"Home Thoughts From A Bed by N. Frowning"

"OH, to be in EnglandNow that winter’s there,And whoever sleeps in EnglandDoes not scratch their legs sore and bareAnd the low temperatures and cooling breezeHelp those abed to sleep with ease,While comfort doth duvet endowIn England—now!" I woke at 3.00am. What is one to do in the darkness of the man cave at that time? I checked my emails. Most emails arrive while I try to sleep...because most of them are on UK time. There was one from my tenant. It would seem that returning home on Saturday night she had not been able to unlock one of the locks on the front door. It was after midnight and she tried, to no avail for 30 minutes. She awoke the neighbour, I am not sure if it was on purpose or by accident, and she tried to gain entry to before the tenant called a locksmith. For some reason he could not gain entry either! The neighbour kindly allowed the tenant to sleep on her couch and when the locksmith returned (!?) in the morning broke a window in the door to gain access. The charge for all this was £90 and he had not even fixed the lock at this point. The email went on to say she had called a glazier to look at the glass and he had quoted a price of £196 to replace the small pane...apparently it needed to be safety glass and had to be ordered from Cornwall (?!)...she wanted to know if she should go ahead and get it sorted.......NOOOOOOOOOOO!At 3.05am I was frantically texting my brother. I don’t know why she had not phoned him about it in the first place. Thankfully, he rang her immediately and arranged to go and sort it within a few hours. He is a hero.The whole drama was not conducive to sleep though, try as I might to drop off at 3.20am. My bites were itching and I reached out under the net for Lucas’s Pawpaw ointment (recommended by Dulcie...I have eschewed ‘Stingose!). It was too hot for covers but I can’t sleep out of the covers. I felt the call of nature and tried to ignore it but alas was forced out of bed and into the fernery...(Shhhh, don’t tell Dulcie.) Dawn was breaking....and what does that mean? Yes....the birds wake up.Back in bed I tried not to think about the £90 I now have to send to the UK and tried to ignore the birds but there is one that makes a noise like one of those squeaky pet toys...the same note, on and on and on....can you imagine that? By some miracle I must have dropped off because the next thing I knew it was 8.30am.We had the phone call yesterday to say that our shipment was arriving between 11 and 12. They arrived exactly at 11. Two large Samoan gentlemen wheeled all 16 boxes into the garage. The telly was not in the wooden crate we had paid for and looked very much like it had not been in one! One corner of the packing looked a bit crushed and there was a bit of a gouge in the cardboard on one side. I carried it carefully into the man cave and unpacked it hastily...it looked ok. Happily, once assembled, it worked fine...though we can get no TV signal, as yet, in the man cave. The Xbox is connected and working fine...we have even managed to connect it to the internet. Some of the other boxes were a bit bashed and do not look like they have been handled very carefully. One looked as if it had been searched by customs but Will’s harp was untouched. One of the Samoans said that it would have been x-rayed rather than opened. The glass on a number of picture frames is broken but they appear to be the only casualties. We spent much of the rest of the day unpacking and happy to be reunited with our things. Just before lunch I found a picture of my boys when they were much younger and my eyes filled up and I had to delay heading up the steps until I looked composed. Looking at it took me back to a different life a long time ago...I was back there again in an instant before  almost as quickly whizzing back into the present and very mindful of how greatly things have changed. I missed those boys.With so much more stuff around us now we started to sort out the man cave ‘annex’...the walls and the floor still need to be painted in this part of the room and hopefully we will get this done later this week.While we were busy under the house...Dulcie was watering the fernery. I noticed she was watering one of the plants that I had ‘watered’ in the middle of the night...but I didn’t say anything.