Got My Mojo Risin'

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Saturday night, home alone in new flat:

one happy bunny, it took a while to sink in and stop feeling overwhelmed by space and filth but oh, what bliss now;

sitting very comfortably on my purple beanbag in my ridiculously huge and largely empty living room, listening to some heavenly tango waltz music on the iPod, taking the word ‘laptop’ a little too literally and probably setting myself up for thigh cancer;

had a lovely long chat with my Daddy on the phone earlier and still amused by his lunatic humour and darling desire to help, even after 40 years of being my Daddy;

French windows open and balmy air oozing around, untrammelled by furniture or other obstacles - slowly, slowly taking over from cat-stinky, fag-ridden atmosphere bequeathed by previous incumbent. Buses occasionally rumbling past (can’t complain about the noise, the bus service here is excellent!) ;

just eaten my first steak in the new home, brought to my door by very nice lady for all of 8 pesos (a quid and a half!) with the best chips I have had since I got here. They had clearly been potatoes until about half an hour ago and maybe sitting in the package for the half a block walk from the restaurant made them taste like chip shop chips so I savoured every one! After a week of pizza hot for supper and cold for lunch, it was extra fab;

not planning on dancing tonight as tomorrow I really must go and invest in some white goods. I was going to do that today but after a silly amount of time responding to emails and an astonishing amount of time hoovering up the cadavers of a thousand and one cockroaches (had the fumigator in yesterday - v.effective!), the day was as good as spent.

The kitchen here is beyond cleaning (I have tried with mucho elbow grease and an increasingly toxic and abrasive array of products but it is too encrusted with decades of grime), so it all has to come out as soon as I can engage the services of a plumber. Very sweet friend Carmen is working on that for me. Meanwhile it is take-aways and tepid bottled drinks all the way. Must measure the lift to see how big a fridge I can get in there, though delivery people probably won’t argue about carrying it up 4 flights of stairs as they would in England.

Ok, the listing thing isn’t working as a literary device, so I shall just revert to ordinary sentences and paragraphs.

Sensibly, decent mattress was at the top of my urgent shopping list, so I have been enjoying the sleep of the just, even if the lack of fridge or indeed washing-up facilities has deprived me of the food of the gods! Still, after a disgruntled week and a half on unsatisfactory bedding in the temporary abode, I was painfully aware of what a sleep person I am. Sure Mrs Thatcher with her 3 hours a night or whatever it was would not have cared, but something tells me that is not the only difference between the two of us!

Hoover next on the list and hurrah, I love it. I hoover in the morning, I hoover in the evening, all over this flat! If Moulinex want to bung me a free mixer for advertising, I will happily tell you that their Boogie is a powerful and rather cute new friend. What the hell, I will tell you that for nothing - and it is a bit purple! It really sucks - in the sense that sucking is what a good hoover should do. It has a bag already full of cat hair and cockroach cadavers, so I won't be recycling that one!

I did eventually manage to get out today but not very far. I went over to Okko on Santa Fe, a sort of Habitat but with lots of oriental furnishings. It is odd here that there is little middle ground when it comes to shopping. Stuff is either cheap and looks it, then falls apart, or it is very expensive and often falls apart anyway - so there are huge gaps in pretty much every market you care to think of for reasonably-priced, functional things. Anyway, all I was after was a drainer so that I can finally wash up the many glasses I had rather craftily bought in anticipation of well-wishers, champagne etc. but now do not actually want coming into contact with the filthy sink! Of course, am now in possession of a plastic bowl and a drainer but still there are about 30 glasses and half a dozen used mugs awaiting attention… well blogging is so much more important; it will free me up from writing half a dozen long emails every morning. Yeah, right!

As if I am up in the morning!

Actually, I discovered last week that the French have cunningly spotted the gap in the market and sent over Carrefour hypermarkets to make a start on filling it, so I got several super things there and will go back for more. Otherwise kitting this place out is going to be either insanely expensive or insanely wasteful & short-term if I buy cheap. Did I mention the flat is huge?

