The truth about home – part 2

Moving is quite moving, actually.

My partner took this on the day we got the keys to our new flat in 2021.

I posted about the concept of home earlier this year – read part 1

In March, our landlord told us he was selling the flat we lived in. Home.

I know this happens a lot, to people with less hope and more to lose than us, and tough times meant the landlord had to make a tough decision, but the prospect of having to leave hit me hard. I’m afraid I was quite undignified about it. For weeks, I wandered round my neighbourhood in a state of grief so fervent I could describe it only as Italian cinematic. I began to mourn the loss of my old life like an old lover, or the pre-rationing availability of nylons. It seemed impossible I would ever be happy again. I carried on my usual routine, only more pathetically.

My lunchtime walks round my soon to be former locale were no longer just perfunctory exercise time, they were farewell tours. I floated round my preferred local park taking all of it in, every daffodil, every crocus, the trees starting to bud, every spoiled terrier crouching on the gravel and giving me the side-eye. Outwardly, serene, a watery smile on my lips. Inside, Ophelia about ten minutes before she climbs the willow tree. No more of this, I said to myself. Everything that had made me feel safe and secure and settled would be gone.

Not only that, but the little perks too – being able to walk into central London, the vibe of my neighbourhood that felt so uniquely London that going anywhere else felt like being on a foreign planet, the Tube. Sometimes I pity people who come from the capital because they will never understand the allure of it in the same way as someone who dreamed of it, in a cold northern bed, from being very small. Living where I lived meant I’d won a game nobody else knew I was playing.

The melodrama of it all!

And on a slightly less emotional note, it was a stark reminder how little control any of us really have over our own lives. We live on a floating rock with billions of others and the actions of any one of us could change the course of history for ever. While not exactly Archduke Franz Ferdinand clutching at his stomach, my unprecedented move felt like it could, if I let it, have a profound effect on my future. As a renter, you may have rights – with a few more to come soon, thankfully – but you are ultimately powerless.

The inevitability of the house search and its associated agonies drained my battery. Scouring listings on glitchy websites, decoding the lack of floor plan or agents’ favoured hall-of-mirrors angles that made box rooms look like the Winter Gardens, dry heaving at the grim grouting and mildewed shower curtains, bizarre configurations – you wouldn’t believe how many flats in London have a shower nestling in a hole in the wall of a bedroom – and the disappointing viewings.

It was clear, early on, that we would be leaving our current neighbourhood. We had moved in before the Muppet show that was the Truss era, and while prices had rocketed, our income had not. I appreciate spontaneity but I’m not a close friend of uncertainty that looms as you try to imagine your furniture in a house you’ve not yet seen, some six weeks into the future. The kicker of renting is that there’s a limited time to make your strike. You can be organised, drawing up longlists and organising viewings, but few landlords will wait until your notice period is up, and a long overlap between tenancies is only for those with generational wealth or credit card bills they are ignoring.

I’d always assumed things would be different by the time I got to this age. I grew up in council property, which my mum still lives in, so I never thought I’d be able to buy my own home anyway, but how disappointed I was now, with the future a weird haze, my possessions floating above it, to have been right all along. My life felt precarious, like some act of carelessness in my distant past had led me here. I’d turned off from even, tarmacked roads onto wandering, rocky paths and found myself on a rickety wooden bridge dangling over a ravine with no view of its floor. I blamed myself, partly for not shoring up my future sooner, but mostly for believing that everything was sorted, that this may well be as good as it got, but I was happy with it.

What made it harder was that we loved the flat, and weren’t ready to leave. It was the most impressive place either of us had ever lived. We had a bathroom each, which felt insanely civilised, and there was a balcony – overlooking a busy road, but we take the highs where we can get them – and even a little yard at the back. It was modern – built around 2008 – but had so much more character than many charmless new builds. Filling it with all our crap made it no less lovely, and no matter what the world hurled at me on the outside, it was instantly erased – or at least temporarily painted over – once I turned the key in the door.

I was being over-sentimental, the curse of the hopeless. Lots of things annoyed me about it too. Traffic noise, the huge south-facing windows that turned the flat into a kiln from May–September and meant I had to work with blinds down all day in high summer, visitors to the other flats in the complex buzzing us by mistake – an hourly occurrence. But I’d written three books there, some of my favourite work; part of me wondered whether removing me from this space would disturb the precious alchemy.

The final month of the tenancy approached and I felt on the brink of some major health event. We’d widened our search to other areas and devoured the listings daily, mooching round countless inferior or not-quite-right properties for the same or more money. We tried to show enthusiasm for houses that kept their washing machine at the bottom of the garden, or flats with bathrooms that hadn’t seen a cleaning cloth since Cif was still called Jif. We played along, asking questions as if it were the most beautiful place we’d ever seen, because we believed if we were charming and friendly and receptive to these dumps, better places might come our way. (We were right about that in the end, but that is perhaps a story for another day.)

We became determined not to ‘go back’, not to regress somewhere that would make us unhappy, or feel like we’d slipped a couple of rungs on whatever imaginary ladder life has you climbing. It was harder than we’d expected. The affordable rental market is in terminal decline. Both of us turn 50 later this year and I said to my partner, ‘It has to be the kind of place we’d be glad to wake up on our fiftieth birthdays’. As a mantra, it sharpened our focus. Reader, it worked.

Once we’d secured somewhere that we both loved, the old flat took on a different air. Sometimes I think the mind or the body try to prepare you for a difficult goodbye by introducing a slow and creeping dislike of whatever – or whoever – you’re leaving behind. Once I knew where we were going, the flat I’d adored so much became somewhere I was desperate to escape, its local amenities inferior (a ridiculous notion tbh), and the flat stopped feeling cosy and comfortable and ours, and became a transient space.

Moving day, I assumed the old feelings would return, that final plea to the departing lover that you’ll change that actually work, but I got in the cab and didn't look back. Later in the week, returning to an empty flat to let cleaners in, I felt more grateful that I’d had the chance to call it home and I wished all the best for it. I hoped the next people to live there loved as much as I did.

And now home is an another place entirely, and we can’t imagine being anywhere else.