#building work

Roman Centurial Stone, Hadrian's Wall, Great North Museum, Hancock, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

One is surrounded by incompetence.

The builders have yet to do anything with the hole they cut into one’s kitchen wall. They insist on sourcing Morthal wood rather than the Jerall Oak one requested. They cannot be quiet, they cannot seem to grasp one’s fondness for beauty sleep, and they have etched entirely the wrong decorative knotwork pattern onto the beams. To say nothing of their muddy boots being dragged across one’s floor, or their aping of one when they think one is not watching.

And then there is Lirim. Lirim the jumpy little Bomser with the nervous disposition who swings between silently cowering to bursting with puppy like enthusiasm as quickly as the sun moves through the sky. If he is not shrieking because the kitten pounced on him, he is stammering and tugging at one’s sleeve in excitement to tell one about his idea to import fine silks from High Rock. If he is not stood haggling down the local farmers on their prices for herbs, he is wincing whenever the Khajiit looks at him. One does not know which of the two moods one will find him in at any given moment, and it is frankly starting to grate on one’s last nerve. Were it not for his demonstrating something approximating mercantile skill, one would have banished him into the cold to freeze long ago.

Yet that is not the end of one’s woes. Not by half. For one must contend too with the constant presence of the infuriating small Khajiit, mewling and pawing at one’s ears and begging for scratches - when she is not demanding that one teach her more magic, when she has not even yet demonstrated an ability to effectively hold a warding spell. If it is not her, it is one’s own children, bleating and whining and pleading to be allowed out onto the tundra. The girl child even had the cheek to answer one back the other day. One made her rue her display of fire, to be sure, yet tis but another example of the causes of the perpetual headache from which one is suffering.

Then, of course, there is the main source of one’s frustrations. The fur clad trickster and hateful feline himself, that damnable nuisance that calls itself Qau’Dar. One suggests that he takes the children onto the tundra to play, and he refuses. One takes issue with the comments of the builder at his expense, and he complains that one is seeking an argument. One tells him it would benefit his daughter’s training to be taken upon the tundra for an hour each day to watch the flow of the river waters, and he refuses to entertain the notion. Tis infuriating, maddening, and making one begin to wish one had left him to starve in the Jarl’s cells.

One supposes one could live with such irritations. One could put his feline petulance down to discomfort with the cold, down to a quirk of character, or a turn of melancholy. Yet it is an entirely different thing when he chooses to help himself to one’s coin - which he continues to live on, take for granted, and seemingly assume is infinite - and to kidnap one’s children and take them away to stay overnight in the inn. The local inn! With all its’ Nords, and its’ drink, and its’ boisterous ambience and lack of proper washing facilities and over-boiled vegetables and unidentifiable meat and posturing warriors and scantily glad harlots and the detritus of what passes for civilisation in this cradle of filth known as Skyrim!

He did not even tell one! He simply took one’s coin and one’s children and left! One was wroth with concern! Wroth with indignation! To think that after one saved his miserable little life and gave him shelter and food and steady employment, Qau’Dar would treat one as such? Most others would have already found themselves dissipated in the air, or worse. Were it not for the unfathomable affection with which Birk and Gwemba both seem to hold the foul feline felon, one would not have stayed one’s hand. Damned Khajiit that he is. Divines cursed walking furball, with his mangy shedding and tricky eyes and musty smell and sham of a tail. Pah.

Worse! Worse still, he failed to protect one’s daughter from the hordes of feral youths in this town! He sounded almost pleased to tell one about how Gwemba had found herself the target of many a lecherous look from the teenaged rabble of town; pleased that she found herself hunched in a corner with the Jarl’s son and the baker’s son each on an arm! Pleased! As if any of them were anything like good enough for her! As if she is not entirely too young and innocent to be aware of any such matters, never mind find herself the target of teenage boy’s wandering and utterly foul and perverted thoughts! Why, she is not even safe among the town’s girls, if the Khajiit tells right about the way the blacksmith’s daughter was fawning over her! Over Gwemba! Over one’s innocent and naïve and entirely too young to be concerned with such matters daughter!

Pah. One will not stand for it. Tis true that Gwemba is of an age for the changes to be coursing throughout her, but one will be damned if one will stand by and let loose the illiterate rabble of Skyrim upon her. Be they baker’s son, blacksmith’s daughter, tavern keeper’s nephew or Jarl’s son.

That doesn’t mean it’ll quite all be over since the floor fitters can’t come to do the bathroom floor until early next week but it signals that start of being able to feel like our house is our own again.

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