Moving experiences

They live in a modern apartment block with nice wide tiled stairs, so quite why the numpties across the road chose to remove their two settees though the window of their 1st floor flat remains a mystery to me. Being geniuses they also didn’t ask any of the other residents if they would mover their cars so that they could hurling their furniture around with no chance of damaging occurring. Of course two of their mates chose to park in my garden and carry boxes across the road from the flat and load up their cars. Once again, not even a “Excuse me, I know that you have all these signs up saying private property and No parking, but can we park in your car park for a couple of hours so that we can help our mates move house...

I wonder how much it would cost to install an electricity supply down there and install those big posts that can rise up out of the ground?
A few days later I was taking advantage of another summer-like day, minding my own business, cutting my lawn, when an unknown van with a slatted double mattress frame pulls into my parking.
Fortunately I noticed that Madame was in the front passenger seat, so I kept mowing.
“We will need your help, she said. I want to install a sonnette at my bedroom window, so I will need to put a cord round the metal of the railings outside your bedroom window” she says.
The woman is mad, I think to myself. I ask her where exactly the sonnet will end up as I don’t want to have a doorbell right outside my bedroom window.
“He doesn’t understand a word that I am saying” she say to the man driving the van.
Eventually I understand. She doesn’t want to install a doorbell, she wants to hoist the mattress frame up in through her bedroom window using a block and tackle and rope looped round the railings outside my bedroom window.....
You see, if only the French would speak clearly....
A sweaty hour later, we had forced the bed through the window shutter frame and into her bedroom.
Her old bed mattress was still in situ, including the bedclothes, so the bed had to be stripped, the mattress manoeuvred to one side. The old mattress frame was covered in material and was thicker than the old one.
After attempting to saw it up so that it would go through the window, and finding that due to the wire frame and bedsprings inside that this was impossible, a hole was made so that the rope could be attached more securely for lowering it down, should we manage to fit it through the window.
We manoeuvred it almost completely through the window. Madame was supposed to take the weight of the frame on the block and tackle / rope combination.
The bed is over the sill and I am taking pretty much the whole weight myself. The man goes downstairs and thankfully I am no longer taking all the weight.. My arms are a few inches longer and my ribs feel as though they have popped out and back in again.
There is also the lawn to finish.
We put her bed back together complete with mattress and bedding, and I returned to my role as gardener, wringing with sweat.
Before you ask, the stairs in Madam’s apartment are very small and narrow, so the stairs were not an option.
Quite how one man and a woman with numerous disabilities including a bad back were intending to do this bit of sommeiller shifting on their own is beyond me.....