HALLOWEEN IN THE OVERLAP

Halloween. I don’t like it. But equally I don’t actually mind if you like it, even though I think you shouldn’t. It’s a strange position to take, I know, but it’s where I’ve landed.

I’m pretty sure I’ve written before about how the fun is a thin mask for some deeply sinister goings on. People guffaw when Christians say that, but it is there, kind of hardwired into the Bible: there’s a physical realm, where pumpkins are vegetables and masks are made of cheap plastic. Then, overlapping it, there’s a spiritual reality, where evil spirits torment people, and witches gather to perform spells. As Christians, we believe that the overlap is wafer-thin, and on nights like this, getting involved is like playing with a tiger cub - at any moment the spiritual reality of that world can come flooding into this; at any moment, the cute animal could bare its teeth.

We drove back to the hotel via a partial roadblock of blue flashing lights. Police cars and fire engines were gathered by the Co-Op, a ring of officers huddled in the glow of its plasma-lit interior. Something had gone down there tonight - my guess: kids throwing fireworks into the shop. That’s happened before on this particular night. Mischief spilled over into something very dangerous, perhaps without them really understanding why. I do wonder if that’s a small picture of what I mean.

DREAMING OF HOME

I’ve reached the phase of tiredness when I just keep bursting into tears. Sammy says it’s like the old camp days. I feel like it’s much worse.

The thing is there’s nowhere to truly rest. The hotel room is cramped and grubby - it’s fine - just a bit inconvenient for life. Malcolm’s house, where Sammy is tied at least to the feeling of home, is currently a whirlwind of family and dogs, and everything moves fast there. Rest is difficult. Meanwhile our house, which has now been cleaned, still carries a lingering stench, and might do for some days. I’m there today, working, and at various points, expecting an electrician, a surveyor, and some cleaners to turn up. It’s quiet, but of course all the windows are open, and so it’s cold.

I miss my family home. That’s why it’s been popping up in my dreams. I walk around it sometimes, moving from room to room - hearing my sister singing along to Whitney Houston, or my Grandma watching an old western on her telly. The kitchen’s alive with steam from the pressure cooker and the kettle, and out in the garden, my Dad has upended his bike. The spokes click while he oils the chain.

Upstairs in my attic room, the green duvet of a child’s bed has Lego bricks strewn over it: a half-finished spaceship, a car built of out of castle-walls and airport control tower windows. There are posters on the wall. There are colourful books on the shelf. It’s all very familiar.

It’s no wonder I’m crying all the time. I’m homesick for something deeper than maybe I realised, and I have to find a way to journey in it. You know, some people really believe that God’s role in our lives is to fix all of our problems, and that as an omniscient, omnipotent creator who loves us, he’s tightly bound by his character to do exactly that. But it’s always seemed a little two-dimensional to me. Actually, all I really want is him to be with me, out here in the wild, on the road, in the valley. And that’s probably the real home I’ve been dreaming about.

We’re so tired, Sammy and I. I don’t know how we’re functioning. I definitely need to be more gracious and expend energy on kindness; I’ve been snappy. I’m not too proud of that.

At least today, I am actually able to be at home, even if it’s cold and stinky. I’m kind of hoping the road gets easier from here, but even if it doesn’t, Ecclesiastes is truer than ever when it says a cord of three strands is not easily broken. 

AWAKE WITH MY EYES CLOSED

Night 3 at the Slightly-Less-Than-Premier-Inn was probably the worst. I think, because it was always going to be followed inexorably by a Monday morning.

I was lying awake with my eyes closed, almost too tired to cry; who knows how Sammy was doing next to me! Perhaps the same. Perhaps slightly more afraid, slightly more troubled.

Now, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Plenty of people have thrown in the offer of a sofa bed or a place to crash, but it’s not easy to disrupt ourselves from this port in a storm to another. I appreciate it. Sometimes I feel as though the tattered sails might not make it across the harbour.

As we walked down the corridor to breakfast, Sammy told me that her coat, which she’d wrapped herself into before leaving the room, felt like the closest thing to being home right now. Apart from being with you, she added, sweetly. My heart wobbled with worry and shame. I know I haven’t let her down, I know it’s not my fault, and I have tried my best, but I still feel as though I’ve not been a good husband or leader on this journey, or that there have been a thousand things I could have handled better. Pesky emotions.

