Monday 20 February 2023
By looking at the last post I wrote, two days ago, I am reminded that I was supposed to be working through a long To Do list over the weekend. Hahahahaha, I forgot about that. But I overachieved yesterday on general house-sorting.
On Saturday, we spent the day out and about, stopping in Selkirk (coffee and curtain poles (unsuccessful)), Hawick (butcher, fishmonger, picture framer) and Galashiels (lunch, baker, supermarket and curtain poles (successful)).
We have found, through the only two people other than our neighbour we know in the valley, the epitome of an overachieving, over-talented – to call him an ‘odd job man’ seems not to emphasise enough how multi-skilled he is. His name is Mitch. He is very tall, Chris (six-foot-one) reckons he’s at least six-foot-three. To me he is merely ‘very tall’. He strode over a fence as if it weren’t there. I had to use a stile. The three of us walked around the house and land to talk about things that need doing. There was a very long, square wooden pole dumped in the fenced-in solar panel array. For Chris and I to move it, I would have climbed over the stile into the long grass, picked up one end, pulled it from where it lay on the ground so the other end would fall off the middle of the three fence planks. I would then have picked that end up, lifted it up and passed it to Chris before going back to the other end, picking that up and both of us lifting it over the fence. We would then have rested my end of the post on the top of the fence while I climbed back over the stile, then picked up the end and both carried it to a pile of similarly long poles along another side of the enclosure and dropped it there. Mitch, while I was still going on about how much it annoyed me lying there, stepped effortlessly over the three-plank fence into the enclosure, picked up the pole to shoulder height, stepped back over the fence and placed it on the pile as if it were a mere toothpick he’d walked across a room to pick up. We both stood gaping at him in awe.
While Mitch continued overachieving, Chris did some work on his website and some bits of work in his office. I finally tidied away the last of my unpacking bits, Dymo-labelled my beloved eighteen spice jars and filled them with herbs and spices, tidied my ‘shop’ (the pantry, but Chris thinks I’m a bit territorial about it so it’s now referred to as the shop and me the shopkeeper), put up a couple of hooks for an IKEA blind in the hallway (Mitch put up three curtain poles significantly faster and with far less fuss than I put the two hooks in and hung the blind; he also didn’t need a chair/ladders) [rereading this paragraph, I appear to next have listed everything Mitch did rather than what I did, because, er, my list ended with the hanging of the blinds. So what follows is actually what Mitch did] replastered a bit of ceiling, affixed an IKEA shelf unit to the wall (not as straightforward as it could have been due to the angles of the wall and floor), attached my new brass bell next to the front door, cleared some general stuff from the garden (eg broken ladders, toilet cistern, pipes to nowhere) and, based partly on a photo I showed him from a house we viewed with a similarly sloping bedroom wall, he made and fitted a wooden headboard-wall so we now have a headboard and will no longer have to retrieve our pillows from the back of the bed. Mitch is amazing and we have vowed to continue finding jobs for him so more people don’t find him and we can’t then have who must surely be the best, efficient and most creative worker we could hope to find. He’s also an easy person to have around and enjoyable to chat to. He’s an old soul but actually the same age as Chris’s youngest son. Sadly for us, Mitch will be on holiday for the next three weeks, but at least that gives us plenty of time to find and list things for him to do.
Once Mitch left, Chris and I sorted a few more areas, on a roll from having seen all the changes to the house from Mitch’s hard work. The three extra sets of curtains, two to doorways, have made an enormous difference; we were both really happy with how much cosier the house now feels. I then had a wonderful hot shower in the dark outside, we had a delicious Afghan lamb and rice dish and we both appreciated being able to sit up in bed against a headboard (it needs ‘making pretty’ but it’s still very much lean-on-able). All in all a really enjoyable and surprisingly restful-feeling weekend, completely different to whatever we’d have done had we been in London, and I am not suggesting it would have been better or worse, just very different.
