meish dot org: life, unfolding

…space enough for our stuff, but not too much of it and
…a bedroom not overlooked and
…a kitchen with a place to sit and eat and
…architecture with weird bits like recesses next to the fireplace and
…neighbours who are old enough to be past their party days and dependable and friendly and who go away loads and
…a cat and
…a little garden and
…a gap between us and anyone else and
…a railway nearby and
…somewhere to park and
…a study, or two and
…hills nearby, or sea, or both and
…a fireplace and
…friends within easy reach and
…somewhere to sit in the sun (me or the cat) and
…is that too much to ask?

Guide to common laundry symbols.

Though everyone knows you can do pretty much everything on a 40° cycle.

The sky was absolutely gorgeous tonight. Brilliant blue and aflame on the long western horizon with red, bleeding to orange and brilliant yellow, painted bright on wispy clouds.

In London, unless you’re high up, it’s difficult to see very far, because there’s alwasy a building in the way. On my way home, I’m lucky to catch brief glimpses of big skies; long views down the Thames to the west.

My study also faces west, and from the window, I have an abbreviated view of the sunset - parenthesised between a tall chimney stack and a tree.

Captured in this sliver of city sky, I can still see the dying sunset, fading with every minute, and the planes droning overhead before diminishing down the slim passageway of burning sky, between tree and chimney, towards Heathrow.

I figured out recently why I like living near a flight path so much. It’s about journeys and arrivals and expectation.

I like hearing the planes begin their descent above our house, like seeing them unfold their wheels after a long flight, getting ready for touchdown and taxiing, just as the passengers within are preparing for homecomings and holidays, reunions and happy returns.

We live seven minutes from touchdown, at the point where the wheels unfold, and since we moved to the area, more than one person has informed me with gruesome glee that when the wheels come down, sometimes the corpses of dead stowaways tumble out and land in the car park of our local Sainsburys.

I had always assumed that this was an urban myth - but no, it seems to be horribly true.

OK, while I was off the air for a bit (is that right? I wasn’t offline, just a bit of my site, so what’s the term? And don’t anyone say hiatus…) loads happened. Like, tons. So here’s a little recap.

When you last saw our friendly author, she was extremely stressed, because the house that she’d just moved into at the beginning of May was neighboured by posh loud wankers who prevented her from sleeping, relaxing, enjoying home life and, in fact, talking about anything else apart from her stressful home life and noisy neighbours.

This got extremely tedious for her and, no doubt, others, too.

The landlord (this makes it sound like a person, when in fact it was a faceless investment company) agreed to release us from the lease if we could find someone else to move in.

We placed ads in just about every flavour of London classifieds, and I even bit the bullet and went and asked the debutantes upstairs if they knew anyone who wanted a new flat.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another night, another set of potential homes.

Over the last five days, we’ve seen eighteen places.

One was lovely and big, but right on a main road.

Another was nice but too small.

One was OK but too far away from transport infrastructure (though close to a stately home and garden).

One was well-finished and in a great location, but too small.

Two were absolutely dire, and far too close to transport intrastructure - like, open your bedroom window and you could fall out onto the A4, or the district line.

Another was pretty good but with a strange layout - a bathroom with two doors, and no window in the kitchen.

Another was great, but not quite big enough, and a little on the dangerous side - the trade description act should take issue with the description of a roof terrace which is, in fact, merely a roof - with no railing or surrounding barrier, making the potential to tumble three floors during a pissed barbeque quite real.
One was potentially nice, but not potentially enough.

A couple were utterly nondescript.

One smelt like custard.

Another smelt like wicker furniture.

One was almost perfect, but with nowhere for me to keep my bike.

And one was perfect, but we didn’t get it, because the owner suddenly turned into a moneygrabbing twat.

To paraphrase Bono, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for - but we’re trying.

Four more tonight. A dozen on Saturday. I’m hopeful.

