Home life
A clean sweep
Alice Thomas Ellis The other day the old year intruded with its wall chart into this one as Janet grap- pled with matters of tax, digging out ragged bills and demanding that I scour mY memory for forgotten traces of legitimate outlay. There are few things more boring than trying to remember events that didn't even interest you much at the time, so I amused myself by throwing together an oxtail stew in the middle of all the docu- ments. Swede and turnip peelings may well be on their way to the Inland Revenue. Then one son started packing to go to Wales, while another asked where his birth certificate was, the telephone trilled, the pan bubbled and the locksmith ambled about estimating the cost of putting locks on doors.
I've never said this before, because you don't know who reads The Spectator these days, but we never used to lock our doors (in some cases since they haven't got any locks). Now that's all in the past. After Christmas with everyone short of money they've been coming round here looking for things to take away. Two men got the telly, and while I admit that locks on the doors wouldn't have made any difference as the doors were open in any case, it made me think.
A couple of days later a nasty little boy called. He knocked on the front door, Which is unique in that it does have a lock and we lock it, and I opened the bottom (unlocked) door and asked what he wanted. He said he was looking for his nonastinian and I said What? He said his nonastinian and it was a sort of plastic mouse and it was clinging to one of my windows and it might break it. Talking rapidly in a kind of fairground spiel he had edged his way in and was halfway up the stairs in pursuit of his, as I now realised, Mythical beast, when the penny dropped and I threw back my head and sang out all the names of the males who habitually frequent this place. He looked at me with contempt, obviously finding this a pathetic Ploy, so I was relieved to discover that two of the daughter's friends had strolled in earlier. Her generation tends to be built on the, large side (I don't know what we were eating 15 or 16 years ago, but she's Ingrowing us all and her male friends bang their heads on lintels) and I told the little boy that these gentlemen would answer any queries. By now another even nastier little boy had slithered in, luckily a bit slow off the mark, and I understood that I should have been up several floors with boy one, while boy two cleared out the ground floor. We Ushered them out, still talking, and it was some time before I discovered they'd got 'TV best leather jacket. They came again later in the week at night and this time Alan Bennett, my hero, saw them off. I took all this as a warning and I can't expect always to have the cavalry on hand so it's keys all round and a different sort of year ahead. I must remember not to fall into the error of hiding a key under a garden ornament. Our builder was working for a Man who at 8.30 on New Year's Eve had two vast stone lions on his gate-posts and When he came home five hours later in 1989 — he hadn't.
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