When your home turns against you

It's all gone horribly wrong...

Ahh, Paris in springtime! Wandering the sun-dappled streets of Montmartre, stopping for a coffee or wine on a terrace beneath fluffy pink cherry blossom. Cosying up in a little bistro with red and white checked tablecloths where the owner brings a blackboard to our table with all the dishes written out in chalk. It’s all so lovely and so French.

How can we do that? I wonder as our flight lands at Glasgow airport. How can we incorporate a little bit of Paris into our normal lives?

I’m still mulling this over, deciding that we will forever commence our days with excellent coffee and the best croissants known to humanity when Jimmy unlocks the door to our flat and—

OH MY GOD WHAT’S THAT STINK?!!!!!

We step inside and look at each other. Our flat smells terrible. What on earth has gone on here in our absence?

‘It’s just the place being locked up for ten days,’ Jimmy announces with confidence. I remember a Raymond Carver short story about this - about a couple returning home from a trip, perturbed that their house smells weird when they step back inside. Yet spookily it doesn’t smell that way normally. Which means, his female character decides, that they have brought the smell in with them.

Is this how WE smell - like rotting flesh - and we’ve not realised?

As we set about trying to locate the source, my warped mind springs into action because obviously the main issue is what our friend Beverly thinks. Beverly who is totally non-judgemental and wouldn’t even care if our place reeked - hang on, it does! - when she came in to water our plants.

I have yet to reach that lifestage when I no longer care what people think. In fact, the less oestrogen I have the more I seem to worry. I still feel terrible about throwing out my dad’s out-of-date pickled mussels two years ago.

And forgetting to pack a snack for my sons on a Scout hike in 2008.

We set to work, removing all the kickboards beneath the kitchen cabinets. As we peer under them, illuminating the disgusting filth with our phone torches, it strikes me that this wasn’t how I’d envisaged spending our first back home.

I’d imagined browsing Pinterest for French interior inspiration.

Well, if there’s a dead mouse Jimmy is dealing with it. I’m sorry but that’s fair when I assembled something like 8000 packed lunches during the heavy lifting early parenting years.

There’s no dead mouse. Not that we can find anyway.

Is it the drains, I wonder? Is this how drains smell after ten days? If so, what’s festering down there? I put bleach down and check the bins, the cupboards, the loo. I open all the windows and light scented candles and my expensive incense (meant to be reserved for when we have friends round) and wait for the stink to dissipate.

It’s especially bad in the kitchen and suddenly it becomes apparent why this is.

While we were on holiday, someone came into our home and did something very bad.

Rather than stealing our valuables or rummaging through my knicker drawer they went round unplugging crucial appliances. Including the fridge!

I look at Jimmy nervously and then open it.

It’s like being breathed on by the mouth of hell.

You know when you’re on a packed train and the person sitting next to you rips open a bag of Monster Munch - beef flavour - and crunches their way through it for the entire journey?

You’re not thinking, ‘Amazing, I didn’t think you could get beef flavour Monster Munch any more’. You’re thinking: ‘Would a jury be understanding if I drag this person to the door and push them out?’*

(I know you can’t open the doors of trains in motion - at least I don’t think you can, I mean I haven’t tested it. This is just a fantasy, okay?).

The stink is worse than beef snacks. Far, far worse - and if the fridge is bad, the freezer is horrific. While we were feeling all fancy, at restaurants and the David Hockney exhibition, its entire contents were decaying at an alarming rate.

There’s rotten meat. There are sinister dripping items that we don’t even know what they are.

Worst of all is a giant bag of raw king prawns, purchased at considerable expense from the fish monger. While I gag and retch Jimmy protests - defensively - that he unplugged things ‘without thinking’ and NOW I realise what this is. It’s that unplugging appliances thing like it’s 1952! In case things ‘overheat’ or whatever the logic is! Like people did with ancient TVs that had valves and could suddenly go hot in your absence and burn the house down (did that ever actually happen?).

I teeter back and watch as Jimmy starts throwing all our rotten food into a bin bag.

It’s like his thing of making a pot of soup - a Scottish thing - which is fine, I have nothing against soup. It’s the leaving it sitting out UNREFRIGERATED for days on end that I take issue with.

Apparently his mum left soup sitting out. ‘It’s fine,’ he always says. Fine if you like frothy soup. Fine if you like hospital!

Honestly, I do not give Jimmy a hard time about The Great Unplugging Disaster of 2025. I don’t shout at him or banish him from the Kingdom because nobody’s died (although it smells like they have).

I’ve made enough mistakes in my life. One time I took the train from St Pancras to Reading, thinking it was Bedford. And I ate a large bowl of gin jelly thinking it would be okay because jelly is a food.

I had my hair cropped short and dyed black and looked worrying like a famous Fascist dictator.

I mean, I’m far from perfect so I’m not going to crow.

However, I do need get away from this stink so I leave him beavering away, slopping out the Chamber of Horrors.

I walk around our neighbourhood, wondering when it’ll be safe to go home. And checking out the price of flights to Paris.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS Remember last week I told you about my pitiful Easter nests? Within 15 minutes of reading my Substack, my friend Sam had not only thought, ‘Oh, Easter nests, what a good idea’ - but actually produced these. In 15 actual minutes!

And then in our group chat Tania popped up, having knocked up a batch of chocolate mousses with crushed Oreos for the soil! With little spades to eat them with!

Miraculously, our friendships survive.

PPS My new novel, The Full Nest, is still 99p in ebook - for a limited time. You can order here!