On Sunday the English skies opened, and the rain fell in sheets. As we watched the rain fall, we struggled on old clothes, loaded up the people carrier car, and drove to Brighton to fix the gutters.

You know. As one does when it rains.

Angus' house outside of Brighton, in a little village I like to call Ovaltine, has had a damp problem. After the last tennant moved out it transpired that one of the gutters had fallen off the front of the house. Instead of calling the rental agency or Angus to fix it, the tennant wanker took the gutter and winged it into the bushes. As a result, rain water flooded into the walls and windows and doorframes in the front of Angus' cottage, built in 1776, and caused them to crumble and fill with damp. Angus replaced the gutter, but somehow the damp continued, so we knew that we had to go down there in the rain to see what was happening.

So, in the freezing cold rain, Angus climbed a too-high scary ladder while I held the bottom, praying to ladder gods and fighting off visions of me running screaming into the neighbor's yards, begging for an ambulance and wiping blood from my eyes (I was suffering from Post Dramatic Syndrome). After all, climbing a metal ladder to the top of a 3-story house is exactly what you want to do in a rainstorm. It turns out the gutters were leaking from a joint, and a wire down one window was angled in such a way that it was depositing water very neatly into the wall.

Twenty minutes later, and the water issue was solved. We'll wait for the wall to dry out and paint it again. We have to go there next weekend and rip out the carpets, do up the yard again, and we're going to be sanding floors, re-painting already re-painted walls, and tidying up.

The house has been on the market now for nearly a year. Fortuitously, it entered the market just as the real estate market crashed. It has had the price lowered three times now (and will now be lowered again). It has had one sale fall through. He has sacked one estate agent and hired another. It is a building in which we are literally throwing money away into (while simultaneously paying rent on the house we live in now). We've already done it up once, and now are going to re-fresh it again, including hanging pictures on the walls of what it used to look like with furniture in it, so that people can visualize dimensions.

We always agreed that we wouldn't live there, as not only was it hell and gone from Angus' work place, but the thought is just too unsettling for both of us. For him the place has had too many memories. For me, the thought of living in a house that he lived in with his ex-wife, in the house he described in the paperwork for his tennants as a "very happy home", the house in which he had his daughter and conceived his son....well. I already have too many ghosts, and I worry that one of this size might bring the whole pack of cards tumbling down.

His unsold house in Ovaltine is the single greatest source of depression for Angus.

Walking around the organic food shop in Brighton (Brighton is a crunchy-granola earth-mother tree-hugging vegetarian liberal town, which is perfect for a crunchy-granola earth-mother tree-hugging vegetarian liberal girl), I did some people watching. People are dressed in all kinds and shapes-business suit waiting to buy organic sour cream, girl in tie-dye beatnik skirt perusing the parsnip crisps, bloke with blue hair and a spiked collar clutching a bag of cooled samosas, gay couple holding hands and looking in the window of the shop, college students making out by the avocados. It's all kinds, and everyone has a place here.

I had bought a pair of Indian flip-flops earlier, while looking for yoga mats. There are any number of yoga centers in Brighton, including Bikram and Hasha. Truly of the crunchy-granolaness, which I love (we watched a special last night on doctors, and one of the doctors featured was a "spiritual healer" that waved enormous pointy crystals over her patients checking their "energy spheres". Angus told me that must be my kind of thing, being all vegetaran yoga chick. I took exception to that-it would only be my kind of thing if I was allowed to poke people with those crystals when I got annoyed at them being so stupid as to pay £100 an hour for me to wave a fucking rock around.)

I stand outside with our bags of organic orgasm while Angus dashes into Waitrose to buy the final bits for dinner-he's making me his Thai Green Chicken Curry for dinner, only his will have real chicken and mine will have soy chicken that, indeed, tastes like chicken. I look up at the sky, which has naturally turned blue and sunny now that Angus is off a ladder, and I watch the seagulls do swoops in the air, catching currents and shouting to the world that they can fly and we can't. I stand there and I think...Yes. I could live here.

Which is good news really, since it's on the cards.

Angus and I have been thinking about it, and on Sunday we agreed that if the house doesn't sell very soon (i.e. by Fall) we are moving in. It won't be easy. That house is not where he wants to be, and not where I would want to be. I quite like Brighton, but I am keen that we live in an area where neither of us knows where the best pub is, where the freshest vegetables are, or where we are soaked in memories of other people, bike rides by the sea, or summer days with the doors open and the music playing.

But I am likely being silly. The one thing I have learnt is that home is where you make it. Home to me is where my cats are and where my boy lets me fling myself at him when he comes home. As we look at the walls in the living room, he licks his lips nervously. "If we move here, we need to make this place our own, have our own stamp on the place. Completely different."

Amen, my dearest.

We could re-decorate and freshen it up our own way. I could have the dog I am so desperate for. My cats could explore the fields out the back, Mumin rewarding me with the shrunken blind corpses of the moles that she finds to be so portentious a gift for her squeamish mother. I could become a real homebody (debating things like: Making homemade chutney, fact or fantasty? and: How to get your whites REALLY white). I could provide cupcakes to the village bake-off (they're called fairy cakes here. Isn't that so fucking cute you could vomit out of your eyes?) I could arrange gin and tonic-soaked book club sessions of people I meet in yoga classes.

