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Showing posts with label construction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label construction. Show all posts

Thursday, February 27, 2020

The noise!


https://reformationhouse.ca/wp-content/uploads/resized/5cd91656e163d684675e2b0d628d6bc2/Restore01.jpg 
 

I am beginning to suspect that the lengthy and noisy ‘reformation’ of the house next door is being done solely to drive us to distraction and out!
     Houses here have tile floors throughout; the bathrooms are tiled and so are the stairs – this means that if a new occupier wants to renovate there is a quantity of loud banging to replace the coverings.  As we live in a conjoined house, and as those houses have a framework of concrete, all thwacks against one part of the structure is seamlessly transmitted to the adjoining houses giving a reproduction of the attacks that cannot be bettered by a Bose loudspeaker.  We have been living through a positive battlefield of noise for months!
     Today, apart from a few desultory hammer knocks almost for ‘old time’s sake’ the noise is now emanating from the front approach to the house where a walkway is being extended to cover the whole of the front ‘garden’.  Nothing really grows in our front gardens because of the overshadowing pine trees where lack of sunshine and a covering of pine needles ensures that the ground is vegetation free – apart from the needles.  The laying of footpath slabs is not in itself noisy, but the radio turned up full to accompany the labours of the workmen is.  I have retreated to the opposite side of the house and am typing in relative tranquillity.
     I am very well aware that typing such stuff is an open invitation to the Gods of Perversity to fill the silence with the hammering-by-proxy that has become so much an irritating part of our lives.  And, even as I type the low timpani roll of hammer thuds rings out from next door!
     There is always something to keep me grumbling!


The first responses to the pre-publication copies of The eloquence of broken things have started to trickle in and they are positive and encouraging.  What I need to do is think more about marketing and publicity, which I am sure can be just as intellectually satisfying when done properly as producing the writing in the first place!  But I am constantly beset by the signal disadvantages of writing in a foreign language in Catalonia and writing poetry too!  Niche in a niche!
     I will have to reach out more to the cultured ex-pats who might actually read what I’ve written!