So, to recap. I have an on-off boyfriend who is a lapsed alcoholic, or should that read relapsed? I am a borderline anorexic.
Jess the 17-year-old collie is having her period, which seems quite odd to me (as I only got her when she was 13 or 14, I’d thought she was either spayed or had gone through the menopause), but gives me hope there is life in the old girl (ie, me) yet.
I am now renting a house and fields while I recover from the horror that was five years in Somerset.
I always feel it helps to order my thoughts by writing things down, mainly so I don’t churn endlessly at three in the morning.
So I made a list of my debts, and have been crossing them off neatly as I pay them.
Fee to estate agent for selling my house: PAID. Conveyancing fee: PAID. Vet bill: PAID. Bill for cutting hay I could never sell: PAID. Bill for wrapping the hay in cellophane: PAID. Electricity bill for Somerset house: PAID.Having sold my house, I paid a lump sum off the mortgage I have on my sister’s cottage.
I know I shouldn’t write all this stuff down and then get it printed in a newspaper, but it is the only thing I can think about at the moment.
Having everyone know everything about you can be extremely damaging; oh, just to have boyfriend problems.
It’s no wonder I wake up in the middle of every night, disturbing Susie
I’ve been disputing a bill with a builder, given his work meant my buyer knocked a hefty chunk off the price after their survey was done, and I read, in shock, his statement to the court. He wrote that I ‘was not well liked’ in Dulverton. That I am ‘a wilful lady’.
And that I was never going to pay him as I have often written about selling my house to pay my debts: he quoted large chunks of my columns.
He also wrote that he had gone through my post in the postbox and on my desk (although he didn’t open it). I had not made one personal comment about him, or his workers.
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I didn’t have a chance against this personal attack, so I paid up. I wonder if he would have written that so-and-so is ‘a very wilful gentleman’. I very much doubt it.
Then I got an email from my accountant, telling me that I am about to be made bankrupt. Oh, and that I need to pay their outstanding bill.
Then I got a bill from my solicitor for fighting the builder’s claim, then another bill from the solicitor acting for the bank who has the mortgage on the cottage.
Then another enormous electricity bill. Then the tumble dryer broke. And my electric toothbrush, so I have to use it manually, which is very tiring.
It’s no wonder I wake up in the middle of every night, disturbing Susie, who pats my face gently with her paw.
My other sister is here from Australia, recuperating after having lost her 21-year-old son, Nick, to leukaemia last year.
Having first been to stay with our brother in Scotland, she went to stay at my sister’s cottage (see above) in Dulverton but in the end, having been told off for wheeling a dirty case into her house, and muddling up the soap powder drawer to the washing machine, and sitting on the edge of a brand new mattress, and told not to smoke in case she burns the house down, and that she broke a tap, and is ‘disgusting’ for having a drink, she and her case walked out in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, with no place to go.
Now she is installed in my cupboard in London. She needed some peace and quiet, so I left her there, alone, and headed back to the Dales and the animals.
I left her my iPhone, ie, the Bat Phone, as she doesn’t own a mobile and there is no landline at the flat, so now if He (the boyfriend, not God) calls me, he will get someone else entirely, and become quite confused.
But at least, with all her troubles, she will probably sound more cheerful than I do at the moment. Ah well. Such is life. Such is my life.