London/Edinburgh

Caro and I left Brownie in Newark airport, and we took separate flights into London. Caro's mood immediately darkened when we arrived.  She had a point.  Londoners are undoubtedly the most ignorant buggers I've ever encountered, grumpy, miserable and startlingly unhealthy, hacking and snuffling all over us.  I was worried that I would inhale some horrid virus, and equally concerned that f*cking miserablitis was even more infectious.  So the grey sky over London matched our mood as we made our way to Brownie's flat in Wimbledon, which she had warned us would be pretty grim as she shared it with two smelly and dirty flat-mates named Ed and Sebastian. 

Poor Brownie spends a lot of her time spraying air-freshener around the boy's bedrooms, because - well - they're SMELLY.  Minging.  Whiffy.  On a hot day, Brownie can detect the aroma from upstairs in her bedroom.  Lovely.  As often happens when a girl shares a flat with boys, Lisa has become “mum” despite her best efforts to avoid it.  This is a typical conversation between Lisa and Ed:

BROWNIE: Ed, I hear you're off for the week.  I'll be compiling a list of tasks for you to complete in that time.
ED:        I'm on holiday, I don't expect to be doing much.
BROWNIE:  Listen sunshine, you're not sitting on your arse all day.  That lawn needs mowing for a start.
ED:        But it's Seb's turn!
BROWNIE:    Don't start!  Seb's good.  Seb's mowed the lawn a couple of times now.
ED:        But I did it last.
BROWNIE:    Yeah right.  I came home and I knew you were the one who'd done it, because you couldn't be arsed doing the edges.  You'd just done a f*cking cricket pitch in the middle of the lawn.
ED:        Hmph.
BROWNIE:    And there's a huge pile of washing up that you created over the weekend too.
ED:        I suppose it's conceivable I could do them.
BROWNIE:    I'll give you bloody conceivable.

During my time with them I began to worry that Brownie would do Ed a serious injury with said lawnmover, if only in order to get herself a nice clean prison cell.  So it was with some relief that Caro left and headed back up to Edinburgh to stay with Sue.  Sue is my ex-wife and one of my best friends.  Weird huh?  How terribly European of me, I know.  The fact is that I don’t discard friends, even if I do happen to have been married to them.  Added to this is the fact that Sue is extremely level-headed and sensible and so the best person to have been taking care of my affairs whilst I was away.  She had also become foster-mum to my cats, Dusty and Ripley.

Dusty, is a little splat of fur that sits in the middle of the carpet with a permanent expression of, "Huh?" on her kitty face.  She's not the brightest little animal and would often fall off the couch when she lived with me.  Ripley, her brother, is a more robust animal.  He's quite big and sleek, but also very noisy and huge baby.  He also has a habit of announcing his entrance to the room very noisily.
 
"MEOW!  I'm home!!!  MEOW!!  I say!!!  Is anyone there???  MEOW!  I need stroking!  MEOW!!!!"
 
It was nice being at Sue's with the cats, but we decided we also had to visit  Pete and Carol.  Now I first met Carol on renting her flat and loved her straight away.  She's a very sweet and lovely person, and also someone to whom events just seem to happen (more on this later).  I rented Carol’s flat on the break-up of my marriage and just as she was about to leave to move in with her then-fiance Pete.  Caro and I were very happy indeed for the two of them when they bought their dream-house in Roseburn, and suffered along with them when it was flooded with poo just a few weeks before they were due to move in.  They knew from the start it was a fixer-upper, but they had no idea they would have to have all the floorboards lifted, industrial fans brought in to dry the house out, and the whole house de-toxed for e.coli and other nasties.  This major renovation was still ongoing when we visited.
 
Nevertheless, they always kept their humour about the place, as evidenced by this story that I must share with you:
 
Carol and Pete's Chimney Sweeper Story
After the disastrous flood, Carol and Pete worked very hard fixing their house one room at a time.  They eventually managed to get their dining room dried out, re-decorated and just as they wanted it.  The only thing left to do was the fireplace, which was terribly dirty.

Caro called various services, and was told a man would be sent around to deal with it the next morning.  They didn’t specify quite how early, so Carol was disturbed to hear a banging on the door at 8am the next day.  She pulled on a long t-shirt to cover her nudiness and ran to the front door.  Only she couldn’t see anyone.  Then she looked down, to see a dwarf chimney sweep looking up.  More disturbingly, looking UP her t-shirt.  

“Blimey,” she said, “I’d shown him the family jewels by mistake.  I thought, ‘I’d better get good service.’”

Carol let the little chimney sweep in and told him his remit was to clean up the chimney in the one room that was now presentable after many months of post-flood cleaning.  All their downstairs furniture was now in that one room so they could work on the rest of the house.  She also added that she KNEW the chimney was blocked with concrete, so he was just to CLEAN the chimney.
 
Then she went off to get dressed, only to come back and find that he had LIT a fire to "check the draw".  The newly-decorated room was filled with soot, the furniture stank of smoke and Carol found new uses for the word "fuckwit."  Her tirade obviously scared him, because he jumped out of the window and legged it.  Although she didn't scare him badly enough to stop him sending her a bill later that same week.
 
We also got to catch up on other events, such as the time Carol rushed down her driveway to answer the phone, and promptly fell into a huge hole.  She had a big skirt on at the time so said she had to flash the neighbourhood to get out again.  When she finally got in the house, she answered the phone to find it was Pete warning her that that there was a huge hole in the driveway.  She wasn't best pleased.
 
But undoubtedly the biggest news of all was that Carol is now pregnant!  However, I have always found that pregnancy merely gives women a good excuse to talk filthy.  Carol admitted that she was considering the benefits of a c-section as she doesn't want "a fanny like the Dartmouth tunnel" and Caro and Carol spent an inordinate amount of time cackling over the S&M type bondage gear that they appear to have in Maternity Catalogues to hold your bump in place.  Of course we got onto the subject of natural childbirth ("Not me.  I want all the drugs going - legal and otherwise.")  And Carol got to tell me her poo story:
 
Carol's Poo Story
Carol has a friend who is a midwife, and on one occasion she assisted at a waterbirth.  The woman was instructed to push and she promptly did, but from the wrong end if you know what I mean.  I imagine this is fairly common in labour, but at a waterbirth it is a slightly less than joyful experience when instead of a newborn child, a bouncing baby poo comes floating along in the water.  It had to be fished out by a nurse armed with a sieve, apparently.
 
So we had a great time in Edinburgh, but were more than looking forward to returning to New York to start our second 90-day visa waiver period.  Caro and I were starting to feel like old hands at the US now – and were sure that nothing could faze us.

This is because we are idiots.