It Never Rains but it Pours

Since I ‘retired’ or downsized – call it what you will – but since I gave up working 60 hour weeks for evil banks and corporates I have never actually been so busy and wonder just how I ever had time for a full time job – mind you, I suppose in them dark days of yore I didn’t have a thirteen year old bundle of blonde ambition topped off with hormone hell nor a dog of such vast immenseness that the upholstery has gone in my brand new sofa (yes, he sits on it – YOU try telling him ‘down’) and who needs three marathon walks a day…aye, that must be what it is.

Anyway, this week has been a perfect example of how madly fast paced and full my life has actually become since moving to live a quiet life in North Cyprus.

We had another kibtek type incident on Monday with unexplained power cuts just at my house that this time could not be resolved with a few frustrating phone calls and actually required a trip into town to the electric office – and we all know what fun that can be! 

The outcome was a strange one though – after the usual arguments that came at me ranging from them having cut another house off altogether to me having tripped a fuse to the builders onsite having stolen my electric (do they have magic psychic sucking powers I wonder), it was decided that an engineer should visit my home that evening to take a closer look at something or other to decipher why my electric and only my electric keeps getting cut off at the office end of the electricity infrastructure.

Of course, by the time I got back home ready to wait for the engineer my power had miraculously been reconnected and the generator was silent.  So, the engineer promptly arrived, refused to enter my home until Cheesepuff was condemned to the bathroom – I kid you not, this guy wanted him LOCKED in a room from which he couldn’t possibly escape and come and play – and then he looked in my main fusebox said as the switches were up the right way everything was in order, and seeing as I had power he didn’t know what all the fuss was about anyway. 

In all honesty I had no feisty-ness left within me to argue my point that at random times of the day at various points in any given month my home and only my home has its power cut off and when I complain I am always advised that some other random house on the estate is the one that has just been cut off and not mine.  So, I’ll just wait now until the next time and go through it all again – I’m sure I’ll never get bored of that lurching sinking feeling that I get in my stomach when something goes wrong and I just know the hell I’ll have to go through to get it sorted – God I wish I was learning Turkish faster.

Then himself did his back in, couldn’t move, was grumpy beyond and refused all my offers of appointments with Layle the back magician, I had to go door to door late at night knocking and bothering neighbours in search of pain killers (luckily Wendy came to the rescue) then the dog got his regular problem that requires a visit to Firdez the vet and her magic finger (enough details for you I’m sure, but in case you’re wondering this problem also requires a muzzle, rubber gloves and a lot of cotton wool – dogs, you gotta love ‘em whilst wondering why you bother) – and then Tyler had an altercation with some Vicki Pollard wannabe in town which resulted in her being stressed out beyond, then she stayed out in the rain wearing a next to nothing, I’m a teenage girl, you can’t tell me what to wear, you’re not my ‘muva’ type outfit and promptly got pneumonia (well, bad chest infection anyway) and required a visit to the hospital and enough drugs to open a rather large branch of Boots and now all three of them are sitting about the house in various states of agony with cushions supporting backs or easing sore bottoms or heads and I’m left to deal with more missing gardeners, Wendy getting properly locked out, anonymous complaints about my garden wall, a water meter that goes backwards very fast, a washing machine that spilled its contents all over the kitchen floor, a quite frankly WAG-esque type clothes shopping bill from Tyler’s latest exploits in Istanbul with her friend over the half term holiday when she convinced her friend’s mother that I wouldn’t mind her adding a few things to this kind lady’s credit card bill such as 200ytl FM boots and a 15ytl pair of novelty handcuffs (???????????????????), drains blocked by bird poo, the wrong colour paint in my bedroom (hence the picture above), broken blinds, bushy eyebrows and builders trudging mud glorious mud all over my just mopped floor.

But at least I’m not in England where crime is rising and the weather’s grim, where Tony Blair is considering crowning himself king and most people are on a downer from Sunday morning to Friday night – and I can see the sea from my desk, and I can have wild and funky plants in my garden, and I have a million more true friends here than I ever did when working for a living (!) and no one cares that my car is a cronky old wreck because chances are, so is their car too!