Downhill spiral

It’s always been a bit of a standing joke that I’m a spectacularly un-lucky person, mostly because I don’t actually believe in luck. The departmental secretary at college gave me that description when I was in my early 20’s - if anything could happen, grant cheques would go missing, paperwork misplaced, administration would lose me - they even got my name wrong when I was awarded my MA. Anything that can go wrong, will. It just happens. Some people glide through life - for me - it’s just a constant battle, one absurd thing after another - nothing goes the way it’s meant to - no matter how hard I try, I just lose.

I wrote about my leaking roof, and how the insurance refused to pay for it and have treated me really badly - and how the bay window is collapsing because nobody told me there had been a fire here - and how the kitchen roof is leaking - and all the damage done last year by the floods, there is other stuff I never talk about on here that’s just to shit to contemplate,  it all just keeps banging away at my self esteem in a desperate attempt to convince me, yes - I really do have bad luck.

For the last few days, every time I open the fridge, it smells of drains - I kinda assumed that it needed cleaning (it’s spotless) - or that I had been eating a lot of foreign cheese recently, or that there was a dead mouse underneath ( has happened once before ). I also noticed a small, round spot of damp on the floor - I had to take the kitchen floor up when I had the flood last year, so that the base boards over the concrete could dry out - I just assumed I’d spilt something. But for some reason, the wet spot gets bigger - and today, as I was making a cup of tea, I stepped on it - heard a ‘click’ and felt an indentation. I realised what it was almost at once. It’s the concrete cap over the soil pipe - where the toilet used to be ( the bathroom and toilet used to be downstairs. Clearly - the cap has failed - and that’s an open soil pipe.

My bathroom is upstairs - the back garden terraces about 15 feet higher - next doors toilet is about 5 feet higher than mine - and every other toilet on the row above mine too - so I’m clearly looking at going forward to a wet winter with a potential/inevitable sewage fountain in my kitchen. To make it worse, they put the floor down before they boarded the walls, and plumbed and wired - so to expose the pan - I’ll have to literally strip out the whole kitchen back to to brick, and as the roof leaks, the windows are rubbish, and the walls are just a single layer of cinder block - in the words of the last builder who came round “it would be cheaper to knock the kitchen down and rebuild it - quicker too - and you’ll never be able to build a room on top unless you do. I also think there is asbestos in the roof.

So - frankly, that’s my choice. Well, no choice. Knock the kitchen down to fix the drain.

On the plus side - I’ll get a bigger sun trap patio area. I could have a green house, or build a workshop or studio. On the downside, I’m losing my kitchen - I’ll have to move it into the dining room, and it’s al crap. Really shit. I don’t deserve it. And I don’t have any money

Work was a bit crap today too. 

Not really sure what I’m going to do next. Might just sit in the dark and stare into space.