Friday 13th November (moving house)

NON-WORKING DAY in the Outlook calendar

I get Fridays off since my company had to cut staff pay because of Covid-19. Although it’s a good thing for me today because I am moving house!

During the week I boxed up all of my belongings, carefully un-hung pictures from the wall and wrapped them in clothes, so they were less likely to break. I loudly peeled brown tape off the roll and fastened cardboard packages in between headset meetings and Excel formulae frustrations. The sense of relief I felt when I put my ancient work desktop in a box and taped it shut was telling. 

It’s a really odd experience waiting to move into a house (that my boyfriend purchased, so by proxy is our house) when you’ve never owned a place before. The Offer was accepted in the Spring, the Exchange was promised for the end of September, then pushed-back to October and finally in November it happens. All of a sudden, which is why it feels a bit out-of-place, like when you steel yourself for a big non-event. Friday 13th at 2pm is the Completion.

‘What does that mean?’ 

‘It’s when we get the keys! And all the money for the house that I sent to Tim [the lawyer] has been completely transferred to the sellers.’

‘All that money. Gone.’

‘In exchange for a house.’

‘A whole house!’ 

Friday comes and I am ready. Too ready. I have nothing to do until I meet A in Woolwich for the 2pm deadline. I also have no stuff to distract myself with because they are all in boxes. 

I take my yellow rucksack holding my essentials (wallet, phone, keys* – though not the correct ones. *Do you ever leave the house with the wrong keys for your house? There must be a riddle in there somewhere…) plus toiletries and a change of clothes; under one arm my yoga mat, under the other a sleeping bag. Tonight, we stake out the new house expecting all manner of disasters to befall us upon collecting the keys e.g. the previous tenants are still there, or it’s unliveable due to flooding/swarm of locusts/etc. 

It’s one of those mild November afternoons with a mixture of rain and sunshine. I catch the DLR to Greenwich then a train to Woolwich, heading on foot to Europe’s largest Tesco in the town centre, where I’ll rendezvous with my lover to walk into our new house. What a sentence. But first, before we do probably the most exciting thing of our lives, we push a trolley around Tesco buying cleaning products and the most humdrum stuff. A family size pack of pasta, eggs, dustpan and brush, olive oil, cooking oil, table salt. I realise while pushing the trolley down the tea aisle asking A, ‘What coffee do you drink?’ that this may be the last time I ask such questions. I ask him, ‘What milk do you normally get?’ ‘Green top organic.’ ‘Cool, me too.’ I believe we live pretty similar lives, so there’s no need for trepidation, it is mainly amusement at this point that soon we will just be drinking the same coffee apropos of living together. It’s also not like he isn’t allowed to change his habits and start drinking oat milk, I don’t think I would care – but as a live-in partner you might care, or at least be aware that a change in milk drinking habits may portent a bigger shift in temperament or political views. 

Two o’clock. We are walking down a busy road to the estate agents. We walk past the house which is soon to be ours along the way. It looks like a brick-and-mortar house, that’s good, glad we got that right in the first and only ever inspection we made of it, which lasted around twenty minutes. House-viewing is like the most high-stakes speed dating! 

The estate agents are closed (because of covid) but we ring the bell, and someone comes to answer the door. A tells them what we’re here for and she asks him to show his ID through the half-open doorway. Once that’s done, she asks us to wait a minute and then Spencer, who looks and smiles just like an estate agent greets us. He hands us a wad of keys and says have a good time. Simple as that. We walk back over a little park and a flock of pigeons flash mob us and then we’re home.

Getting a key to turn in a lock that’s not familiar to us takes several attempts. I’m a bit worried the keys don’t work. What a stupid view to take when you’ve been handed a set of completely foreign keys to blame the keys for not being able to open a door they’ve been opening for years. Of course, the keys work after our tenth try, then I hop over the threshold. We’re in!

The house is clean to they eye. The sellers left us their lawn mower in pride of place in the middle of the living room, as they’d stated they would in the List of Contents. The rest of the house is pretty amazing. Without the furniture and decorations of the previous owners the features speak for themselves. I never noticed that above the front doorway there was Victorian plasterwork. Or how the two fireplaces have very distinctive colours, almost like characters who are introducing themselves to you as a couple, but with very individual tastes. One is a deep blue and the other a burnished green, like ocean and earth or something complimentary, like wine and beer. I had wanted to paint the living room dark green, and A had wanted to paint the dining room blue after the Offer was accepted, and I only realised now that the fireplaces had persuaded us to do so, tactfully. 

The bathroom is not as tacky as I remembered. The walls are not covered in 00s mosaics, but tiny translucent blue glass tiles – it sounds like the same thing, but I promise you it’s not. We opened the veranda doors and could not get them to close properly again. We flicked on and off the wrong light switches waiting for things to turn on that didn’t, but other things did. It was like meeting someone you find fascinating for the first time.

