One Fine Weasel: July 13, 2021

Another hectic day but for a different reason - we had an all-house electrical safety inspection, so I needed to get my flat tidy enough to let another human being see it.

There's only been one other person in here since October 2019 and that was a Plusnet engineer who stuck his head round the door last September, said, 'nope, we can't put a line in here,' and then left.

So the flat was quite messy.

I was up at 8am to do dishes, dust, hoover, strip the bed ready to take the bedding to the launderette, pull a bookcase away from the wall so the electrician could get to the fuse box, sweep the kitchen floor, polish the microwave and the electric hob, sweep the dustballs off the skirting boards, and clean the shower. Phew.

Thank god he started on the ground floor and worked his way up and not vice versa.

I was at the launderette by the time he got to my flat, and when I came back he'd gone and the only sign he'd been here was a sticker (with a grammatical error so painful I'm going to have to move) stuck to the fuse box to say it had been inspected.

As the bookcase was still in the middle of the room, I took the opportunity to peruse what was on it, make an inventory, and see if there were any books I could stand to lose. I'd been stung by the landlord saying, when he knocked to remind me that the sparky was coming, "You've got a lot of stuff in here."

He says this every time he visits and it's VERY irritating - where else am I supposed to put it? I live here. Unless there's a limit on the amount of possessions people who can only afford to live in poky rented bedsits are allowed? Maybe there is. This is Conservative Britain in 2021 after all.

He also mentioned he was going to put the rent up. Hurray. The reason being, he was out of pocket from all these new five-yearly electrical safety inspections the council have cruelly and outrageously imposed on him, the poor lamb. Won't somebody think of the landlords?

To be fair, what I pay here is well below market rate even after an increase; but come the revolution, when it's time to eat the rich, this guy should worry.

Anyway. The books. I started a spreadsheet and recorded titles, authors, whether or not I've read it, and whether it's fiction or non-fiction. I stopped at 200. The stats:

> 51 fiction; 149 non-fiction.

> 57 read; many, many more (not counted) dipped into and then abandoned, usually because it was too wonderful and I wanted to read that boring one first then come back to this one later. For shame.

> 45 so far removed for disposal.

> 2 unexpected duplicates, including (I shit you not) The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying by Marie Kondo.