simplification

I was going to make my next blog entry a nice positive one about a day out I had last week flying the Pitts Special: it was one of the best days I’ve had in a long, long time and as such is one that I may indeed write about in the future, but for now I just don’t have it in me (sorry Paul).

I spent this weekend up in Scotland failing to climb anything for various reasons, but the main one being a piece of news I received from Phil on Friday evening (I’d headed up on Thursday you see). It would seem that our lives had suddenly become much simpler, or at least they will have once all the initial brouhaha is over and done with…

Possessions…who needs them right? Perspective is something that is often gained rapidly and with almighty clarity when all of a sudden you have none.

Ok, enough of the cryptic – Phil called me to tell me that we’d had a house fire. Mercifully no-one was hurt and we had no animals in the house either, but somehow those hugely important facts don’t feel quite as comforting as they perhaps should when what you’re hearing is “everything’s gone…everything”.

Now that’s all a touch melodramatic, as everything is in actual fact not gone, just covered in a thick layer of noxious black soot – the fire burned itself out in a smouldering pile of molten metal, plastic, carpet and electronic components. It did not follow the more obvious course of setting the bookcase alight and destroying the building as well as all of our worldly possessions for some reason (oxygen starvation most likely according to the fire brigade). So, whilst we do still technically own everything we did before, none of it is ever going to be useable again – the soot and smoke damage is almost total…

So where does that leave us? Well, we are now living in Phil’s cousin’s caravan perched precariously on our driveway, desperately trying to get in contact with the landlady (don’t ask, but until we do, the house insurers still won’t know what’s happened, and we won’t know what’s going to happen to us!), and waiting for our own contents insurers to send out their damage assessor on Friday.

So, life may be crap right now, but at least it’s simple!