The ceilings are three and a half metres high. I was standing on the little balcony today and realised that here on the 4th floor, I am at eye level with the 7th floor of a building across the way. Yikes! So will need lots more paint than in the London flat!

A friend is coming round next week to get going on the painting. We will get the living room looking decent at least. My plan is to do a fairly cosmetic job initially, then strip things down and do it properly over the next couple of years. That way, it can be presentable and functional sooner. Belen has a good craftsman who can work on restoring the mouldings and that sort of thing but he is quite busy just now.

My cleaner from the old flat is coming over too to catch up and I hope she will be in a position to take on some rolling-up of sleeves etc. She is such a sweetie, very practical and a total perfectionist, even if a little prone to moving things about the place for no apparent reason.

Ambitiously enough, I am planning to have a house-warming party on Friday coming, so had better actually start planning it, rather than just asking people! Need a table and a couple more places to sit. If I have no working kitchen, I will at least get rid of what I can and buy in empanadas & cake. Also need to clean inside bedroom & bathroom cupboards so that I can actually bear to unpack bags currently still in vestibule on ugly but easy-to-clean-and-disinfect ceramic tiled floor. The vestibule is about the size of my living room in London, by the way. Here is the vestibule, replete with worldly goods and Julie-Anne's fantastically helpful (nearly all gone now) cleaning equipment:



I feel inspired to measure the living room now… it is nine and a half metres long, so what is that, about 30 feet? The fatter half is four and a half metres wide, the thinner half is three sixty. Pretty big anyway, and it has a beautiful varnished wooden floor which everyone tells me is very valuable. Well, if we can dance on it, I will be happy. Here is some of it, freshly relieved of some ugly concertina doors in the middle:

The panelling in the arch has windows in it, as is the case all over the flat, and at some point much of this has been painted over. The doors and frames are also rather nice wood underneath layers of chipped and filthy paint. So there will is a fair acreage of paint-stripping to be done.

Thank heaven for rubber gloves and lethal chemicals!

The cockroaches will most definitely not be invited on Friday - if they turn up, they will be trodden on by some of the fanciest shoes on the planet! Actually, maybe I should ban an Comme il Faut shoes in case of stilletoe marks on the floor.

Glad I am not a Buddhist or in any sense worried about grand scale insecticide. In fact, should I not be congratulated for sending them on up the ladder towards nirvana rather than castigated for killing the little buggers? I did think about taking a picture of the massed cadavers but it is an image I would rather forget and you dear people never need see.

I will invite a couple of the guys I dance with at my beloved Club Español, though they will most likely take it the wrong way. They were so sweet on Thursday - pointing out that I looked different and quite radiant, so I told them about the flat and to a man they were warm and congratulatory, even excited about the cupola. One wrangled the address out of me and sent round a lovely big white azalea on Friday morning with his congratulations. He wants to dance with me next year in the campeonato. Maybe I am still naïve about all the compliments but I have never had a problem brushing off unwelcome advances and on the whole I love the charm and ease of it all. I danced like a demon on Thursday with all my favourite people - fab. Left exhausted with huge smile on face. By the way, I do go on about Club Español, and how gorgeous it is, so here is a pic. If you know who to look for, you can see Susan and Julie-Anne dancing:

Well, now I must go and crawl into my big, comfy, cotton-sheeted, feather-duveted bed (thanks Carrefoure!) and hope to get up in time to buy a fridge tomorrow. Maybe a stereo too. Very happy to live without a TV though as there is so much else to keep me occupied.

I only wish the dear friends who have coaxed me through some unhappy times on London could loll about in the mood I am in now. I am, as I said at the start, one happy bunny! If I get hit by one of the frequent and enthusiastic buses here, you will know that I had a smile on my face, even if the wholesale cockroach slaughter - or a judicial holiday, some idiot intermediary or industrial action at the Heaven Registry - bars me from reaching a better place in the hereafter!
Oh go on, scroll down and take another look at the cupola!

Who needs drugs when there’s Buenos Aires?

Cheers!