Sunday 27 March 2011

Insert 'it's curtains for you' pun here.

A few people (who are either kind, or mad, or both), have asked me why I haven't written anything for a while. The answer is that I haven't done anything worth writing about. If I'm honest, I have spent most of my recent free time watching a lot of The X Files.

The SO and I decided to re-watch the whole nine series and two films of this landmark of 1990's sci-fi in order, from the beginning. This was nearly two-and-a-half years ago, so a large proportion of our own relationship has panned out against the backdrop of Mulder and Scully's adventures. Together we have enjoyed the heady, hopeful early days of seasons one and two, when the monsters were plentiful and Scully's hair was big, helped each other through the dark times of the baffling government conspiracy mire that marked four and five, and struggled into the light of season six, when it got good again all too briefly before plunging back into the confusion of season seven, as Duchovny left to embark on his glittering Hollywood career (how's that working out for you, Duchovny? DUCHOVNY!!). We're now halfway through season eight, getting fed up with Scully's pregnancy and wishing Mulder would return and bring the spark back. (I realise the relationship metaphor got lost somewhere along the way there, which is probably no bad thing).

So what with all the ups and downs of that, I've not been up to much.

 It's sort of difficult to get an interesting picture of curtains, but here they are.
I did make some curtains. Let this be a warning to you from someone who has been there and survived - don't do it. 'How hard can it be?', thought I 'they're basically squares'. (Everything is basically squares when you come down to it, I've found. Scale that up and you can make anything. 'Taj Mahal? Yeah mate, piece of piss. It's basically squares, innit?').

So with 15 metres of Ikea's finest material staring at me, I set off to make six curtains for our unnecessarily big lounge windows (we had wooden blinds, which the cats had recently discovered could be used as rope ladders to swing on while re-enacting the Pirates of The Caribbean for the benefit of passers by. At least I presume that's what they were doing, nothing else would explain the destruction they had managed to wreak). After cutting, hemming and ironing one, I started to get bored. After three, I lost the will to live. And by the time I got to number six all that was keeping me from tears was the sheer grim determination of a woman possessed and the promise of a gin and tonic at the end of it all.

Apart from all the hemming and ironing, and the patience of a particularly patient saint, you also need a large area of floor to lay it all out on. I have a large area of floor, but it is generally full of cats. So extra time needs to be added for shooing the cats away, hoovering the floor, cutting the material, shooing the cats away again, retrieving your tailor's chalk that they have decided to take with them for a snack, then hoovering the finished curtain again because despite all your care they have still managed to somehow will their fur onto it from another room.

Still. They're up now and seem to have turned out OK. They're pretty much curtain shaped and the right way up. I'm nursing a mild hangover as I write this and they are doing a good job of preventing the sun's evil rays from burning into my retinas so they fulfil their primary objective.

Now. More X Files. Come on Agent Doggett, Scully's up the duff and Mulder's still gone, it's just you and me now.

2 comments:

  1. Of course you will have realised by now that cats can shimmy up curtains....

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  2. They don't seem to have figured that out just yet, which surprises me. But when they do at least they will be cheaper to replace than the landlord's blinds!

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