Word Boy

I AM WAITING FOR

Mandatory quarantine to cease. Here’s my predicament: can I go back to New Zealand for Christmas? Yes. Would I have to hole up in a hotel for 14 days? Also yes. Who would be funding this luxurious imprisonment? Me. Crucially, would this be at all practical? Absolutely not. At $3000 a head, this sort of staycation simply isn’t feasible, nor do I have the patience to stomach three squares of airline food for a fortnight - again. I’ve done the hotel quarantine thing when I re-entered the country back in May, and I can’t say it was all that and a bag of chips. But knowing my mates have planned a bitchin’ new year's that I may miss out on almost has me reconsidering.

I AM LISTENING TO

Australian rap. For so long, only a select few from Down Under have been able to break international thresholds in the music biz. We’re talking Keith, Kylie and Sia – and there’s a common theme with that lot. It seemed only the Aussies floating down the mainstream could have their names uttered in lands other than our own. Until now. Western Sydney’s One Four is a grimy, thuggish rap troupe spitting out subject matter far from friendly - and the world is taking notice. It isn’t just knocking on the door of global fandom, it's smashing it to bits with a two-tonne battering ram.

I AM PENSIVE ABOUT

Cricket season. Whenever the warmer months come a-knocking, it’s a constant um and ah for me as to whether I throw on the whites for another season. The devil on my shoulder says, ‘let it go, you’re as useless as a screen door on a submarine’. The angel, however, says ‘give it a red-hot crack, you need the sun if anything’. I know who is winning the war after last weekend. A three-ball duck paired with an extremely ordinary bowling spell gave the ego a hit. I’ll try my luck again on Saturday with one consoling factor in mind: it can’t get much worse. Can it?

The day of judgment is nigh.

No, this prose bears no relation to Christ returning just in time to cure COVID-19 and assassinate Trump via Zoom.

I instead refer to today's house inspection.

The dictionary definition lists it as ‘a limited, non-invasive examination of the condition of a home’.

Sounds friendly enough, huh? Absolutely no reason for unease, right? Wrong.

I run the risk of self-incrimination here - seeing as my employer owns the digs I currently lodge in - but I feel Shepparton needs to know what I have gone through to (hopefully) make the place appear spick and span.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice house. I can’t quite gaze through mullioned windows out on to an esplanade of palatial courts made from marble, but I get by.

Where the issue lies, and where things have got a bit crazy lately, is on the housekeeping front.

With only two men to the tent, transforming our castle from grim to grand for today’s inspection has been an experience - I’m almost certain my colleague and ‘homeboy’ Alex Mitchell can relate.

Wheels were first put in motion on the cleaning front a few weeks back, so let me attempt to entertain/horrify you, the audience, with the very 2020-appropriate tale of Sanitising: The House.

As my mother would likely agree with, I’m a novice in the realm of all things scouring and scrubbing.

So, my thought process was as follows. I’ve endured enough lame American television to soak up the pearls of wisdom Ty from Extreme Makeover shouted down the lens all those years ago. I can do this. It can’t be that hard.

But what doesn’t get much airtime before they “move that bus” is the sheer aptitude and diligence needed to whip a residence into shape.

Sure, it looks easy enough when a team of labourers sweep through a house, busting through dry wall after dry wall as another team follows through with timber, insulation and paint to finish the job.

While I'm not comparing the simple assignment of readying a house for inspection to an entire full-scale site rebuild, hear this: it was hard, okay?

Anyway, stop one on ‘home makeover, Kialla edition’ was the bathroom.

Now, some label black mould abhorrent, I say it makes a house a home. But as far as inspections are concerned, it had to vacate from the shower.

Dousing every square inch of the shower in a degreasing agent was very necessary, as it turned out.

Mould the consistency and colour of molasses stuck firm to the wall despite my arm-busting efforts with the scrubbing brush.

Was it the worst of my woes?

No.

It was a tiptoe through the tulips in comparison to the next task.

The lawns. Oh my god, the lawns. Although they were mown last month, I committed the cardinal sin of failing to get on top of them. Putting down the shears for a split second meant they somehow cultivated into a live action set of The Jungle Book as a product of my carelessness.

And so, something had to be done.

Armed only with an electric whipper snipper, I hacked, slashed, chopped and carved for the good part of 90 minutes to bring the grass down to a wadable length. I may have well used nail clippers – the damage to grass and all wasn’t exactly existential (what I really needed for the job was a combine harvester).

Wary not to halve any serpents which may have decided to call our backyard home had me as mad as, well, a cut snake, but aside from the odd bindi which would jump up and say hello, I got through the process relatively unscathed.

Luckily, the rest was pretty standard practice. Bins: out. Floors: mopped. Sanity: relatively in tact.

Now, during the time this is being read I'm likely walking white-knuckled through the house with inspector in tow. The day of judgment hath arrived.

Weeds in the gutter aside, I’m pretty sure we’ll get a pass mark. However, if you see this columnist staring wistfully into the windows of a local real estate office, spare a thought, or a dollar, for me. I may just need it yet.