No Vacancies

OK, let me describe my house.

It's on a really narrow street running down to the harbour. The street's cobbled, and when dogs pee on it (as they often do right outside my house) it runs down the gaps between the cobbles turning left and right as if it was chasing through a maze, like a sort of urinous pacman game. There isn't room to get a car up the street, but you wouldn't believe it, emmets sometimes try to and get stuck and then complain because they can't park right up outside the door of their holiday let. The houses are quite tall and thin and painted white. If you want to look up at the sky you have to bend your neck right back and make yourself dizzy as if the high white walls were closing over your head, but if you want to look at the sea you just look straight ahead, although you have to squint a bit as if you were looking down the sights of an airgun, and there it is, all silvery at the bottom of the street, unless the tide's out and then it's just sand. For those of you who don't know, most of the day the harbour in St Ives doesn't have any water in it at all, which is a bit of a bad place to have built it but OK if you're a fisherman who doesn't like fishing much because its a good excuse not to go out. It was probably meant to keep out the Spaniards or something so they wouldn't have anywhere to land.

There's a chip shop near us called The Balancing Eel, and that's a bit what our house is like, tall and thin like an eel would be standing on its end, and a bit unsteady and liable to fall over any time. There are four or five windows up the front, depending on how you count them, one on each floor, including the basement and the attic where I have to sleep while mum and dad's VISITORS are using my room, which is most of the summer. It's like a child's drawing of a house, if the child was autistic and thought houses were a stupid shape. When you get up to the attic there's a chimney, but you can't see it from the street so I don't know whether to include it in my description or not. I think I will, because it means I can tell you about the seagulls. Every year the seagulls nest on our roof and my dad moans about them but always leaves it too late to do anything about it, but they make 1) a mess 2) a lot of noise as soon as it gets light, like at about four o'clock in the morning 3) my dad moan.

The most annoying think about our house though is the stairs. I think I mentioned the stairs in my first blog. Yes I did, I've just checked, but I'll mention them again here because you probably can't be arsed to go back and look.

Ha ha, bet you did now, but I didn't say much at all about the stairs in my first blog did I? OK, so there are a number of granite steps up to the front door. Let's say there are six, but there isn't. When you knock on the front door, let's say you're lucky and somebody opens it, the first thing you see in front of you (apart from whoever opened the door) is some stairs. Steep stairs, going almost straight up, so steep that they've got a rope instead of a rail. And they're really narrow as well, so narrow that some people can't get their bags up and sometimes people arrive who you know are going to be too wide to get up the stairs themselves, let alone their bags. If you look just beyond the shoulder of the person who opened the door (say it's my dad, he's quite short) you'll see the stairs twist round a corner and there's a narrow wooden post about as thick as the top of my leg, with wedge shaped notches cut in it and a metal ring where the top of the rope is tied. And just about level with where your head would be if you didn't duck there's another beam going across the top of the stairs, and you have to sort of swing from the first rope to another at the opposite side of the stairs, just round the corner, where there's another ring in the wall. That's how you get up and down from one floor to the next, swinging from ropes and trying not to fall down the stairs. There's two rooms on each floor, one at the front and one at the back, and a little landing about the size of a portaloo joining the whole lot together. It's just an unsteady heap of floors held together by a series of ropes threaded through a twisty staircase, like one of those bangles the guys with dreadlocks sell to emmets on the Wharf.

Ha ha, someone just came to the door and asked if we had any vacancies for tonight. Mum's at work and dad's out, so I said no.