So, last night Kathryn got home and had a ‘Discussion’ with the Landlord in which he listed an apparent catalogue of failures. When I got home we had a similar discussion, in which I avoided shouting at him, or hurling abuse, or screaming, or anything too bad on my side.
The failures boil down to the fact he’d have liked us to put our washing up away more promptly in the morning, don’t help with the recycling, and that he feels we are insular and don’t trust him (he went into our room without asking, when we weren’t there, which was why the discussion started today, so no, now we don’t trust him), and apparently we lack ’empathy’ for his ‘needs’ with his son (which it appear mean that he can traipse through our room whenever he fancies because of his son being home and him wanting to put the Xmas decorations away yesterday).
It was one of those discussions where one side is like teflon. I accept we’ve not been in the main house that much – but we indicated early on that we were *cold* and he said he didn’t want the heating on. Our solution was to supply our own heater, with our own fuel, which made it liveable. But also that meant we spent very little time elsewhere in the house (seriously, he turned the heating off because it was +6 C outside). Which leads to us spending time in the only warm room in the house. I didn’t have a diagnosis of Asthma before I moved in, because my symptoms never lasted long enough to be noticeable. After a month of living in his house my quietly background asthma has a persistant appearance long enough to be diagnosed.
I accept that we’ve not taken the recycling to the supermarket. This is because he, at no point, indicated that he’d like us to*. Nor did he tell us where it went. In Slough it went on the kerbside, all of it (except Tetrapak cartons), in Bristol this is apparently not the case. His mum mentioned that he took some of it to a recycling place, in passing a few weeks ago when I was chatting to her. Neither I, nor Kathryn is telepathic, you actually have to tell us if you want something done, not turn up after 3 months pissed off that we didn’t mysteriously grasp your requirements.
Anyhow, it ended with me saying that I’d do my best to get us out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that means us being in a hotel for a few days. Whilst having a Spa Bath is nice, and the full English in the morning is convenient (especially because I don’t think I’ll be having another hot meal today), even with the fairly huge discount it’s still painfully expensive and we still don’t know when the house is going to be available to us.
I’m feeling completely lost right now. I’m meant to be working, but I keep coming back to Russ damning us, and feeling lousy. I feel like crying, moving to Bristol was meant to improve things not make them 20 times more challenging. And it scares me, because we want to move to Canada, and suddenly that seems infinitely more challenging than it did before. While I’m still pleased we’re making the move, it’s wonderful to be around friends**, at the moment life is hard and tiring and I want to cry.
* However we do empty the bins, put out the food-waste-recycling, collect the bins and put them back inside the property boundary, sweep up in the kitchen, wash the surfaces and the cooker, do his washing up, dry up his stuff, put it away…
** Nikki and Kate bloody rock.