***

That same day, we unloaded all of A’s family’s hand-me-down furniture. Four dark wooden block chairs with rattan seats, one Ercol chair with much varnish worn off, and nested tables with glass tops. There was one beautiful dark wooden coffee table with a story to go with it. When A’s mum Jeanette was a little girl her most favourite thing was her pen knife, and her mother’s most prized possession was this dark wooden coffee table. The two of them were talking one day around the coffee table, when Jeanette who was playing with her pen knife dropped it and it went slicing through the air and hit her mother’s table. Both of them looked on in shock. Jeanette felt sick with guilt. Her mother stayed silent for too long. The mother broke the silence by stating solemnly, ‘I saw what happened and it was an accident. And I bet you feel very guilty about it, so I won’t be angry with you.’ And for sure, when I stroke the surface of the coffee table, I can make out a clean nick. 

In the fading light of the afternoon, we manage to lock all the doors and drive over Blackheath to where I used to live. Luckily, we find a parking spot right in front of the house. As we load up my boxes into the large car, Alex comes out to help us do the heavy lifting. He is the most helpful man on earth and when we leave, he gives me an un-used paint roller, two paint brushes and a paint tray. It’s appreciated because we’re going to be painting the front room this week. I say goodbye to my old room, but I leave my bicycle behind, so I can come back and ride it home when it’s not raining. Of course, I feel a twinge of sadness to be leaving the House of Abundance, but my old room is in good hands, an OG is moving into it and when I return, it will look like a soulful club with dim lighting and swathes of vinyl records patterning the floorspace, and this will fill me with content. 

Stars over Porlock // Bold Types 2020 Finalist // Glasgow Women's Library

An essay inspired by a holiday with friends was shortlisted for the Bold Types 2020 competition held by the Glasgow Women's Library. It is called Stars over Porlock and you can read it here, or in full below:

Stars over Porlock

The night sky in Porlock was one of the best skies I have ever seen. I can’t tell you what constellations we were under, except for the Plough, with its axial handle jutting out across many light-years. Everybody was in good spirits, some were sat on the lawn with their coats spread beneath them, others were standing barefoot on the soft green grass. We were all looking up, my mouth was hanging open and I held my boyfriend’s arm wrapped around my waist. A bleat from a sheep travelled across swathes of farmland to us. 

    Perhaps this was the happiest holiday of my life. We were all about thirty years old, escaping to the country from grimy city life. It took three days for my snot to not be grey or flecked with pollution. My pores sang in the water! The water in Porlock was delicious and my first cup of tea there was like a beatification. I thought, how can this tea be so delicious (it’s unbranded?) then I found out it couldn’t – but the water could. Coming straight off the granite rocks; clear and mellow like drinking crystal liquid and my hair became softer and fuller too, like a well-groomed poodle’s.

    The stars were phenomenal. It was dark in Porlock and our house was cut deep into the valleys of Somerset. You could hear the distant roar of the sea rolling back and forth over the shingle beaches. In daylight, you could gaze across the garden down to the agricultural lands and then to the salt marshes, then onwards to sea. A flutter of sparrows rose into the air chattering in a frenzy. On the lawn we played Mölkky, a leisurely game where you throw a stick at a clump of other sticks (the Finn’s know how to have fun); Genny made us a tray of gin and tonics and towards the end of the holiday, a jug of sangria to ingeniously use up the surplus saccharine wine.

    The house held up very well. Full at the seams from the beginning with food, booze and friends spilling over into bedrooms assigned for couples, we eased into it, like a cat stretching out after a yawn. We gave each other pet-names like “Grandma Georgia” and the “Chaos Queen”. People took up their well-beloved roles, like Aidan who became the group’s map-bearer on our long country walks. Gee was the charming one, with all the quick-wit and haughtiness of a lifelong tenured butler. Everybody played a part and yet, we were not pigeon-holed. Caring, stubborn, excitable, cynical – all mad – highly entertaining and filled with a mutual respect for one another. How we managed this I’m not quite sure, but Georgia said to me at the end of the holiday aghast, ‘I thought at least someone would have a barney!’ No one particularly talked about work or politics and when they did someone would be good enough to shuffle the conversation along, to avoid any sparks turning into forest fires. Or maybe because there was a pandemic going on, there was less scrutiny or assurance given to such matters, they just didn’t seem important enough. We all felt grateful to be able to go away together with “more than friends” but “less complicated than family”.

    After the trip was over, I was telling my boyfriend’s father about it. He is a good listener, always nodding at the right tempo and reacting to titbits of my story. He has grey hair, a tall frame, and emanates those leadership qualities people long for in boardrooms. Halfway through my retelling of Porlock, something must have clicked in his brain and he began to delve into a memory of a good friend whom he had known since the Seventies. This friend is handsome, intelligent, a delight and on his fortieth birthday he hosted a big bash announcing to the world that this was his wedding day – because he would never marry! Champagne and confetti. The father chuckled, regretting not having more reunions like that when they had had the chance. He told me more about his friend who in the end did get married (a surprise to everyone who was at his birthday party), he had a daughter with his wife, but soon after they divorced… 

    While he told me this I was thinking in the back of my mind, ‘The 1970s is when Tarantino’s film was set; that’s when Patti Smith was getting famous; Joan Didion’s essays are about then.’ It struck me that when the father recounted things from his past, I conjured up a pastiche of different forms of media I had consumed. Famous photographs, movies and music, the nostalgia effect; and in turn, when one day I tell a younger person in the future about my holiday to Porlock, they will be reminded of something they saw once about a pandemic and a referendum; some protests and art.

    I felt then the future was slightly out of reach, my finger’s grasping at floating fresh threads. Everything was becoming and everything was remaining, all at the same time, the world was still and changing. When I am old my memories will be films to the young and their future, relics to someone else after them. I felt the world in a state of continuous flux, like the vivid landscape shimmering and the rolling waves pulsing – but the stars cut into the veil of eternity will outshine us. I let go of my breath and thanked the heavens because it made me feel at peace.

FEAR || The Creative Pandemic

I had a piece of writing feature in The Creative Pandemic titled FEAR, you can also read an earlier draft of it below. It's not very cheery; about the morose state of mind I found myself in when second lockdown was announced. 

FEAR 

I am afraid that this will last too long. 

Too long to be able to call what we once had normal. 

What if I refuse to adapt and live in denial; go in for hugs and be palmed off on to the pavement; what will they think? 

What on earth do they think? I think sadly to myself at home alone in my kitchen: nobody wants this so – what does that mean?

Eventually, we will become reckless and touch hands to face, to cough and splutter and inadvertently kill off the sick and elderly. How un-caring would that be, and could we live with ourselves after that kind of revolution?

I’m disgusted to even think of it and slam my glass down on the Ikea tabletop. I am not worse off, I’ve not been directly hit by this pandemic, so why am I sitting here being morose when there are people far worse off, dealing with poverty and a lack of space and being displaced. 

It puts me in an angry state, I feel caged in and helpless, I feel stupid and lethargic and incapable of doing anything good in the world. This whole thing makes me lose hope. 

I want to talk about the fear of not knowing. 

Not knowing whether what you are doing is right or wrong, or how you even feel about it in the grand scheme of things. People hope the government is doing the right thing, but of course they can’t be because no one knows what the hell to do, no one understands, there’s too much opposing data, too many questions that bring rise to more questions. 

Unlike a maths problem where there’s a cribsheet and fun to solve, the situation is forty thousand dead in eight months and the numbers are mounting. 

EXT. TREE LINED STREET - DAY

The diagnosis of covid is not black and white.

It’s much more complicated than what the public think.

Why aren’t we listening to the doctors who say that lockdown is going to cause more damage to public health than no lockdown?

Fatigue. That’s the big issue.

You mean post-viral fatigue syndrome?

No, the public’s feeling of fatigue.

 

INT. BASEMENT FLOOR KITCHEN - NIGHT

When was the last time you felt alive?

This very morning when I woke up alive and breathing, awake.

Is that what living is – being stuck in your locale, not communicating with society out of fear of infection? Is that really living?

When you put it like that, then no.

That’s what I’m talking about, man.

 

What if we learn to live small-y. Buy kittens, knead sourdough, prune plants and learn to forage mushrooms.

Get into home-schooling and cycle to work, get to know your neighbours and not rely on quick fixes to solve our mundane problems because we’re too poor to be click-baited all year round, out of season.

But what about the daters? 

I heard us couples became smug in our lockdown bubble o’ bliss. What about those of us who have to find a soul-mate, or someone to cuddle up to when the outside world seeps into your core. 

Penetrated by those desperate quiet stares of strangers sat across from you in train carriages, lips and softness smothered by a stretched piece of cloth. All you can do is swallow and hope that this will soon be over.

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Bonfire night

The other night was bonfire night, which coincided with the beginning of lockdown 2.0. I went for a walk while explosions happened all around me in the sky. The evening air was still and smoky; it was like I’d walked back through a veil of time. How the lamp light filtered through the autumn leaves and was held by the smog reminded me of period dramas, like in The Crown when they fill a dampened room with fake smoke to give it that stale, liturgical look of old Britain. There was no one else on the street. A blacked-out Range Rover stealthily crept up beside me, before uneventfully rolling away, perhaps the driver was looking at the fireworks too. Shots rang out! Peals of fuchsia swerved up from behind a brick wall to crackle into sparks and fade out over a garden wall. There was a bottom-heavy moon that night and its creamy glow effused in contrast to the vivid smattering of lights.