Home Show

This is quite an English topic, I don't know whether they have these kind of home moving programs in America or wherever.. But this is just a bit of a monologue I guess, I don't know how to describe it because I don't really see myself writing anything to follow it up- well maybe if I get some inspiration.

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I don’t like that lady who came six months ago last Tuesday and pranced around my house like it wasn’t even mine. I was watching her today and realised that she does the same to everybody’s house. I was never really keen on my house but when she pointed out all the good things about it, I decided I didn’t want to sell it. So they took that part out of the show and chose another bigger house to look around instead. I was angry because she can’t have liked my house that much if she could just drop it like that. I didn’t want to be on television anyway so I suppose that’s a good thing.

So I was watching her again today and remembering how she was when I met her. She was wearing the same top I think, it was plain black but I noticed it because it and she was very trendy.

They wanted to dress me up and do my make up for television but I said then it wouldn’t look like I was an old country woman but they said ‘No amount of make up could hide that love!’. At the time I felt quite flattered by that, I suppose the ‘Love’ made it seem quite endearing and who wouldn’t want to look like a proper country-spirited woman? But then I realised, after watching 10 years younger, that it was the OLD part they were getting at really. I mean, how dare they talk to a woman who is opening her home to a set of cameras- like that? Disgraceful really. I think they were told that I was some sort of crazy woman or something because they talked to me so condescendingly, really. In the end, I said I would do my own make up because that was really me but when I watched it back on the little screen they have there, I didn’t look any different. I just looked like wrinkly old me.

We walked in through the front door like we had just arrived but really I had been sitting inside that very house, my house by the fire for hours. I reckon I was quite convincing, though. I showed off my newly refurbished kitchen and was rather disappointed later on when she said that it was a bit nineteen eighties and that the potential buyers would probably want to change that. I always thought it was modern actually, but I knew she would be impressed with my dining room. It was very traditional; a huge dark wood table and chandelier-type lights. ‘You must entertain a lot then’ she said. Saying yes would be to lie but a little one wouldn’t hurt. I didn’t want them to see my bedroom. It was dark and the plaster was all coming off the walls.

‘I’ve watched you a lot of times on the television, you know?’ I said to her when they were editing the scenes. ‘But you look so different now, the camera, it makes you look quite old doesn’t it?’. She laughed and replied that lots of people had said that to her and that she supposed it was a compliment because she’d rather be younger in real life than she looks on the TV because she’s not on the TV her whole life is she? I smiled, but not because of what she said, because of the way she said ‘TV’. I felt quite young when she said it. I don’t often talk to young people because they don’t often talk to me so it’s really quite fair. I saw her smoking round the back of the house later on, looking all stressed and depressed. I asked her if she would like to go down to the village to get some of Harvey’s famous scones but she sincerely apologised and said that she had to speak to her daughter. Daughter? Yes, she was 10 years old and missed mummy a lot. I could imagine, but could not know.