This weekend
We did some spring cleaning, and went to Ikea to buy another bookshelf and some drawers for the attic so that we can move stuff out of the spare rooms and have space for potential future family members. I quite enjoy putting together flat-packed furniture, it's a bit like Meccano for grown-ups so I spent quite a lot of the weekend crouched over in the attic, creating order from the chaos and discovering things that I had already forgotten I had put away up there.
I found a forlorn Lalenth Nightmare, who must have been separated from his brethren while much of the kit was still living up in my attic, and who was curled around a lost Lalenthrian throwing rock. I found my diaries from before the computer age, somebody else's airbed and Mr Mason's bag of Batman masks and yellow artificial flowers which will probably make more sense in context. I was also reminded that my house is a treasury (or possibly crapsack) of random antiquities. I know about the furs and the china, but sometimes I am still surprised by the provenance of some of our belongings...
For instance, I encountered Vince by the dustbin and asked him what he was doing there. "Shaking out the nazi bedlinen" he told me. I was very confused for the few short minutes it took him to explain that the scruffy old dustsheets that we lay down in order to paint, sand, or build giant dragon puppets on were older than I thought. In fact, they were stolen from Germany in the 1940s by someone's grandfather, and for all the many years I have been laying them on the floor to protect the carpet, I have failed to notice the tiny swastikas in the corner hallmarking them as genuine nazi bedlinen. I am now resolved to pay more attention to the things we have inherited from Vince's side of the family, in case anything else I own has been looted from anyone notorious or evil.
Vince's grandmother unfortunately passed away last week, so on Sunday Vince went to her funeral and I stayed at home to finish putting the attic in order. You can now see the floor up there, which would be a good thing if I didn't now have to drag a vacuum cleaner up a loft-ladder in order to make that floor habitable.