Categories: uncategorized
Date: 09 December 2008 08:41:59
I have been remiss in posting this account of how my brother and I spent our weekend.
As you know, when my brother is here he proves decidedly useful, and the weekend before last was to be no exception. It was only a flying visit - down for the day in court and then home again on the other side of the weekend - but I was going to make full use of him being here if I could.
One job we had to do was change over the washing machines - this was accomplished surprisingly well and it was good to see Dad's machine whirring away with the backlog of laundry. Less good this weekend to discover that this one too is on its last castors. Have you ever spent a night awake with a washing machine which refuses to stop washing? At least I know my son's school uniform is the cleanest it will ever be - it was washed for four hours non-stop before I managed to immobilise the maching sufficiently to get the washing out of the drum without flooding the kitchen. I feel another trip to the electrickery store coming on.
The other main job was to clean the carpets and upholstery. My brother has a carpet cleaner which he'd brought and left down here for several cleaning sessions to undo the damage done by the builders (and the wightmeet! ;) ) but for a number of months the machine and bits and big bottle of cleaning fluid had been standing around in my hallway and getting underfoot. They were moved from pillar to post - first to the hall, then to the boy's bedroom, then back to the hall, and then finally out to garage, with me always thinking "I must keep all the bits together" and repeatedly finding stray parts which had to be repatriated. So when J went out to the garage to fetch the machine in, I was only 90% confident it was all there.
"Where's the hose and extension pipe?" he asked, and my heart sank.
"Oh, it's there somewhere. I can remember having to keep moving it. Isn't it on the machine?"
"No, there's the upholstry hose on the machine, but the long pipe with the tube for the shampoo and the carpet cleaning head is missing."
And so the search began. There were only three, possibly four if you count the coat cupboard, places it could be. Sadly one of them was my eldest son's bedroom, which was in a state of being a half-sorted out junk room at the moment with things in sundry piles containing who-knows-what and drawers and wardrobes inaccessible. Somewhere, in the midst of that jumble, or in the junked-up depths of the garage, was a hose and it was our mission to find it, not least because my brother wanted to take the carpet cleaner back home with him. Our search of the garage was thorough, and in the process we were able to organise the garage a bit better and load some sundry bits and bobs in the car for the tip. But no hose.
We searched the hall. No hose. We emptied the coat cupboard and shoved everything back in again. No hose. We attacked my son's room in sheer frustration, shoving things from pillar to post, mixing the sorted with the unsorted, mounding everything on the bed in an attempt to get at the inaccessible corners of the room. No hose. My brother even went into the loft, though we knew there was nothing hoselike up there, and searched the rest of the rooms of the house. All in vain.
The final decision was that we would simply have to buy a new carpet cleaner. Then my brother could take the new one up to Scotland with him and if, when, I finally did find the missing hose, I would have a carpet cleaner of my very own here on the Island. So we went online to look how much they would cost, having spent... wait for it... two entire days searching.
"Just checking. I'm looking for an upright VAX carpet cleaner?"
The penny dropped. He called me into the hall to look at the carpet cleaner. "What did you just say?" I looked, uncertain at what he was getting at... and then.... It's an upright carpet cleaner.
It doesn't have a hose!