Exploding Chandelier

 

It's been a GORGEOUS day* and I've spent way more of it than is good for me** in the garden.  This is probably the gorgeousest day we've had so far this year—blue sky!  Balmy breezes!  Both the front and the kitchen door open for better blow-through by bumblebees!—and you just had to be out in it.***

            It began, of course, with me oversleeping, because that's how all my days begin lately.†  Hellhounds and I then had to hurtle with preternatural swiftness, which is okay for them but not so great with me, because we had electricians coming. 

            Electricians were late, of course.  I had, however, not wasted the time:  I had been hammering my way through a few inches of the heaps around my desk at the cottage, where all the stuff I should do soon but not necessarily today accumulates††, and screaming, which, in my experience, is the natural accompaniment to all desk work.  The screaming may vary,††† but screaming is crucial.‡  It provides a safety valve, so the top of your head doesn't blow off. ‡‡

            The electricians came, and thoughtfully examined the blackened light bulb with the exploded contacts‡‡‡, and then with whips, chains and a tranquilizer dart gun they removed my chandelier.  I've told you about my chandelier, haven't I?  When I first moved over here, into a house that several generations of Dickinsons had lived in, my office was a little room that had been hacked off one of the sitting rooms for Peter's first wife, but she'd got ill before she'd ever really used it.  So it was just standing there empty, with a wall between it and the rest of that sitting room.  The first thing that went up was bookshelves.  You will not be amazed to hear.  But it also needed an overhead light.  The two sitting rooms—reception rooms, what you call 'em—on either end of what had been a square Georgian house were Victorian, and put on by a widow with delusions of grandeur.  They have Very High Ceilings.  And I looked at the high ceiling of my office and said thoughtfully, you know, I've always wanted a chandelier. 

            We can do that, said Peter.    

            At the time chandeliers were apparently out of fashion and we had to choose one that was rather more tactful than it might have been if there had been more lurid to choose from, but this turned out to be a good thing when we moved into town and I took it with me.  The cottage has high ceilings for a cottage, but they're nothing like as high as that of a Victorian sitting room of a widow with delusions.  And my small tactful chandelier looks very nice in my office, and it doesn't whack you in the forehead when you walk under it or anything.  It does, however, explode after twenty years.  They just don't make chandeliers like they used to.

            The electricians then examined my fuse box.  And their faces grew Very Long and they said, this fuse box is Old.  Yes.  I was afraid they'd notice.  Southern Electric keeps sending out mailings adorned with graphic photographs of Old Fuse Boxes and large red text saying if your fuse box looks like this you need to buy a flash new one that we would be happy to provide for a mere 25% of your yearly income.  I keep throwing these in the trash, despite recognising my fuse box immediately.  Electricians, just by the way, were late coming to me because they'd been up at Peter's doing an Exhaustive Test of Everything.§  And they said to me, there's two ways you can do this.  You can have an Exhaustive Test of Everything too, like your husband.  And they paused, and looked at each other, and then the older one said, But you don't really need to bother with the Exhaustive Test.  Your husband's electrics have their little problems, but they aren't archaic.  All you need to do is get our Tamerlane to come round and give you the Official Eyeball Test, which is to say that he'll look at your fuse box, blanch, and say yup, gotta change it.  And then you can book us in for the work.  —I think it was just a trick of the light that made his eyes glisten as he said this.§§

            Joy.

            So is it any wonder I ran out into the garden to play?    

* * *

* Why do I have to WORK for a living?^ 

^Weather like this I want to be Atlas.  Although I'd have to be able to measure things and hammer nails in straight.  And make cranky lawn mowers start.  

** Or PEG II 

*** Headline:  Office Blocks Empty.  Central London Deserted.  CEO says:  You Just Had To Be Out in This Weather.  Film to Follow. 

            Although I have slightly mixed feelings about t-shirt weather.  The long sleeves of your gardening sweatshirt mean that you bleed less. 

† I may have been knitting last night.  Not being able to read in the bath^ is making me sulky and I may have had to knit longer to cheer myself up.  That and trying to interpret the hellhounds' latest Food Ritual so I can play my crucial role as efficiently as possible.  This is also time-consuming.  Gaaaah. 

^ Someone told me to use candles.  Candles?  To read by?  Someone has much younger and less flimsy eyes than I do.  I do, in fact, have three excellent read-by-able Aladdin oil lamps, from my life in blizzard- and power-outage prone Maine, but they have the little drawback that if you knock one into a full bath the flame does not go out. 

†† Today tends to come down to the mews with me at lunchtime.  Where it creates another pile. . . . 

††† There's the Frelling Story in Progress scream, there's the Oh Mares' Nests and Mayhem That Invoice Was Due Three Months Ago scream, there's the Omigod Christmas Card from Two/Three/Four Years Ago scream, there's the What the Frell Is This scream, there's the I Can't Have Promised to Do This scream, there's the . . . 

‡ This may explain a lot about my singing.  

‡‡ I can't imagine how office workers cope.  Especially the ones in those little cubicles where the Styrofoam walls only come up shoulder high.  

‡‡‡ Maybe it should have tried screaming 

§ The electrics in Peter's kitchen more nearly resemble fireworks.  You're standing there cutting up chicken for hellhounds and, ZOT!!!  —Wow!  That was a great one! 

§§ The good news, however, is that, once they had rootled around in the depths of their kit for the necessary obsolete tools, they replaced the fuse^ and the other lights came back on.  

^ I don't mess with scary overcharged British electrics any more than I have to, wussy American that I am, which is to say that I turn lights on and off and (warily) change light bulbs, and it ends there.  I have changed British fuses, but I'd rather not.  And in this case I didn't want to touch anything.