Apathy Sketchpad

A week ago today we moved into the new house. Naturally, this was not an operation which was performed quickly and smoothly by a team of individuals working like a well oiled machine, or it if was, then said machine was one of the stepper motors we had to use for our electronics project. We were first hampered by a very inconsiderate decision to hold an international cricket match in Headingly Stadium and therefore gridlock several major roads, and then further hampered by the previous tenants almost total faliure to move out, or more accurately, faliure to move any of their stuff out. They arrived later to remove some things, but they left a healthily stocked cupboard of tins and lots of surplus furniture, which combined with our food and furniture, and the food and furniture we stole from Stavros meant that yesterday the landlord had to come to collect some of it, and he’ll be back for more later in the week.

To speed up this operation, Lee offered to move said furniture downstairs. In retrospect that may have been a mistake. The matresses came willingly. The beds put up quite a fight, but don’t actually weigh anything so weren’t much trouble. The sofa was an evil sofa sent by Satan direct to the first floor of our house, to torment us. It is too heavy to be moved more than a few feet by one person, and we had to get it through a doorway narrower than it, along a landing, round two corners, down a flight of stairs, and then somewhere out of the way. While this naturally entailed a lot of fun and games at first manouvering the sofa to the top of the stairs, the fun part came when it got there. We eventually just put an armchair at the base of the staircase and sent the sofa sliding down into that.

The new house came with a strange token meter, which I didn’t think existed any more, and had been run into the red by the previous tenants. The previous tenants, I should mention, included two guys who everybody just called “The Crook Brothers”. At first I assumed that it was just because they were two crooks who hung around together, but it turned out was because they were two crooks who were brothers and whose last name was Crook. Which strikes me as foolish. If your last name is Meadows, then subconsiously people are more likely to trust you than if you’re plainly a crook and your passport says so. It also came with its own tramp (or more correctly a tramp we share with the whole street) who is happy to take anything we don’t want, so must have been delighted when we threw out all of the Messers Crook’s kitchenware after Lizzy declared it kitchenware “of ming”. He also has about three beds and some pillows now, making him officially the third most comfortable tramp in the world.

Meanwhile, the stange token meter was running down very quickly at first, and this turned out to be because the upstairs shower (also of ming) which was left on and refused to be turned off. Eventually I trusted it with enough of my weight that I decided it would either break and kill me, or switch off, if I pulled it hard enough. Incredibly, both these things happened at the same time (it turned off and broke; it plainly didn’t kill me), which is behaviour I haven’t seen from a switch since Fantasy World Dizzy.