Rich was telling me last night about their insurance claim several years ago. I must have looked wide-eyed as he told me about the awful negotiation phase - that bit that’s yet to come for us - in repairing and replacing. This week, on top of exhaustion and displacement, could be difficult. Hence, I suppose, being awake with my eyes closed in the middle of the night.

I’ve got to dig a little deeper haven’t I? I mean in the secret, battery-charging, sacred space of faith. I’m not saying that this is what this has all been about - I can’t spiritualise the problem like that, and I won’t believe that God brought this on us like some sort of horrible training exercise. No. Life’s just messy, and sometimes things happen. But even in the valleys, the challenge is to lean closer to Jesus; to walk nearer to him, to learn his rhythm in the difficulty and (if it’s the right word) suffering. If I’m reading it well, I think suffering is somehow a mysterious path to intimacy. But there are more qualified sufferers out there who could probably go much deeper into that thought.

Somehow today is about navigating the working today with a head that’s dizzy from tiredness and a heart that aches. Meanwhile Sammy’s at the house, helping the clear-up team fumigate and strip the contaminated surfaces. She’s planning on opening all the windows when she’s there, just to get that crisp autumn breeze blowing through our house. It feels like a prayer: come and blow on through, come and do what only you can do. Yes please and amen to that.

EXPLAINING EXHAUSTION

“I don’t think anyone knows how exhausting it is, not having a home,” said Sammy on the way back to the Premier Inn tonight. We’d spent the day with her family, plus doing various other things in town. I was tired but I didn’t disagree.

I think people can imagine that it is exhausting. I don’t think it’s easy to know just how inexplicably exhausting it actually is. I say inexplicably because I don’t have a lot of energy to process, and perhaps even less to plan. In addition, we’ve had what would be considered a quite normal Saturday for energy expenditure, and yet, the energy it’s actually required has been more than we could have recharged overnight, and probably more than we can charge up with a night’s sleep tonight either. In other words, the outgoings in our energy budget exceed the income - and that seems to me like the dictionary definition of exhausting.

So perhaps not that inexplicable at all. But everything, even the time and energy it took me to tap this out, costs something. And I am so spent.

THE PREMIER INN

Tonight you find us in the last place anyone really wants to end up, and that place is the geographically-closest-to-your-house Premier Inn.

Right. Let’s get the details out of the way first. There’s no hot chocolate sachets at the Premier Inn. There’s PG tips, two questionable teaspoons, and something labelled ‘coffee’ but there is no hot chocolate. I don’t know about any of the other ‘inns’ in the town, but presumably they’re inferior to this one (if the name is to be believed) and are basically shipping containers with airbeds in one corner and a foot pump in the other.

I’m sorry. I’m being uncharitable. I’m not sure that’s exactly the attitude Sir Lenny Henry would expect here, so apologies. There is a comfortable bed. It is warm, and in-between the Tesco print artwork and the squeaky curtains, the room is calculated to be as close to efficiently comfortable as those two adjectives can be stretched. Efficient in that it’s got everything you need to sleep and wash, and comfortable in the way it enables you to make a cup of tea and hang your coat up. Fine.

It does have toenails though. That was one of our first dismal discoveries - a small pile of someone’s discarded keratin crescents in the corner. And, in case anyone were hoping for the lapping of Neopolitan shores or the cheery parp of Vespas in a coffee-coloured Italian strada, this room has a view of some industrial garbage bins at the back of the Toby Carvery, and the sounds of someone dumping a load of glass bottles into them.

So, not exactly ‘premier’ I suppose. But its best feature by far is that it’s better than sleeping in the car, which I guess might have been an alternative step in our situation.

That’s the detail. Let’s zoom out. We’re here because our house is unliveable-in, and until Wednesday, we pretty much have nowhere else to go. And so, our reluctant insurers found us the best possible response to our request for ‘a shower and a bed’ and landed us here. Despite me trying to be funny, I have to say, we are grateful - extremely grateful. And I don’t want to lose sight of the power of thankfulness, even in the hot and scratchy sheets and the palace of toenails. Things could be a lot worse.

