Tales from a freaked-out bride-to-be

 How To Be A Champion Procrastinator...

No sensible person would decide to get half her house redecorated and recarpeted straight after a worldwide pandemic and right in the middle of organizing a wedding, right? 

    Well, 'Sensible' isn't my middle name. In fact, my middle name isn't even sensible.

The logistics alone felt like we were giving one of M.C.Escher’s interiors a revamp. Our house is tall and thin and there is, quite literally, nowhere to put anything. It's necessary to empty the contents of one room into the space between the contents of another, then empty them back before the painter returns to do the next bit. It’s like a toddler tipping coloured sand from one container to another – most of it ends up scattered all over the floor…

We began by emptying the room we designate ‘great-nephew’s bedroom’, dismantling the elderly self-assembly cupboard (which wobbles alarmingly every time anyone walks past it), and distributing sections of the bed and other bits of furniture and toys between the bedroom on the top floor and the living room downstairs. We also moved the tall bookcase, which has stood on the middle landing for two decades, into our bedroom, which at least gave me the opportunity to stub my toe on it on each of my frequent night-time visits to the bathroom, and ensure that P couldn’t get into his side of the built-in wardrobe (which was fine as I don't make him sleep in there any more). The carrier bags full of books festooning the two sets of stairs were also something of a health hazard, bearing in mind my propensity for falling over - I mean, I fell on my arse this very afternoon outside my front door while standing still and attempting to attract P's attention, so I can't realistically be expected not to fall over obstacles on the stairs.

We hired a local decorator to wallpaper the entire staircase and paint Great Nephew’s Bedroom. The night before Decorator was due to arrive, his father was rushed into hospital so he asked if he could delay the work for a week. I have no idea whether this story was true – the man had a habit of making sure he was alone with me before trying out a cat-like facial expression conveying a mixture of distress and hopeless resignation to the vicissitudes of life, which he clearly felt would work better on a woman than on the man of the house. In fact, he would have done much better using it on P, who is a sucker for this sort of thing. You’d think men would realise, by the time they hit their fifties, that women are basically world-weary cynics who never trust a bloke with a pathetic expression on his face. Nevertheless, I couldn’t very well say no just in case he was telling the truth, so we had an extra week of toe-stubbing and tripping over toys.

Finally, Decorator got on with it. I’d bought the number of rolls of wallpaper he’d advised me to get, plus two extra as I wasn’t convinced by his calculations, but even so we got in from work to find he had run out of paper halfway through the hall. I was a model of patience, which isn’t like me, and I ordered more paper online, but this meant a further week of falling over Lego tables and night-time collisions with tall bookcases. It also allowed me time to examine Decorator’s handiwork, which was definitely substandard in places, but - as the alternative was my doing it myself - I was happy to overlook it. Eventually we got the paper and he put right some of the ‘minor snags’ (eg, a ten inch tear across one sheet of paper, very badly finished bits round the light-switches, paper stretched over lumps of plaster that should have been sanded down, so it looks like mice have been papered over, mid-scamper).

He was still a better choice than the first guy who’d come round to give us an estimate: he was wearing a tight vest over his enormous belly, flips flops, and had his hair cut into a spiky style more suitable on a teenager than a man in his forties – he resembled Kenneth, the camp hairdresser from the sitcom ‘Benidorm’. I have actually enjoyed the succession of workmen who have traipsed into and out of my home during the past six weeks. The enormously fat plumber with a Terry-Thomas moustache who bore an uncanny resemblance to a grey-haired Super-Mario. The depressed-seeming electrician who looked about twelve years old and who fiddled with our switches for an hour before deciding he could do nothing and charged us nothing beyond the lift to and from his house as he couldn’t drive. The little middle-aged electrician who replaced him, did a great job and regaled us with his misery memoirs over a cuppa afterwards. The second carpet-fitting team whose leader, another short-legged overweight bloke with a big moustache, sucked in his breath through his teeth upon seeing the apparently incompetent workmanship of his predecessors, phoned his boss , and he and the boss then spent thirty minutes ‘tightening up’ and ‘putting right’ the mistakes of the previous fitters – mistakes we hadn’t noticed ourselves. How often does that happen? And how many workmen in South Yorkshire look like Super-Mario?

