My office. The clue is right up there in front of the noun. MY. Office. It is mine. It's the one place I sometimes feel how I used to feel when I was a grown up and went out to work. It's the one place that I can come and tap away to my heart's content and, if I'm lucky I'm left alone to do just that. Because it is my office. It is sacrosanct and it is MINE.
Except nobody else seems to understand that. And instead of "leaving me be" in my own rather restricted space, DH & The Joshua seem to use my office (MY office) as a general repository for anything and everything that they don't quite know what to do with. The assumption is that I will know what to do, so little heaps of menacing detritus are left for my urgent attention:
A half-completed glove puppet. The sewing basket placed strategically by the half-completed glove puppet in the hope that the nice Mummy will complete it in time to be handed in at the start of next term. Town guides from various European cities. Hotel brochures from various European cities. Receipts for coffees or food. At least 17 car 'phone chargers - which 'phone they belong to long since forgotten. Any cables that anyone comes across end up in a pile on my office floor. You name it - all inanimate inhuman life is here.
Along with all the rather more organised files that I keep to do with work. (I don't mind those ... I put them there and I use them).
And on Sunday afternoon, I'd had enough.
I'm not entirely sure what came over me. One minute I was sitting down politely drinking a cup of tea that DH had made for me and the next I was wailing like a banshee, trying to find something that had been lost under a sea of other people's nonsense - in MY office.
Piles of papers, booklets, leaflets, brochures - armfuls of them were hurled into the dining room. Anything whose ownership was blatant was rapidly repatriated to the person who'd left it there. No delicate little throws either. Great raging lobs of paperwork flying through the air. With an accompanying soundtrack: "I give you a folder to put bl**dy receipts in". "No, I take that back - I give you two folders to put receipts in". "Yes, darling, I'm thrilled that you keep getting positive praise forms at school but you're meant to keep them in your school folder, in your rucksack which SHOULD BE IN YOUR BEDROOM". And on. And on.
If the owners of the accumulated oddments attempted to move out of the line of fire, I developed a nice line in the running and shouting overarm. They didn't escape.
And then it was over. I could see my office floor again, I could see cabinet tops and a desk that I hadn't seen in months and I was calm.
And everyone has gone back to remembering that this is MY office. Just for a little while.
And The Joshua told DH that he thought it would be very nice for Mummy to go for four days to one of those places where they put mud on your face.
And I would feel guilty. I probably should feel guilty. But, oh - it's just so good to be in MY office again.
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