Autumn

Hm, hm.  It seems a very long time since I wrote anything other than coursework essays and job applications, and a very, very long time since my last contribution to here.  So long that, since Tenerife, I’ve moved house, finished the course, started teaching, and become the oldest resident in this strange muddle of a building which goes by the name of ‘flats’.

The building is late 18th century – high ceilings, oddly shaped rooms, doors like drawbridges. There’s an old brick washhouse in the garden. I assume the original outdoors loos were knocked down – no trace of these anyway.  But you’d know there must have been some at some stage, from the way the ‘mod cons’ are either tacked on the end of each flat, or squirreled away inside, or both, as in my flat.  I have a kitchen in an extension which has the dimensions of a deep press or cupboard; and a bathroom in what was once a cupboard the size of a viable walk-in wardrobe.  I have a minute study, an enormous bedroom and another room which functions as a living room in the sense of housing living-room furniture but which also functions as a large hall, it being impossible to arrange living room furniture in ways which will encourage lounging on account of the door into the hall proper, the door into the kitchen, a large picture window and an enormous, rather ghastly tiled hearth, sans fireplace.  The décor is still that of the precious occupant, despite good intentions to the contrary: peach ceiling and egg yolk walls in the bedroom; turquoise ceiling and sky-blue walls in the study (a room which is tiny, crammed full of bookcases, and very comfortable); and all manner of floral in the bathroom creating an effect which defies description.  I have a small back yard surrounded by a low wooden fence (blue) beyond which lies the communal washing green.

A far, far cry from the cottage.  A welcome far cry too.  Conditions at the cottage had become intolerable by February. It was icily cold; the water supply failed repeatedly; I was perfectly miserable.  

Here, I have pavements, street lights, neighbours, a shop round the corner, a bus stop at the end of the road, and I don’t have to trail my bin half a mile down a track each week to be emptied by the refuse collectors.

Civilisation is plain wonderful!