IT’S refreshing to look up to the heavens from the trap door in our attic and not see the stars. The Great Bear, Orion’s Belt, a harvest moon... you’re welcome to them.
Our ancient roof – all of almost a century old – has been replaced with a new one. Hosanna for decent roofers.
No longer do heavy winter gales find us lying in bed at night listening to the rattle of loose mortar clattering on to the attic roof up above and wondering have we enough buckets for the leaks.
Buying a house with character has its challenges.
There was a time when I liked auras – yellow, purple, all that jazz.
“How does it make you feel,” I’d ask my other half as we stood in assorted hallways on our house-viewing sprees.
Ever practical, he’d raise a Paxman eyebrow.
He knocked the walls to figure out how solid they were, I conjured up pictures of laughing friends arriving at the door clutching bottles of wine; the perfect corner for the Christmas tree and happy children sliding down the banisters.
You need your yin and your yang. But this yin got her way and, sometimes, she wondered about the wisdom of it.
We fell for leaded lights and a stained glass window at the side. We adored red brick and a tall wooden fireplace with inlaid tiles.
You could imagine Clark Gable, svelte in a black and white evening suit, leaning an arm up against our high fireplace while cracking open his silver lighter and offering the beautiful Scarlett O’Hara a light.
Ha... imagination is overrated and tis far from that we were reared.
When the surveyors tried to pour icy cold water on our dreams, I stood firm.
New roof, lead pipes, gutted, they said.
“No way, I’m not gutted,” I replied.
“Gutted,” they said again.
And aren’t we all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, we said.
And so it came to pass that some of us were, literally, looking at the stars and eyeing up the odd starling who took on the attic like he and his chicks owned it... squatters’ rights.
It took us 22 years to replace the roof.
We had a boy to grow in that time – and we just kind of ignored the odd drip and the occasional glimpse of blue sky you got when shoving the Christmas decorations and the bags of unworn summer clothes into the loft.
It was partly the price. New roofs do not come cheap and they do not afford a lot of tangible pleasure.
“You can’t drive it around and you can’t cook up a nice dinner it," I told my other half, thinking of my dream kitchen and my dream car.
“But you need your own roof and you need it watertight,” he replied.
We found magic roofers. They arrived at 7.30am, but were careful not to start hammering until 8am.
Forget the pesky dawn chorus – I like the slip slop of a roofer shifting tiles about my roof of a morning, as I lie nice and cosy in my scratcher.
And they worked hell for leather, refusing all offers of cups of tea.
Bladders? They were the camels of the roofing trade.
“You got great roofers there,” said our neighbours.
The other roofers working down the road got friendly and they chatted to each other of a lunch break on the street.
In their kindness our roofers even managed to wheak out the huge galvanized water tank that had lain redundant in the attic space for the years since we managed to replace it.
That was about 10 years into our residency.
We worried about how they’d do that... but no job was impossible.
Then we worried about how to get rid of it.
“Don’t worry, somebody will spy it on the skip and take it away,” they said.
And verily it came to pass that somebody drove by in a van, stopped, picked it up.
We gave him the thumbs up.
“Well, it was on the skip,” said van man.
“Our pleasure, take it away,” we said.
And having handed over our earthly goods for spanking new rosemary tiles, I pull in at the corner of the street every day, to view our roof from afar as the evening sun sets on her.
Grasp the carp, seize your pleasures while you can. And the rewards of a new roof?
Now I can listen to a full rousing chorus of Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head without breaking out in a cold sweat.
