Keeping out of the washroom

It's been some time since I posted on this blog.  I realised the other day that I tend to do most of my writing on Facebook nowadays, venting about the government, or about personal things to a limited audience of friends and online acquaintances.  There is a qualitative difference between blogging and posting to FB though.  With blogging, I have no expectation of anyone reading what I write, and no way of knowing who does, unless they comment.  With FB I know who I am writing for, and I tend to self-censor what I write.

I had a nasty experience a couple of days ago. I was going into my washroom with some food for the fridge. I should explain that my fridge and freezer are in the wash room along with my washing machine and tumble dryer and one hell of a lot of washing and cardboard boxes. To get to the washroom, I leave the kitchen by what was once the back door, turn into the lean-to conservatory which runs along the back of the house, to the door for the washroom.

Blue door to the washroom

In winter we keep that door closed, as the fridge and freezer start to misbehave if the temperature gets too low and the temperature is very low in the lean-to during winter months. I have a low level heater which kicks in if the temperature reaches freezing, but I don't want it to be attempting to heat the lean-to conservatory too. In summer it tends to be left open... as it was on that afternoon.

As I walked up the lean-to towards the entrance to the washroom, a movement caught my eye, and I watched a snake slither across the floor. My children have all accused me of potentially seeing things, or mistaking a wire for net curtains or a coat hanger for a snake. Believe me, I could hardly believe my eyes either, but it was a snake - or possibly a slow worm which is just a weaselly name for something indistinguishable from a snake - which was slithering over the floor. I turned tail and ran, noisily, and slammed all doors between me and it.

My son was as keen to try to catch the thing as I was, and so I called for help on the local community conservation group, of which I happen to be a member, and two kind people came round and tried to unearth the thing in the washroom.  They couldn't find it, thus cementing the idea in my children's minds that I was seeing things.

What on earth they made of the mess in the Washroom of piles of clothes I can't imagine.  My daughter moved in a few weeks ago and brought a massive number of things with her, including a mountain of clothing. There have been things chucked in the wash room over the past few months that no one knows what to do with, which has propagated into a heap of miscellaneous stuff, plus boxes and boxes of things which were supposed to make it into the attic above the washroom.

I haven't been in the washroom since. It's going to be difficult to do the things I normally do without going into it, but I can't face it at the moment. Which is a shame.  Cleaning out the washroom has been on my list of things to do for months, and the weather is so bad at the moment that it would have been something to spend a wet Tuesday doing.  No chance.