Monday 22 August 2011

A cautionary tale about a tidy house

While the husband and lad are away in Wanaka I have spent my time trying to get as much work done as possible and having lots of friends over for evenings of crisp eating and wine drinking.  I interviewed the chap in the pic about him selling his house in Remuera (the Auckland equivalent of Chelsea) and buying a piece of land, raising cows, planting hundreds of fruit trees and building his own house.

I didn't feel like eating crisps for the third night in a row so I had some friends over for dinner.  One of our little gang couldn't make it.  I popped into her shop the next day for a quick debrief.
"Hey, how did it go last night?  Did I miss anything?  Who was there?  What did you talk about?"
I filled her in and tried to make it sound like fun, but not too much fun.
"What did you get up to?" I asked.
"Oh, I was in the shop looking at a  new range until 10pm then I drove home absolutely exhausted.  I jumped in the spa to try and relax a bit before I went to bed."
I was impressed.  Stevie suffers from insomnia and has been trying to introduce an hour or two of calm before bedtime rather than the more inviting 3 glasses of wine and shrieking with friends as an antidote to the stresses of frenetic work.
"Ah well it didn't end up being as relaxing as I had hoped.  It turns out I had left the door of my car wide open and the headlights on.  Remember my neighbour Archie?"
I certainly did.  He and his wife have taken Stevie in for the night on the frequent occasions she had locked herself out and had rescued her on the roadside the previous week when her car had been broken into.  I should imagine he views Stevie with some wonder and not a small amount of eye rolling at her rather chaotic style.
"Mmm, yep, I know Archie."
"Well he could see the car headlights from his house so he came over to see if everything was ok.  He walked through the house, out onto the deck and found me climbing, naked out of the spa.  I screamed and grabbed a towel.  He screamed and quickly turned away."
I giggled.
"He said 'Stevie, what's going on?  Did you know you've been burgled?  Your car's been broken into again and your house has been absolutely ransacked.'  I said 'Erm really?  Gosh what a nightmare, I'll er, get onto it straight away' then I ushered him out with as much dignity as a towel allows and put tidying the house at the top of my list of things to do."

3 comments:

  1. Haha...does Stevie know you've wrote this!?

    Sorry I didn't return the comment you left sooner, but I'm sure you know how things get.

    We are still in the UK. I don't think we will move to NZ, not for a good few years at least.

    I'm starting a degree in fashion & textiles this september, Ella is enjoying and doing really well at her school, and Danny seems to have plenty of work considering the economic climate, so it's all good at the moment.

    Are you still going to move to the UK? If so whereabouts? Hope the riots haven't put you off!

    Jess x

    ReplyDelete
  2. yes, I checked with her first. She thought it was amusing to have her tale up on the internet.
    I am flying home for a wedding in a week. Am beside myself with excitement x

    ReplyDelete
  3. Brilliant! That reminds me when I was at Varsity when we were burgled. All my friends came into my room and said: "God how awful they just upended everything! Look they've gone through all your drawers, what a violation." Turns out the burglars never went into my room, I was just really untidy.

    ReplyDelete

I love reading your comments, thanks for taking the time to make them

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails