Y’all are lucky I spent the afternoon business drinking in a beer garden and only sexually harassed one of you (hi Chris!) because if it were not for my pleasing intoxication then this little life anecdote would not have passed the blog filter.

Anyway, so I believe I mentioned my Slovakian cleaner who keeps trying to exorcise my house in the days after I go off piste with the grimoires. To be fair, I kinda respect her for that, but it also really fucking annoys me. She has been away for the last four or so weeks and, like literally every other child of the Eastern Bloc I have ever met, her mastery of capitalism has meant she has subcontracted the weekly cleaning gig to one of her friends.

Her absence, I found out this afternoon when I drunkenly returned to my house (4pm), was because she had returned to Slovakia for/to completely manage and execute her father’s 85th birthday. We talk about that and her clairvoyant friends and the two weeks she spent in a forest in -I wanna say the Czech Republic- with her daughter and granddaughter, looking at the stars, spelunking and generally having a fairly magical time. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the severe language barrier -my fault as much as hers, obviously- we’d probably be pretty tight.

Her 85-year-old father lives four kilometres from the border of Ukraine.

Can you guess what the summer weather has been like the last -oh, I don’t know, let’s say- two summers? Not. A. Drop. Of. Rain. “James, let me tell you…” she tells me. She calls me James because it turns out fat Anglo gays (fanglo gays?) look identical in the eyes of Slovakian women of a certain age and so she has never been able to distinguish between myself and my partner. In her defence, he’s the one who always calls her and I’m usually the one who’s home of a Friday. This has been going on for just over three years and it has gotten to the point that James and I hope that at least one of the three of us dies before/rather than having to explain what has been going on. For further information on such extreme levels of social awkwardness, see this twitter account.

“James let me tell you… everyone has…ahh, English… in the yard” (makes very obvious sign for a well or masturbating an enormous penis). A well? I ask. “Well, yes. All dry. Never before. No rain. In summer in Slovakia it is 25 degrees but feels like 35 because we have no…” (waves arms around my kitchen) “…ocean. This year and last year. It is Africa. Nothing grow in my father’s yard. I plant for him many things, beans, tomatoes. Nothing grow.”

My mind goes immediately to that theatre of war everyone in mainstream media has not been talking about. My mind goes to the former Japanese minister who said the Americans caused their most recent tsunami with a geo-engineering weapon. My mind goes to the string of highly suspicious earthquakes and droughts in Iran. My mind goes to the 1970s admission of both the CIA and American Air Force that their goal is to ‘own the weather’. My mind goes to the World Economic Forum agendas of recent years that discuss rogue geoengineering. My mind goes to this complete asshole, who is the home-grown, home-brand Australian equivalent of skinny former-defence-contractors-in-bow-ties who show up on controlled media to dispense teh scienze.

I am hesitant to bring up my suspicions because, despite the fact that even a rescue zebra could find factual evidence of geoengineering in about two seconds online, the last time I mentioned it on the blog I have a vague memory of some haterade thrown in my direction from the peanut gallery. This might be wrong because I learned about it secondhand from people who actually use facestalk but whatever… if you have a problem with facts then please do continue to complain about them or me on facebook, where only your mother and that guy who used to bully you in high school will ever see your precious words. (Aren’t algorithms amazing? LIKE.)

My cleaner picks up her bag and goes to leave. I am debating in my head whether to voice these observations, or whether to just blog about them, or whether to voice them and then blog about the subsequent reaction. Fuck it. Door number three it is.

“I’m suspicious, [cleaner’s name], of these weather patterns. I find them suspicious. The same thing happens everywhere the Americans want to go to war.” My cleaner pauses. She unshoulders her bag. “James, let me tell you… growing up… I have seen everything. I no like Russia but I like Russians. I no like America but I like Americans. Of course they do this. I have seen everything. I have seen spies from this side and that side. I have seen alien spies who look like human spies (Gordon: told you we would have been mates!). I have seen everything. Everyone at father’s party know… this is not normal. This is Americans. Everyone say.”

My drunken impulse to foist my shadow geopolitics on the woman who cleans my bathroom has… I don’t want to say backfired but… honestly, where was I going with this? I believe her, obviously. I just get to blog about Cold War projects. This woman had to build a life around them. But… what’s next? Do we spend the long weekend going through the archonology series in broken English?

She picks her bag back up, solving my quandary. This is definitely my second-favourite story that she has ever told me. Most of them are great because we are her poorest clients by some margin, so typically we bond over her bitching about other, uber-wealthy clients. I share my cleaner with some evidently very rich screen and stage actors in Notting Hill whose names she does not know. (Which kills me.) But my favourite story is one she told -while disparaging a wealthy Notting Hill yummy mummy who was about two seconds pregnant and would literally not pick a single thing up off the ground- about when she was about 8 months pregnant with her first child, with whom, along with her child, she just spent two weeks in the forest.

I remember my mother the psychonaut explaining the weird olfactory cravings and revulsions that go along with pregnancy… in my cleaner’s case, this meant her perfectly reasonable liking for the smell of freshly-cut firewood escalated to an extreme level. So when her mother and father went out to visit the neighbours, she -8 months pregnant, I remind you- chopped a utility vehicle flatbed’s worth of firewood. She would have continued had her father not come home and freaked out. And I quote: “What kind of daughter I raise?! My daughter crazy!” He then raced her to the nearest Soviet hospital on a tractor. (I’m unclear where the utility vehicle was at this juncture. But this is one of the most adorable mental images I have ever conjured. You’re welcome.)

She was completely fine, obviously. In my head I like to picture her menacingly ripping off the blood-pressure strap and then destroying the door handle with her unstoppable axe hands as she slowly left the building. So this is my favourite story of my Slovakian, clairvoyant cleaner.

She is tough as fuck and not easily fooled by the machinations of the bad people of this world.

Learn from her.