pie in the sky

He’s been and gone, the Skyman, not a chap to be defined by his absence since the extent of his personality was revealed in but a sequence of grunts and flunked eye catching. Still, he wasn’t there to be my best friend, he was thereto arm himself in a surprising amount of clothing to scale a ladder, rising 4 or 5 giddy rungs to install a, sssshh, a dish. The shame. But prior to that,

“You’ve had Sky before,” he said accusingly.
We’d ticked a box saying we hadn’t. We’d also cleared a room to allow what’s called Easy Access to the phone line. He’d told me brusquely that we needn’t have bothered, which left me facing an hour of bashed shins to anticipate in shunting it all back.
“No,” I said, hasty to declare our Sky virginity, “We haven’t, it’s just for the Ashes, nothing more.”
“You have,” he said, totally uninterested. “Look. The marks on the wall.”
“Well, maybe the woman before, but I don’t remember seeing a dish.”
“It was here,” he said, “you’ve had it before.”
Clearly his ‘you’ was not my ‘you’ so I let it go.

I asked a run of idiotic questions. The terseness of his answers suggested he’d considered murder as an option to replying. He used words like ‘scart’ and ‘input’ and 'AV2' to spoil it for me. “It’s all in the manual,” he said.
“You get to an age when you can’t face the manual,” I said.
“Better press on,” he said.

On went the steel-capped boots and the hard hat, out came the ladder. Doubtless a Certificate of Competence in ladder management, awarded following a 2 day course, lay in the glove compartment (I say "glove" but does anyone keep gloves in this compartment, or a hideous miscellany of tat: scratched sunglasses and rumpled A-Zs shy the relevant pages?)
3 people from school, teachers and, what are called I always find rather alarmingly, ‘support staff’ – I imagine them there, poised beneath open windows, ready to catch flying infants, or braced against a wall, shouldering it into submission – took such a course, in stepladder use. 2 people are always to be present, it seems, when grappling with steps: hence the need for 3 when, inevitably, one of them is off on long-term sick leave.
Amusingly, the 3 plucked for this noble task were the fatties. I pause to smile at the images of all 3 getting the Christmas decorations out of the loft, happy days, drenched in tinsel; tempers just this close from fraying; tight, short laughs; trapped fingers and panic and blame; plenty of tepid tea.

And just yesterday, the waterman came.
“Come to read the meter,” he said.
Since it had been tipping down, I winced and said, “Oh, your feet ...” Beige carpet, you see, relatively new after three years of squalor and grime.
“Gotta keep ‘em on,” he said, “health and safety.”
“The meter’s just here, under the stairs,” I said. “It’s quite safe.”
“Gotta wear these boots,” he said. “Sorry. I used to keep a pair of protectors, in the van, for nice people such as yourself, but I got reported. Not allowed to wear ‘em.”
“Can I read it?” I asked.
“You can,” he said in terms of well, I’ve heard some crazy things. “It’ll have to go down as a customer reading though. One of these days, you’ll have to let one of us do it. Mental, I know. Sorry about the mud.”
The mad mad world of meter reading.

Meanwhile, I made F10 some breakfast. There was very little milk.
“Is that it?” he asked in great outrage, he grabbed Catty by the scruff of its exhausted neck as witness to my slack housekeeping.
“It is. You’ll both have to have water, I’ll get some more later.” Both! What am I saying. This cat is stuffed.
“Is there no back up milk?”
“What would back up milk be?”
He rolled his eyes, “For when the normal milk runs out.”
“It’d go off,” I said.
“No it wouldn’t,” he said, “I’d drink it. And Catty would drink it.”
“I’ll go and buy some now,” I said, resisting the lure of the cat-led circular conversation.
“And don’t forget to get back up milk too.”
What that boy and his cat, his ambitions and expectations, needs is an office and secretaries. I feel sorry for them having to settle for me.

I bought a thing of big milk instead, and a lemon and some garlic. Not very breakfasty but I like to do my bit with regard to unnecessary purchases to help keep the shop afloat. The price they charge meant they could close by lunchtime and still make a profit on the day. Empty of purse but bursting with milk, back up or otherwise, I trotted back.

“He wanted you,” F10 said, “the man who doesn’t like his job.”
“Did he say that?” I asked eagerly.
“No. You can just tell.”
“How?” I said, loving glimpses into his thought processes.
“You just can,” he said warningly, “end of conversation.”

I took him to school, he miaowed and purred and talked about Catty who, little does either of them know, is doomed to a morning spinning round in the washing machine.
More end of an era stuff up at the gates, with the current Year 6 lining up for the last time. Brings tears to your eyes, or it did to mine; the crop of mothers there looked stolid and unresponsive, and you have to hope that nostalgia, at the very least, is playing out somewhere in the depths of their flinty hearts: I’m expecting great use of hankies at pick-up time and not just by me.

Somehow, next year, my random F10 will be in the big boy line. He gave me a wonky smile and faked a miaow at me through the bars. We’ll have to do something to quell his inner cat before year 6. That and watch a lot of cricket, if I can be bothered to read the manual.