Sweep it under the carpet.

Recently I have been plagued with feelings that I have let my life wind down a bit:

My job is a depressing waste of time counterweighted only by the fact that it requires about as much effort as lifting an empty box once every 20 minutes over a working day....interspersed with the occasional urgent lunge toward my telephone where I call my own answering machine and leave myself a message.

My social life is pottering along nicely but is only a hairsbreadth from becoming a close knit circuit of dinner parties and book reading meetings. That isn't due to a lack of opportunity to explore the surrounding world or even a lack of invitations to attend varied hedonistic occasion, it is more down to an internal sense of age.

So many weights begin to build upon social adventure as time passes...it hurts more in the morning that it used to....I’m more tired after work than I used to be....I’m reticent to skip sports lest I suddenly put on 40 stone and sound like I’m drowning in my own fat when I speak....I feel like I should be saving money not spending it and am aware that I might end up like a neglected old war veteran rationing the heating and attempting receding inside my own emotionally scarred memory bank to escape the cold....I feel like I used to be more fun, but I’m aware that I dislike that person as well on account of them being a super twat bag....I miss 3 day drinking binges with wild drug intake in a crack flat with only gnawed pieces of mouldy bread and 40 cans of lager for sustenance....but it would kill me and I’d have cunts for friends.....

and so on....

These things bother me sometimes despite the avenues of social exploration that I do adopt always resulting in a fine time and an anecdote or two, perhaps it is just the volume of opportunity that London offers making exploration seem a little less adventurous?

Regardless; I live in Stoke Newington, Hackney and recent event has evidenced quite nicely that my concerns are unnecessary and ill founded as I live in an area so absurd as to quite literally bring the sort of carefree nonsensical idiocy to my very front door.

From the street you must approach our basement flat abode by journeying down a set of steps into a large patio area suitable for BBQ's and the like. Under these steps is a cupboard guarded by a metal door and a bolt. In this cupboard is a dirty, damp stinking collection of our friend’s spare clothes and old bed linen. Quite recently the weather has become aggressively foul and this seems to have scattered and disturbed the local homeless community like ants facing an assault of boiling water. One of these street scavengers too shelter in our yard, a point that I was alerted to one morning as I strode naked into my room, glanced out of the window that was directly ahead of me and noticed a ragged looking fellow sat on a plastic chair and doffing his cap at me like an English gent on a Sunday who's garden I was passing.

Interestingly, when faced with a potentially violent, complete unknown loitering in your yard covered in mud and rain, the revealing of one's own birthday suit seems inconsequential.

Feeling a deep sense of empathy for his situation, I called in to working citing a tramp in my yard and stayed in bed allowing him shelter. The ambitious little fellow was not happy with his lot though and promptly smashed the lock of the cupboard off, bent the bolt and put up home in the musky under stair cubby hole, a veritable stig of the dump.

Being a natural coward, I stayed in bed until he left and told myself that I was being a Good Samaritan. Over the following week he returned on occasion to his newly found home to roost until my flat mate (a small girl from Birmingham) took up the man of the house mantra and shoed him away like a stray cat, though given her mindset I’m sure that had he in fact been a stray cat, or dressed as a cat, he would now be living in the flat and defecating in the cat litter box as freely as his cat suit would permit.

The ordeal over I gradually regained the confidence to walk through the yard as oppose to the all new head down dash attack that I had adopted. That is until but a few days later another one of club street roamer came strolling through our threshold gate and began plodding down the steps full of aplomb and as smiley and happy as lord.

He wanted to know if his chum 'was in'....was in? 'Was in' in so much as the cupboard was now his permanent abode? I wonder if he's informed the Post office of this new address and left a forwarding address at on top of the cardboard box that he used to live in.

Barely having recovered from the surprise at the audacity of our parasitic friend I was enjoying one of my favourite day's in the house with tea, biscuits, computer games, Father Ted DVD's and children’s TV(I’m hooked on the new adventures of Iron Man), when two burly looking men began sweeping up outside my front door. Disconcerting at the best of times but our front door has a glass transparent front and leads directly from the yard into the lounge.

So whilst naught but a couple of inches of glass separated me from these angry looking do-gooders, I pondered, 'how often can I ignore events like these before I begin awaking to a homeless sleeping next to me in bed and a behemoth of a man vacuuming my room?'

Before the full impact of that thought had reverberated through me one of them knocked on the door.

This was it, he obviously wanted to sweep up the kitchen wearing a dress, and I was doomed.

Apparently they were builders, and apparently they were sweeping up the mess that they had made but a few days earlier and apparently his broom had snapped so could he borrow mine?

In a flash I had provided my sweeping device, innocent as they motivations of these men, they made me uncomfortable and I wanted them gone. Some time later (there was a great deal of mess and my broom is of limited usefulness resembling more of old toothbrush than a method of 'sweeping' away rubble) a knock at the door, and the call of 'I’ll just leave it put here mate', though he didn't look that bright so probably miss-spelled his own sentence, 'out hear'....

Once I was sure that the coast was clear I poked my suspicious little head around the door fearing having to sign for delivery of a package that the tramp had ordered or something, perhaps a new welcome mat. The broom was leaning on the wall. Or rather, A broom was leaning on the wall. The Builder had swapped it for a white one of similar quality taking my blue one with him.

BUT WHY?

The brooms were of similar inefficient quality, this wasn't the alleged broken broom and presumably he had to go and get it, else never would have needed mine in the first place.....

Perhaps he fears the colour white? Or is so unhappy in his marriage that any variety of any kind is vital to the perpetuation of his bliss? 

I wish him well with his new broom and certainly haven't suffered for the replacement, but I am now acutely aware that I do not need to leave my own living room to endure anecdote provoking lunacy and that anyone who says that one is wasting one's life by just sitting in front of the TV is completely wrong, if anything to go out, to leave all of that to go on un-seen would be a crime.

After all, if a tramp moves in to a cupboard and no-one knew he's done it, would he have really moved in at all?