….If your landlord’s daughter lived in the flat upstairs, and for some reason insisted on playing incredibly loud thumpy music all night on her new stereo which just happened to be located square above your desk, where you were trying to concentrate, at what point, if any, would you think it was fitting to march upstairs and kindly request her to shut the fuck up, and how?

We have a new neighbour. We only know three things about her, two from the landlord, and one from observation.

1. She’s an art student
2. Her dad’s paying the rent
3. She’s a basketball player. Or her art consists of thumping things. Or hammering. Lots and lots of early morning hammering. Perhaps it’s an installation?

There’s a shouty woman who lives in the residential home for the mentally ill which backs onto our terrace.

She shouts. A lot.

I’ve mentioned her here before, or rather, her shouting. It’s loud and harsh, and seems to happen randomly and without interaction or meditation. It’s not so much a prolonged bout, as a series of short, abrasive outbursts, as if she’s having an angry conversation (a loud one) with someone who isn’t there.

The words are rushed and unintelligible, her accent strained. The bursts come in groups - an hour of particularly strong activity, and then nothing for a while. Occasionally, she has a notably bad day - or night.

We can only hear her when she’s sitting in the conservatory of the centre, because the windows are open, the roof is only corrugated plastic, and the sound travels well in the narrow canyon formed by the tall terraces of this street and the one behind, backing on to each other. I can’t tell if she’s shouting at someone, or the television, or possibly at both, but hers is the only voice which carries. It’s half past six now, still dark, and I haven’t slept a wink: she’s been at it all night. Just when I feel myself to be dropping off, she launches into another abrasive, abusive round. Her voice is pitched precisely to penetrate double glazing.

And we’d had such a lovely evening, too. Rioja and tapas, then a walk over the Thames towards home, then plenty of relaxing. Not that I did much else yesterday, of course… but then isn’t that the essence of a well-earned day off?

When we moved in, we heard the occasional shout, but we put it down to the usual noisesome neighbours. London’s full of them, and we’ve both had our fair share. After a few months, when the sun came out, we noticed the shouting was getting more frequent, and, peering out of the bedroom or bathroom windows, we could see people sitting outside the house which backs onto ours, drinking tea and smoking rollups in an enclosed patio, while rocking, rapidly backwards and forwards. The shouting which we had assumed was the audible end of a conversation seemed instead to be the only end of a conversation.

Last month, I decided to find out what the centre was - A residential home? A drop-in centre? A hostel? Cyrenians? And for who? I counted how many houses the patio was from the end of the street, then went around to the street behind, counted the houses in reverse, and knocked on the door.

The woman who answered was immediately suspicious.

“What do you want?”

I explained that I was a neighbour from the next street, and that I’d been hearing noises for a while, and that I wondered what they were. From downstairs, I could smell institutional food, and hear the familiar shrill shouting.

“Are you making a complaint?” she asked.

No, I explained, I was just curious. She told me it was a residential home for the mentally ill, and then shut the door in my face. That was apparently the end of the conversation.

I wasn’t expecting an invitation for tea and biscuits, but I would have liked to have found out more about what causes the woman to shout. To be honest, it sounds scary. If I was a kid, or more anxious, I’d worry about the shouting woman, think that she might be dangerous. If I worked in a care home like that, I might try to inform people about how the shouting is a symptom of the illness, but that the resident isn’t dangerous, or angry at all. If they came around, asking and curious, I’d try to educate them about the illness, rather than being immediately suspicious - though I can understand how anyone might feel like that, especially if complaints have been levelled against the centre in the past.

But there’s a difference between curiosity and complaining, and once that door slammed shut in my face, I subconsciously aligned myself closer to one than the other.

These last few days have seen me throw away (or give to Oxfam) boxes and boxes of stuff - clothes, books, bits of paper, stuff I’ve been holding onto for years, for no reason except empty sentiment…Feels good to chuck it away. I’m purging.

I’ve been doing a lot of clearing out by proxy, too - my sister is at the family homestead at the mo, preparing the house for an incoming lessor. No-one lives there at the moment, or has done for the last few years at least - my mum is up in Iona, my sister is wherever her work takes her and my brother is in London, like me.

