floor finale

Dear friends, many of you have kindly written with your recommendations for my flooring choice, for which I thank you. You were all overwhelmingly for the light shade, not the dark. I have to tell you - TOO LATE. I chose the darker for a few reasons, the first of which is that it's made from Canadian trees, and though I don't approve necessarily of cutting down Canadian trees, at least my planks created a few Canadian jobs. But I also thought it's a warm colour which would be good in bedrooms, and that it would not show the dirt as much as the light one. The light one was very shiny and I thought more conventional. So I chose the dark.

And now that the many boxes of the wood have arrived and I've had a chance to look at more than one small piece, I will share this with you: you were probably right and I PROBABLY MADE A @#$#@ MISTAKE.

No no, I'm sure it'll look fine. And if it does not, I'll get rugs. At the moment, it looks like dull mud-brown laminate to me.

The house was particularly insane today, with Kevin and Ed working around four Hungarian floor finishers, who arrived first with vast slabs of plywood to lay the subfloor, and then many boxes of the wood. They have a nail gun thingie that they use to nail down everything. There was a huge amount of noise and much loud consultation, not in Cantonese today, but in Hungarian. In the middle of it all Grace arrived to give me another seminar in social media, but I was just not up for it, just not up for much at all. Under the weather, I think they call it. I am under really a lot of weather.

Though my dear Chris just called to say - Buck up, your floors will be fine. No one has ever come to your house, he pointed out, and said, Ugh, look at these ugly dark floors, let's leave. You're making yourself sick with stress, he said, and I think he may be right.

I have spent two months wearing more or less the same clothes - some kind of turtleneck and warm wooly apres-ski pants from MEC, of which I have 3 pairs. Most days I don't even bother putting on a bra. TMI? It's such chaos, I can't be bothered to find other clothes and it's cold, and who cares anyway? A certain nihilism enters the scene, and even red wine doesn't help. What the hell is going on?

Winter, renovation, being 68. What's it all about, Alfie?

As I type, I'm looking at the diamond ring Auntie Do gave me - an engagement ring that she never wore. It's so pretty, such flash and fire, red, blue, pink, green, all contained in that little stone. With it I wear my mother's wedding ring, and on the other hand, a Victorian ring with tiny sapphires that belonged to my great-grandmother's best friend Hattie Cumberpatch, in Northampton, and a green tourmaline ring made by Cousin Lola, an artist and jeweller in New York. I am carrying the love of my family on my fingers. And now I feel much better.