The swifts are back!

They usually arrive in the 2nd week of May – I’ve never known them turn up later than the 14th of May. I might have seen a few flying round Senate House in Malet Street on the evening of the 12th. But too far away for me to see clearly.

Though there were some jackdaws I hadn’t previously noticed. In the bit of Bloomsbury I work in we get pigeons (of course) with crows and starlings not uncommon. Now and again magpies, woodpigeons, blackbirds, pied wagtails. I’ve seen mallards, herring gulls and blackheaded gulls in flight, but not landing. All very urban. But I’ve not seen a jackdaw there before.

But anyway. Walking to church on Sunday morning, 14th May, and there they were!. Bang on schedule. Flying in and out of rooves of houses, hawking low over the vicarage garden, flying round the spire. In the evening service I could hear them screaming past the windows.

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but one swift does. Spring was late starting but now its back on schedule.

The three biological events I wait for at this time of year all happened on time – the mining bees in the churchyard were flying on Easter morning, the swifts were back in town for the 14th of May and the trees are just about fully back in leaf. The canopy has closed. The London planes (the main street tree in town) have got a full covering of soft hairy leaves, still not fully grown but enough to cast almost full shade, and the limes (most common street tree in South East London) are bursting with soft pale green leaves still sweet enough to eat. As always nearly all the sycamores have been in full leaf for some weeks now. The South London skyline is a soft green shade and once again Brockley and Forest Hill look like Tuscan hills. From a safe distance. When the sun is shining. If you’ve been drinking and are in a good mood.

Magnolias and cherries long out of flower, but the lilacs are still in bloom and the streets smell like spring. The horse chestnuts have come out, the hawthorns are in bloom, and the elders are about to move to fruiting. The willows catkins have gone and the oaks are coming out – and the huge evergreen oak in the churchyard has a full flush of yellowish-green new leaves and flower buds covering over last year’s dark leathery spiky foliage.

Summer’s come at last. A pity we have to put up with all that horrid hot weather and nasty sunshine if we want to enjoy it. But at least there will be some shade in the streets.

I like trees

Well, that all took far longer than I expected…

Well, that all took far longer than I expected…

all the wonderful walking-round and taking photos and writing-things plans for spring fell through. Its nearly summer and the photos remain resolutely in the camera. And all the good blogging that I was doing in my head remains in my head. Too much work (for a change) and most of it writing. I had to write about 30 pages for a project at work and ended up writing 20 or more for an essay for a course I’m doing (another couple of 4-in-the-morning jobs) and didn’t have many words left for this.

Didn’t stop me posting on Cix or the Ship of Fools or a few other place though. Maybe I am just a reactive person, I need a question to answer, something to talk back to. Cix or the Ship is addictive because there is always something inane to moan about that someone else wrote. But coming up with my own inanities is much harder.

And now I’m sitting at work using the computers to do these non-work things and really ought to go home. Except that I even realier ought to fill in some forms and send them off to Companies House about the noddy little company that I supposedly own half of that owns the freehold of the house that my flat is the ground floor of.

And I dread doing it. Actually shaking and sweating. Makes my stomach go cold. I’ve tried three times over the past year or so, sent them in twice, been rejected both times because I did it wrong or because you need two directors for a company and the owner of the other half hasn’t filled in her form telling them she is a director. (I could have lied and faked her signature – but I didn’t – and I have no idea if she has – I’m not even sure I have her right address or that the letters I sent her and the forms I sent on to her ever got to her) It can’t be hard getting it right, but I got it wrong. And I’m scared that whatever I do will make it worse. Except we have to get it done because if we don’t they will wind up the company and try to sell it to someone else then we lose the freehold of the house and I could end up paying ground rent to stay in the place I own – or else have to borrow a few thousand pounds to buy it back myself.

The trouble is, I had to admit to myself a year or so ago, that I’m scared of my house, Well, not so much house as grotty little flat. Everything I try to do goes wrong. Attempting to fix the floor a few years back destroyed a huge chunk of it and about a quarter of the flat is unusable. There’s nowhere comfortable to sit, nowhere to work (one of the reasons I do things like this from the office) no usable phone, a little portable TV, hardly any room to move – you have to walk round stepping over things. The hallway is blocked by the piles of floorboards I bought to install in the living room but wasn’t able to when I found the joists were crumbling and when my wrists and knees began to hurt too much to do the work. Its damp, dirty, and smelly. I am nervous to be there, scared to put my feet in the wrong places as if whatever I touch will just break, So much already has. There are holes in the floor, holes in the ceiling, holes in internal walls. I got angry once and kicked a hole in the kitchen wall – the scarey thing wasn’t my anger but that I didn’t kick very hard. There is a small hole in the floorboards in my bedroom where I accidentally poked the vacuum cleaner through the floor. And I certainly wasn’t poking hard.

The hot water boiler stopped igniting last week. I have no idea why. So no heating or running hot water at the moment and I need to contact a plumber to fix it but I haven’t partly because I am scared of them because all but one I’ve ever used have either been incompetent or dishonest and partly because I am genuinely very ashamed to let anyone else in to see the place. Its humiliating. I feel that they might think that the state of where I live reflected on me and I hate the idea that anyone would think that I was the sort of person who was like that.

I walk around indoors with my head down and my shoulders hunched, keeping my arms and legs under tight control, watching where I place my feet and being careful not to hit anything or knock over the piles of stuff everywhere. When I leave home I relax. I get physically bigger. My stride lengthens. Like Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects. When I come back in the evening I feel smaller again. And I feel as if I have failed – another day over and nothing more to happen. Walking back up to my own front door at the end of the day is the second worst moment of a typical day (the worst is getting out of bed of course)

And I feel as if I have failed my daughter. I want her to have a nice place to live and I haven’t been able to provide it. And I feel bad that I can’t invite anyone home because I love cooking for people and having parties but I can’t. And I feel that other people will look at it and think that I am old or decrepid or dirty or smelly or useless like it is, that they will think its all my fault.

And I really ought to be at home looking though yellow pages or something trying to contact a builder to fix it but I am scared to. That’s the only relevant word, scared. I know I will sooner or later – if only because there is nothing else to do. I have to live there or move. The only way to move would be to sell it and that is impossible without fixing it up. And I am scared of the disruption of that, of the time it will take, of how I will look to the people who will do it, of how much it will cost, of the chance that it will all go wrong, that it will end up in a worse state than it started, that I will end up homeless. And so far that scaredness has meant three years of living in shit.

So I’ll probably go to the pub instead because I won’t be on my own and because its more comfortable.

But I will try and send in those forms.

Now.