Why God why?!

Today I learnt that I can get ridiculously mad about the dumbest things. I cleaned our outdoor furniture; by that I mean I hosed it all down. For weeks now the stuff has been sitting under our porch, plastic coverings kicked up and muddied by dogs. We have these two wooden loungers which, in poor weather, we push up against the outdoor table. All of them have plastic covers for the wet, muddy, foggy, rainy weather that lies over Hillcrest like a migraine through much of summer. The other day we came home to find our two dogs standing on the table peering quizzically into the lounge, their new viewpoint allowing them, for once in their sad doggy lives to look down on their owners. You can imagine the footprints and muddy detritus these two mutts leave in their wake.

So I took a hose to all of it. That sentence is a little misleading, it suggest I was somehow in charge of what unfolded next but I’m not a DIY guy so, when it comes to this kind of thing, I’m never really in charge. You have to be seriously un- DIY to know what it means to be owned by inaminate objects – hammers are objectionable, hose-pipe pieces don’t fit the faucet, nothing works. So you get a hired hand for most things. The hired hand comes in, you know, measures twice cuts once, performing DIY like a heart surgeon, pulling the right sized spanner from the belt; I should say rust-free spanner, which in this house is an item of folklore. They whistle while they work. I could kill them in.

So washing down outdoor furniture is not something a person like me does before breakfast; it is an ordeal. It draws increasingly interesting gazes from the neighbours who have never seen something that is so easy on paper unfold in such reckless fashion. I turn the hose on, which is a good start when you want to hose something down but the thing is coiled and starts to whip around in a frenzy. Every time I am about to lunge for it, it whips around and away; I feel like a horse whisperer trying rein in an unduly ill-disciplined stallion; only, need I remind you, the hose is inanimate. I stand now crouched, hands open and to the side, shuffling backwards and forward, side-to-side, concentrated effort etched on my face, less like a person chasing down a hose-pipe, more like a mathematician developing a complex algorithm; picture a six foot two Irish sumo wrestler, lacking nothing but an oversize nappy. The gardener next door has turned off the mower to add a soundtrack to his disbelieving view. It doesn’t help that I am wearing my good trainers. I don’t want these things muddied! I should go change them but now all rational thought is out the window. Eventually I lock-down the hose-pipe in dramatic fashion.

I finish hosing down the furniture just in time for the Hillcrest drizzle to set in, which could last days. The furniture so exuberantly washed now sits out in an endless drizzle, and I lift my eyes to the heavens and cry, ‘Why God why?’