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Saturday, May 04, 2013

As it transpires, the answer is "Quite hard, actually"...


You wouldn't believe I put almost an hour's work into that. Or maybe you would. It looks like a fat person wearing ill-fitting clothes. And it's not as comfortable as it looks. The back cushion's too big for the seat, so you end up perching on the edge like an oversized Ronnie Corbett.

So that photo was taken shortly before I took it all apart again. I've decided it looks better with a bit of bare wicker and a couple of scatter cushions. It's a case of less is more.

But my upholstering aside, it's been a successful day. I woke up this morning (or last night, depending on your point of view) at 4:30am, and having lain in bed for half an hour thinking about the 101 things I wanted to do today, I decided the best thing was to get up and start doing them.

By 9:15am, I'd already filled three bin bags with rubbish, and was standing in a branch of Argos, waiting for a bookcase, a DVD stand and a shower hose to come rolling down the conveyor belt. By lunchtime, I'd cleaned all the mould from the children's bedroom, sorted through all their belongings, rearranged half their furniture, and put together the bookcase and the DVD stand to house the scant few things I was letting them keep.

By 4pm, when I took my sixth sack of refuse down to the rubbish area, and hoovered the newly discovered floor in the bedroom, I felt exhausted, but had carried out the kind of transformation that Carol Smillie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would have been proud of. Although much like a lot of Laurence's work, it's likely to prove unpopular with the client.

The good news is that whilst I've been shut in the kids' bedroom like a slave on a gypsy site, Toby's been next door in the living room, mastering the art of crawling. He's come on in leaps and bounds today. Quite literally. I'd have filmed him if I hadn't been so busy.

As it transpires, however, he's not the only member of the family who's been showing off their skills today. Word reached us this afternoon that just five months after creating the lyrically ambiguous (and essentially tuneless) modern masterpiece that is 'Twinkling Stars', Amelie has come up with an entirely new, self-penned composition.

Not only did she sing it to me over the phone before going to bed, but she also laid down a demo on camera. So, thanks to the miracle of e-mail, and a swift bit of editing, it gives me great pleasure to present the world premiere of 'Singalong Popstar'...


Amelie's the one on the right. And it's great that she can make her own entertainment. It'll make it easier for her when she comes home to find all her toys gone.

5 comments:

Phil's Mum said...

Well, I thought your re-creation of the armchair looked very good. I wouldn't have worried about whether it was comfortable, as long as it looked all right.

Peter Chapman said...

I think I'm missing out by not being in bed with an Iain.

Jon Cheshire said...

I think things can only get better now Am has joined D Ream

Phil said...

It's what everyone's saying about you.

Phil said...

Yeah, twenty years from now, she could be presenting science programmes on BBC2.