Imelda Puts on the Charm for the TV cameras - What a DARLING!!

Imelda - what a character!

19 October 2013

Is this the stairway to Heaven?

Here is a further photo I found of the stairs within the mountain. This was taken BEFORE I cleared it.  It was taken from the top looking down, hence the light at the bottom which is actually the door out of the house! So yes, in this house the stairs going down would be the stairway to Heaven.  Now I see it, it seems unbelievable that anyone could live with this level of clutter for a week let alone 30 years.

So as the TV company think he is such a character they have offered to send professional clutter clearers to have a few words with him. Rather than two burly chaps and a skip which is what he feared, they talk him through his issues.  Whether this will work remains to be seen but if anyone will be able to talk him round, apparently it is them.

 He is, indeed, a character. Some of his character traits are as follows;

He has newspapers from 1996 still lying around which he has not got around to moving.  It is as if he cannot throw out any newspaper if he has not read it yet.  He sometimes appears at my house with a newspaper page he thought I may be interested in for a ski holiday or something - the paper is dated 2003.  He does this a lot and I get the impression he expects me to be grateful.

He took ten years to do my mother's probate because he couldn't find the paperwork.  I nagged him virtually weekly for this and finally took him myself to the probate office.

He calls my computer 'The magic lantern'. - He has no clue at all how it works.  He doesn't understand how a fax works or why he won't need to photocopy stuff before it's sent.  If my phone is engaged when he calls he'll call me back later and tell me the kids must have been on the computer earlier as the line was engaged.

I had my first poem published in December 2010 and proudly gave the book to him as a Christmas present on boxing day 2010.  He looked at it and said 'Oh, reading material'.  I had to point out it was me on the cover from my writing group as he had mislaid his glasses.  I then explained my poem published inside the book was about HIS dog Daffny. He said he'd read it when he got home.  I rang two days later and he'd not got round to reading it yet. He said my brother had read it and explained a bit about it.  About ten days later still no word.  I still don't think he ever read it.  He certainly never rang to say he had.  It is probably still stuck in a pile somewhere.  I would have expected him to want to read it - his daughter's first published piece of prose. Ho hum!

I'd love to tell him a bit more about my day to day life but he is so deaf it really is counter productive as I get so frustrated.  I could say 'Dad I am getting married next week'.
He would say 'Oh yes - now do you want a Radio Times?'  
I've no idea if he has heard me.  He says he doesn't always hear - you never know if he has even understood the gist of what you are trying to tell him.

He has no idea what the kids are doing at school as he can't hear them. They try to talk to him but he talks over them and he doesn't try to understand them. 

Every time I call him he says 'Thank goodness it's you, I thought you were one of those dreadful idiots trying to sell me something'.

Hopefully the clutter busting people will come and sort him out. Maybe he will even find things he has lost - item one on the list would be his hearing aid. His hearing issue is, I suspect, partly selective.  At best this is annoying and at worst embarrassing.  An example of the issues we have with his hearing as follows;

At Christmas dinner my friend who had come for a visit, asked how my partner's mother was - he said he didn't think she would last much longer and was in and out of hospital almost weekly. There was a bit of an awkward silence, then dad piped up ' We had a bumper crop of gooseberries this year and still have some in the freezer.'  Apparently not having heard a word.

A conversation I once had with him went like this... 'Dad, I am thinking of taking Kieran skiing - what do you think?'  (Kieran being my son who was six at the time)

'Think of what'

'Of me taking Kieran'

'Where?'

'Skiing'

'Oh you are going SKIING!'

'Yes - I was thinking of taking Kieran'

'Oh yes'

'Do you think he is too young?'

'For what?'

'For skiing dad.'

'For skiing - yes, I said that is nice - Are you going on your own?'

'No dad I was going to take Kieran.'

'take Kieran where?'...............

BANG BANG BANG (me banging my head against a wall).

That is a regular kind of conversation - it has anyone listening to the one sided conversation in my house howling with laughter - they can only hear me but it is obviously highly amusing.  The phone conversations are 100 times worse than real live conversations - although of course you do not have to put up with him sticking his ear in your face. The number of times my hair has almost caught fire or I have had my hair in the soup as he arrives on cue as I am cooking. If I speak to him and he doesn't hear he leans so close I have to literally bend over backwards.

He rang me from Spain on one of his regular holidays and he always goes to a public call box,  He told me about the weather and then said 'I only have 7 seconds left, 3, 2 - I can let you have another minute I suppose'  
'Er thanks Dad I feel SO very special.'

Although his house is a shocking state, when he comes to my house he seems to assume if something is on the floor he has every right to step on it.  I guess there is so much on his floor at home he doesn't even bother looking any more.  He will walk into the living room and CRACK! one of the kids toys bites the dust.

So, we will have to see what this week holds - watch this space.