One word? When seven would do…

We were supposed to be riding Honey this morning and Scarlett was quite excited about it as Julie was planning on setting up some low jumps and using the ‘lunge lead’ or something similarly named which meant Julie would stand in the middle of the field while Scarlett had more control over the reins etc to guide Honey instead of Julie walking next to her and leading her. We were up and out promptly and lack of traffic meant we actually arrived at the stables about five minutes early. Julie was also amazingly on time (we are both very slack time keepers and even worse when we are meeting each other) but it was absolutely pissing with rain so we quickly decided we’d just feed Honey and then go for a walk instead and it was so not riding conditions.

The children and I fully waterproofed up aside from shoes as they have both outgrown their wellies so we all had waterproof trousers, coats and crocs! We went down to Honey’s field with her feed and moved some dividers that had been set up to give her a smaller patch of the field as she is very overweight. Then we went off on a walk round Slindon, the small village that the stables are in. It had actually stopped raining by that point so in the event we could have at least taken Honey for a walk even if riding in the field wouldn’t have worked but the children were more up for running ahead and playing by that point anyway.

Slindon would be the perfect place to do one of those penny walks where you toss a coin at every junction as there are loads of left, right, up or down type decisions to make but none of us had a coin so instead the children took it in turns to decide which led us on a big sort of circular walk taking in the duck pond twice, leading us through the woods and across a field. It was a nice walk and Julie and I managed some chatting along the way.

We all ate lunch in our cars parked side by side with the windows open just a little as the rain had started back up again by then. I was suffering with a delicate stomach from last night and again this morning so I wasn’t eating so once Davies and Scarlett had finished the food I’d brought for them we headed off. We came home via a town on the way to get some new wellies for them in honour of visiting The North next week where wellies are sure to be necessary at some point.

Once home I made a second lunch for the children and joined them in eating something, I sat and read my book and demanded some peace and quiet as I was still feeling fragile. Then I decided to start tackling stripping the wallpaper in Scarlett’s bedroom. She wanted to ‘help’ and infact did for a while but eventually drifted off to play with Davies. I had a break to put their dinner on and then Ady came home so he was able to take over dealing with them, making up a bed for Scarlett in Davies’ room so she can sleep up there with him while her room is in disarray for a night or two and tidied up.

I managed to strip one wall but it was a pig to get off and I forsee several more hours spent over the next 3 days to get it all done ready to leave for Dad to rewallpaper while we’re away. I was feeling a bit generally melancholy anyway and the introspective nature of literally staring at a wall doing mindless scraping probably wasn’t the best thing for me as I managed to get all sentimental about that room and those walls. It’s the most multiused room in our house that one.

When we moved in in February 1994 it was the second, spare bedroom. As we’d bought a new kitchen and bathroom in the January sale at B&Q in preparation the whole lot got shoved into the spare room and the door shut on it to prevent our kittens getting lost in the room for the first couple of months. When it was eventually cleared of junk we had a single spare bed in there which many, many guests slept in over the years. I slept in there on the night of my 21st birthday as we were putting up friends and gave them our bed that night. I remember feeling slightly stroppy that my 21st birthday had been spent sleeping in my own spare room rather than living it up wildly 😆

It originally had dreadful ‘decorative’ polystyrene tiles on the roof that I spent many hours up a stepladder with a heat gun and a scraper removing along with the super strength adhesive they’d been fixed with. It had anaglypta paper on the walls which I would have been the one to scrape off at some point before my Dad woodchipped it as that was all we could afford.

I was up a ladder in there again when I was heavily pregnant with Davies painting it all blue and setting it up ready to be his bedroom. I spent many hours in that room through the night sitting next to his cot, willing him to go to sleep, staring at the walls and listening to his winnie the pooh cot mobile playing the same tinkly music over and over and over again.

When Davies was 4 months old we built up and his bedroom became the one he is in now upstairs. The bedroom was then an ‘office’ as I worked from home a couple of days a week. There was a sofa, a computer and desk and our chiller in that room. The walls were painted a relaxing green shade. By me.

I think it stayed green while we were away and the house was rented out but with 3 different sets of tennants in here it would have probably had three different uses and even names that room.

Just before we moved home I bought lilac paint and Dad repainted the room before we came home ready for Scarlett to move in and it became her bedroom. Her first bedroom was the little boxroom in our house in Manchester and I’d always been sad that I’d not been able to decorate it and prepare it for her like I had with Davies before he was born. I made her room there as nice as I could but it wasn’t the same.

Predictably the walls have been either covered with posters and pictures or the woodchips have been picked off by Scarlett over the last few years so the room was looking very tatty. We’re currently in a phase of thinking we might stay here awhile longer so we decided to make her room nice again and got some cheap wallpaper from B&Q at the weekend, so I’ve been scraping off that woodchip, along with the layers of blue, green and lilac paint today and thinking about all the times I’ve sat in that room in all it’s different incarnations, either decorating, sitting with a baby, working or sitting with another baby.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not going to like the new wallpaper in there when it’s done. It is very dark pink and I think it might be a bit womb like and oppressive but aslong as Scarlett likes it (and if she doesn’t we can paint it a paler colour) I guess it’s time for me to let go of that room really and hand it over to it’s current owner fully.