I’ve never lived in that house, but there’s a room there which contains some of my stuff - old textbooks and notes from uni, holiday snaps from places long since forgotten, thousands of compilation tapes and LPs, jumpers and hiking boots and other clothes not suitable for London living, but damned useful for hiking in the Pennines on my infrequent but always-valued visits to that bit of the world. Things need to be cleared out, though, ready for the incomer.

So the last few days have included a series of phone calls from my little sis, sitting amongst a pile of my forgotten belongings up north, sorting them into piles according to my instructions over the phone…

Ana: Mad White Giant by Benedict Allen
Meg: Keep. I’ll pick it up in the new year.
Ana: Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
Meg: Oxfam.
Ana: US Socio-Economic Policy Towards Latin America 1945-1959
Meg: Ummm…Oxfam?
Ana: I don’t think there’s going to be any great call for that particular title in the Peak District this Christmas.
Meg: Oh, alright, keep it.
Ana: Blue jumper. Looks very warm.
Meg: You have it, then.
Ana: Cheers. Photo of two men I’ve never seen before in my life. One of them’s doing an impression of Elvis, I think, and the other one’s got a guitar. It’s in a wooden frame. Ooh! Wait! Guitar man looks like Ben Elton! Is it?
Meg: Ummmm. No. Oh, that’s Adam and Dan from uni. Put that in the box of things for me to pick up.
Ana: Map of Seville held together with sellotape with writing on it. Looks like a phone number and a name.
Meg: [silence]
Anna: Map of Seville? Meg?
Meg: Chuck. [sigh]

I’ve found it’s actually much easier to throw things away by proxy - there’s no lingering over objects, revisiting the memories that holding them brings back. Items have a description and a purpose and that’s it. Keep or chuck. Much, much easier.

What have you thrown away? What couldn’t you throw away?

Me? I threw away three and a half years of letters from the same person. I couldn’t throw away a book inscribed on the inside cover with a name, a date, a place and an ee cummings poem.

In our old house, we used to get a lot of letters addressed to J Whelan (dcsd). We managed to deduce (by sifting through a box of her posessions left in the cupboard of our old house) that she had been a former tenant who had had an affair with a married professor, travelled to south-east asia, worked as a teacher, possibly came from Ireland, set up a company (the company chequebook was in the box, with only one cheque removed) and then emigrated to Australia. Where she presumably died.

We don’t know what she left in her will, or to whom, but to us she bequeathed a box of angry love letters, bank statements and personal papers, a handful of blurry photos of ex-boyfriends, a handbag, a brown belt and a single gold shoe.

We didn’t know her at all. We pieced together her life from fragments of evidence, over the course of a long rainy afternoon in August 1999, with papers spread out across the floor of the living room. One day I’ll write about it properly - you just couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

Anyway, today, Davo and I were shifting the last of the mess left behind by the decorators in our new house, putting it into black binbags to be taken away with the rest of the rubbish tomorrow.

Lifting up a box of screwed up newspaper and oily painting rags, a letter floated out to the ground. It was open, dated January 1998, and addressed to Suzette at our flat address from Rebecca and Chook in New Zealand.

Of course, I read it - who wouldn’t? The first paragraph reads thus:

“Hey guys, just got your card in the last month. My old employers in the US forwarded it on, but I was down south for a couple of months sorting stuff out cos mum and her 2nd husband went missing on the yacht, now presumed drowned. (Reason why we came home early). I’ve been back up in Hawkes Bay for about a month, and have already started a job at Hastings Hospital…”

Speechless. The letter goes on to chattily talk about kids and work and surfing and fishing and the normalness of everyday life. There’s nothing extraordinary about the language or the handwriting - even the paper is normal cream airmail stock. But that first paragraph hangs like a silent exclamation mark over the whole letter, at least to me.

I can’t imagine Suzette reading it without having to return to that opening line again and again, as I did. Notification of a death. And then we went diving for crayfish. Weather fine, hope kids are well.

I seem to make a habit of finding things.