in front of me, talking on her phone, and taking up the entire path. My only way around her was to slither my way across a muddy verge next to the footpath. She still didn’t notice me as I drew level with her – hopping from one hopefully solid patch of grass to another, and praying that gravity would not deliver me to the enormous puddles surrounding us.

Even as I swore under my breath, she took no notice, and gave me no quarter.

Moments later, while turning past the entrance to Narnia (an old joke about a single lamp-post that stands among trees at the back of the high-street), another woman appeared – walking towards me – and forced me off the path once again.

What is it with people at the moment?

Perhaps they were non-player-characters in the TV show about my life that I’m not supposed to know about – challenging me to do something stupid, or to explode in rage. The directors will have to do better than that.

How come they never throw any proper sliding doors moments at me?