Category
House & Home
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10.04.04A home with...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 ...
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01.05.04Do not wringGuide to common laundry symbols. Though everyone knows you can do pretty much everything on a 40° cycle.
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04.02.03TrudgeAnother 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 - ...
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03.13.03While we’re talking about hypothetical situations…....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?
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01.07.03Through the floorWe have a new neighbour. We only know three things about her, two from the landlord, and one from observation.She's an art studentHer dad's paying the rentShe'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?
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01.01.03On ShoutingThere'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 ...
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01.01.03Packing By ProxyThese 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 ...
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12.16.02Piecing Together a LifeIn 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 ...
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12.08.02The Irishman and the LibyansIn 1998, I lived in a horrible flatshare with an Australian woman from Brisbane who insisted that everything (TV, food, weather, you name it) was soooooo much better at home (leading to the oft-thought but seldom-expressed question: "then why don't you simply go back there?") and an Irish guy, who couldn't bring himself to say the word "lesbian". We had absolutely nothing in common - nothing at all. It was when I first moved back to London, and I was renting a room in a flatshare in a dingy house in Putney. He never said more than four words to ...
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12.08.02How You Feeling? (Hot, Hot, Hot)Last night Brian Eno saved my life. For reasons best known only to themselves, the property management company responsible for my flat last year gave all the woodwork in the place a lick of paint - including all the sash windows - which was very nice of them, we thought, until we realised that they had painted them all shut. Half the windows at the back of the property don't open, and every single window at the front is sealed firmly shut with white gloss, with the hardly-worth-mentioning-at-all-because-it-makes-sod-all-difference-frankly exception of the left hand window in my bedroom, which is actually painted ...
recent posts
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