So, next week the work on our house begins. More on that as it happens. But the next five nights will see us returning to, and living in a small room in a hotel I passed many times without ever knowing that one day I’d really need. As I said earlier, squeezing Sammy tight in the kind of hug where it feels like both of us are clinging to the other, this is a low point in our journey home, but it is only passing. It is only temporary. And we can get through this for sure.

ALBA

I’m awake early today. Next to me, she sleeps, still unaware of the bright phone in the darkened room, or the gentle tapping of my fingers on the screen.

I don’t know why I’m awake. I was hot and half-lucid for a while, trying to remember the Italian word for ‘dawn’. No matter how I turned, my brain whirred with ‘Aurora?’ no, ‘ambra?’, ‘alambra?’ No.

Alba. Should have known it. All’alba vinceró! sang Pavarotti in the 90s. In the dawn I will win. He should know.

The kitchen situation rolls on. I was thinking yesterday about how practical I’ve been. I’ve tried my best to look after Sammy through a situation that’s poked her worst fears. I’ve been assertive with the insurers and the contractors they’ve chosen for us, and I’ve tried to manage myself too, even though this heavy thing would have crumpled me a few years ago. There’s been a level-headedness about me that has surprised even me, I’d say, a sort of strength forged out of necessity. Well. I believe God gave me that, actually, and I just took hold of it.

The dawn (the alba if you will) is grey today. Not the autumn sunlight that paints gold on the ceiling, but the murky light slowly replacing the thick, inky darkness. Birds are singing out there - I almost wish I were smart enough to tell you which ones, but it’s a happy chorus of chirps and warbles nevertheless.

All’alba vinceró! In the opera it’s sung by someone who knows that as the sun rises he will win the hand of the princess he loves. Hope surges with the coming of a new day, triumph is nearing as the strings swell and the heart pounds in his chest.

Sammy sleeps. She’s safe next to me, her rhythmic breathing making the duvet rise and fall so gently. There’s a calm content about her this morning. It’s okay to say I’ve done a good job, I think. Some nights might be scratchy and hot and difficult, and my brain might race through pointless quests like remembering the Italian word for ‘dawn’. But here I am, tired and happy. All’alba vinceró, after all.

PATHWAYS OF UNPREDICTABLES

I’m not sure how to describe the last week. I could start at the end I suppose and tell you that I’m sitting in my father-in-law’s kitchen, work laptop out, trying to cope with the tiny screen while my wife sleeps in the next room.

Trouble is, I’m not even sure that’s even the end of the story. In fact, it had really better not be.

Or I could start at the beginning, when Sammy ran upstairs in a panic to tell me that the sink wasn’t draining, and, worryingly, that when I flushed the loo, brown-grey water bubbled up in that sinkful, with bits in it. That was bad. What it turned into has been thoroughly horrible.

At the heart of it as a blockage, probably of decades of limescale and other gunk in a pipe that’s right under our house. Thanks to some bang-up planning from previous owners, the builders built an extension over the only access point to the drain, meaning that underneath our nice shiny kitchen tiles is a manhole that is inaccessible. And that fact has led almost inexorably along a chain of events to a drain engineer ripping a hole in our kitchen wall, drilling into the soil pipe, and flooding our kitchen with sewage.

He couldn’t remove the blockage, and so now, more contractors are going to have to pull apart our cupboards, drill more holes, create more mess, and then replace and clean everything as much as possible - which has left us houseless, and, kipping with family, again.

And that’s just the physical toll. The emotional impact of all of this has been incalculably difficult. I tend to cocoon; Sammy needs to process out loud. Decisions have to be made while one of us implodes and the other explodes.

It’s intensely hard to manage, not to mention the day-to-day reality of having to work and live, and call insurance companies, contractors, and whoever else might need to know what’s going on. I lost the plot on one call, and got infuriated with someone just trying to do their job. I told him to have a good long think about us when he went home that night and washed up his cups and plates and snuggled into a warm house.

What I’ve realised is that I like simple. I like a path of few decisions, that leads more or less directly to where I would like to be. I like those decisions to be controllable, and I like to know that even if they’re not, things aren’t going to balloon - I have a plan. When the probabilities start to multiply, when the path to success is a tangle of moving walkways and interconnected obstacles, that is when I just want to curl into my duvet and hide until it’s all over.