Next thing was getting the stairs and Great-Nephew’s Bedroom recarpeted. My niece took up all the old carpet for us but she could only come round at the weekend, so we spent five days trying to remember not to impale our feet on the exposed carpet-grippers. The new carpet looks and feels great, but it made the twenty-year-old carpet in our bedroom look every year of its age so we decided to have that done too. This of course involved tipping all the stuff from our bedroom into Great-Nephew’s Bedroom (not to mention the bathroom and landing). Basically, for the past month, our house has looked as if a giant has picked it up and given it a massive shake. 

To add to the chaos, I had to deal with P's bedtime peculiarities. Most bookworms might have one, possibly two, books on their bedside cabinets ready for their twenty-minute read before nodding off each night. I personally have three hardback books and two notebooks beside my bed, but this is because I like to read my Kindle while lying on my side resting my arm on the impromptu pile of books. However, P is different. I suspect that, if he lived alone, he would sleep in a nest made of books, magazines and scraps of paper (usually old receipts and lost shopping lists). At the best of times, the floor at his side of the bed resembles an office after a  messy burglary. The waste bin is beside his bedside cabinet, but I can’t get to it without slipping on items of loose debris so there are usually rolled-up bits of paper and other detritus around the bin from where I’ve attempted to throw rubbish into it from my side of the bed in order to avoid the sensation of trying to ride a skateboard over a rocky beach. I've tried many things to improve this situation. I’ve argued that no one actually needs 38 books about chess, three volumes of political memoir, and 18 back copies of Prospect, Philosophy Now and New Scientist, beside their beds. Who could read all this stuff in the twenty-minute window before they nod off? But no matter how many bookshelves I denude of my own books to give him more space, or the large wicker basket I have placed on the floor on his side of the bed so he can put his current stock of reading material within easy reach, or the Kindle I bought him so he can have his books in electronic form, the nest is always slowly reconstructed over a period of weeks. I wouldn’t mind, but most nights he just solves chess problems on his bloody phone before going to sleep, so when does he actually read any of this stuff?

Anyway, the clearing was finally done and the carpet was laid and most of the stuff is now back where it started. And that's when my brain thought up another way of putting-off sorting out the wedding. Seeing my collection of Terry Pratchett hardback novels on the bookshelf in our bedroom, I had a sudden lightbulb moment. I have most of these books in other editions on other bookshelves, so why not get rid of this collection so P could have most of that bookshelf for his nesting materials? This particular bookcase is special to me because I bought it, years ago, with money I won in a poetry competition, but nevertheless giving up most of it to P’s books seemed a small price to pay for a tidier bedroom. And, I thought, wouldn’t it be lovely to pass on some of these beloved Sir Terry novels to members of the online Pratchett group I belong to, people who would really appreciate them?  I assumed naively that people in that group would already have the books so I thought only one or two would find homes that way, but I was wrong. I was deluged with requests. I ended up spending more than a week wrapping up and labelling books to send to strangers round the world, making numerous trips to the post office, sending apparently endless messages to individuals about their Paypal reimbursements for postage etc, having to make decisions about who would get which book. It was incredibly hard work and immensely time-consuming. And it was an excellent form of wedding-planning-avoidance. In fact, as a method of self-induced stress, I can recommend it highly. 

I have to add that it was also weirdly nice to be giving these books away to people who really value them. The very last book was given to a man who works in a homeless shelter, for him to pass on to a homeless man who is a massive Pratchett fan. Several people had added an extra pound to their postal-reimbursement payments to cover miscellaneous costs, and there was enough money to send this book free to this particular recipient. One lovely person even sent me a private message offering to pay the postage for this book himself! The whole experience has definitely reinvigorated my sense of the fundamental niceness of most people, particularly Terry Pratchett fans, despite the fact that one recipient decided not to reimburse me for postage until he received the book (on the grounds presumably that I was attempting to scam him in some way) and another, having said he would love to receive ‘any of the books’, asked whether he could have a different book to the one I’d allocated him, after I’d packaged the novels up and stuck address labels on them. But there are always one or two people in any group like this. 

This is all displacement activity, obviously. It’s what we all do when we know we should be working on our novels: ie, something else. I'm double-procrastinating now - or meta-procrastinating, if you will!  I'm taking it to a whole new level! Organising TFW is something I do instead of writing, and now, instead of organising TFW, I’m redecorating the house and wasting time giving well-loved books away to strangers…