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| From my office window... |
From where I am sitting in my office I can look through the window
out across to the bathroom.
I live in an L-shaped house so the view from my office
encompasses not just the bathroom but the whole of the East Wing wherein my
boys have their bedrooms.
My boys seem to be oblivious of this fact and I am not going
to enlighten them for they think I have omnipotent powers.
I know when they have brushed their teeth and when they have
been flinging wet flannels at each other without me even having to ‘see’ them.
I can call up from wherever I am like some Big Brother out 1984 and tell them
to stop whatever it is that they are doing, to do whatever they are doing
properly and to remind them that mother always knows what is going on.
I can also take a good guess as to where they are in the house
at any one time because even though they think they are moving with stealth and
cunning, the sheer age of the house is against them, they are betrayed by the squeaking
of the floorboards and squealing of old hinges and scraping of arthritic old
door handles.
Their piping youthful voices are particularly easy to hear
through old plaster walls and badly insulated floors.
It must be a scary thing to know that your mother just knows
things about you even when she’s not actually there.
But all this omnipotence does have its drawbacks – for I can always hear them and I can never get a decent
lie in!