I’ve been an adult for longer than I was a child; I ought to know a bit more about growing up, didn’t I? Perhaps the marker between adolescence and independence is a bit more fuzzy than either I or the law of the land imagined.

Anyway, we’re waiting. In theory the pathway is for a sanitisation crew to turn up and decontaminate, then for a man with a van and some proper tools to show up and get digging some solidified sludge out of a pipe that smells like I wouldn’t want to think about. In theory, that happens over the next few days.

I certainly hope that’s the way it goes. I can’t cope with too many more unpredictables.

SHOPPING LIST: AN ANECDOTAL TALE

Milk

Bread

Cheese

Fruit

Porridge oats, and 

Ginger root

Cans of Fanta

Shredded wheat

Salted butter

Potted meat

Cinnamon

And hot cross buns

Watermelon

Juicy plums

Butter

Chicken

Raspberry jam

Tin of tuna

Peppered ham

Lemonade

And carrot cake

Like grandma taught you

How to bake

And rubber gloves

For washing up

A box of pegs

A plastic cup

Some cleaning stuff

Some floral prints

A pack of finest

Murray mints

A pasta sauce

A tin of soup

A basil plant

A cantaloupe

A Lego toy

For someone small

An overcoat

For someone tall

A little tasty

Chocky bar

(Something nice

For in the car)

And all the lovely

Weekly treats

From savoury

To pudding sweet

Oh these are all the things I missed…

When I forgot the shopping list

TAKEAWAY TOAST

I’ve got it! Takeaway Toast!

Yes. Probably a van. You pick your bread-type: you know: wholemeal, gluten-free, ciabatta, seeded, whatever… then you add from a range of butters, and even marmalade, marmite, raspberry jam, Nutella, and you get a slice of your favourite toast, toasted and buttered and made just for you, out and about!

Forgotten your breakfast? No problem! Stop by Takeaway Toast: we’ve got it covered.

You know sometimes people forget I’m a genius. All you’d need is a selection of toast toppings to tantalise the travellers, a van, and a toaster. Hire a barista and a coffee machine and there’ll be queues round the corner! Who doesn’t like a bit of toast? And tell me this - is anyone already out there doing this? I don’t think so. The toasty market is wide open!

So then. Back to work I guess, instead of aimlessly wandering around the kitchen wondering what to snack on. My genius, it seems, hasn’t extended to suggesting to my wife that we could buy a loaf of bread. Sigh.

THE SOUP MAKER

Autumn. We’ve finally got our soup maker up and running. In case you were wondering, it’s a sort of hybrid of a kettle and a blender. It heats up your chopped vegetables and your stock from below and then chomps it up with whirring blades from above.

It seems that in order to make smooth soup, the soup maker has to punctuate long minutes of silence with a quick burst of terrifying activity. “Kerrggggh! Grrrrring! Unnnng!” it screams across the kitchen. We both almost jumped out of our skin.

Sammy had already had a fright. She’d seen me dollop heaped teaspoonfuls of spices in, when the recipe had specifically called for ‘level’. I still maintain that if you can’t get the whole teaspoon into the spice jar, and you don’t want to get cumin all over the worktop, half a heaped teaspoon is probably about the same as one level one and a little bit of guesswork in this regard is absolutely fine.

I’m wrong of course. But let’s not get into that. The salient points are that the soup maker made us jump, autumn is here with a lovely Sunday evening flourish, and the butternut squash soup had a definite ‘kick’ to it.

We do like autumn round these parts. Long shadows and crisp blue skies are the best, not to mention golden afternoons and chilly breezes. I love the trees - at this time of year their leaves turn almost transparent, like coloured glass as the sun shines through them. It’s wonderful to see the light cascading through like it does in cathedrals.

And then the best of it is that we rush home for spicy butternut squash soup and a cosy night in the warmth of the living room, with Mr Glenn Miller and Mr Duke Ellington for company. It’s all rather grand.

I’ll be ready for the phantom soup maker next time. It would be so weird, wouldn’t it, if the dishwasher or the microwave suddenly just went KLANK! halfway through its cycle. Though, to be honest, either of those two appliances could easily do that if I had stacked one incorrectly, or cooked an egg too long in the other. I’ve really got to start following instructions, I reckon.