And the thing is, we can move down there. In fact it will help us out a lot, as our current little house doesn't have enough space. It doesn't have enough space for visitors, and it doesn't have enough space for the stuff we are shipping over from Sweden shortly, the last of our worldly posessions.

It also doesn't have enough space to work from home for two people. We now have absolute freedom to live anywhere in the UK, as long as we can commute to London. No longer are we tied to living near Newbury for Angus to commute. After 20 years, Angus has handed in his notice to Company X, and taken on a sparkly and very serious job. He'll be like me-working from home as often as possible, with frequent commutes to London. I'm exceedingly proud of him, and proud for him. It was an enormous step for him. He's very excited, as he joins a new job, a job which his qualifications make him far and away the most perfect candidate for the job, a job for which management was desperate to have him once he'd sent them his CV.

We will both be working from home sometimes, and so both need offices as you can't have both of us barking on conference calls for 8 hours a day in the same room. His home in Ovaltine offers just that, plus a garden, a large bathroom, a large master bedroom and a guest room.

So it looks like we are moving soon, and when we do I will wave a very sad goodbye to Whitney Houston and love it forever. It will always hold a little candle in my heart as the first place I have ever been so utterly comfortable. And as we slowly resolve to move to Ovaltine, ideas start fluttering in our heads of ways to make it home while we take it off the market for a while, give it a rest from estate agent ads, before putting it back on the market to try to sell again.

We can make it a home. We can. Can't we, dearest?

-H.

PS-I will try to dial down the falafel earth mother talk.

Posted by: Everydaystranger at 10:11 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 1582 words, total size 9 kb.

1 Of course you can. For all their expense, a house is just a house. The people who reside there are home. And you know? History isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes being reminded of the mistakes and disappointments that came before can breed sweet satisfaction in the beauty of the here and now. I've no doubt wherever your heart and Angus' decide to light, they will be light indeed.

Posted by: Jennifer at July 26, 2005 01:13 PM (jl9h0)

2 I had wondered why you and Angus were renting a place when he already owned a house. I can see how it would be emotionally chraged for both of you to move in there, but it's amazing how a touch of paint can change things. Also, if you 'christen' each room you can make your own memories, right? Good luck with whatever you decide. (Please note that in this context 'christen'='wild passionate monkey sex')

Posted by: ~Easy at July 26, 2005 01:16 PM (L0wuQ)

3 You will certainly be able to make it a home, no doubt. And I have no doubt that your yogic crunchiness will flourish in Brighton. I've always loved wandering around that town, loved its artsy culture and it's bliss to be that close to the sea. And congratulations to Angus on his job!

Posted by: karmajenn at July 26, 2005 02:01 PM (fx1A8)

4 I think living in the house is a fab idea. You'd love the area (um, and you could visit that nifty little downstairs shop). Angus's kids would probably feel comfortable visiting since they lived there at one time. And, if anyone could make it all her own, it's you. You've rented lots of little old places filled with other people's memories and it hasn't mattered, so why should this?

Posted by: emily at July 26, 2005 03:28 PM (plXME)

5 It may take a little time, but you will be able to make that house your home, I have no doubt. And won't it be lovely to get the dog you've been wanting? Congrats on this big decision and on the new job for Angus!

Posted by: amy t. at July 26, 2005 03:50 PM (zPssd)

6 I think it sounds perfect for you!! What better way to banish demons than to make them (them being the house in this case) do your bidding? I love the sound of Ovaltine, crunchy granola, and seagulls soaring overhead. And the "nifty little downstairs shop" (whatever their specialty may be) sounds like it has fun potential too. I'm all kinds of excited for you - and for Angus in his new venture! I feel a turning point coming on, even from way over here.

Posted by: Lisa at July 26, 2005 07:11 PM (MzcD8)

7 You, dear girl, (with your darling by your side) can do anything you set your mind to. You always could. Click your ruby slippers together and say it with me: "There's no place like home." I have utter faith in your wonderfully loving heart. P.S. (This about killed me: "I was suffering from Post Dramatic Syndrome" I LMAO!)

Posted by: Margi at July 26, 2005 07:48 PM (nwEQH)

8 Mmmm, Falafel. No, talk Lebanese all you want.

Posted by: Sigivald at July 26, 2005 08:33 PM (4JnZM)

9 There's a nice Wiccan, kinda earth-mothery ritual that i always do for myself when i move into a new place... i grab a few sticks of incense (i like nag champa, but whatever smell makes you feel peaceful and centered) light them, and carry them along the walls of each room..allowing the incense smoke to drift up into the corners and down to the baseboards and into the closets..etc...filling each space.. while focusing on a warm and peaceful feeling. Although some view it as a cleansing ritual, I dont see it so much as banishing anything away as I do putting a peaceful, sweet smelling foundation all around me for my layer of life and memories in the home to begin. Kind of like a protective blanket between me and what was there before...starting new while leaving the old undisturbed. Maybe performing your own little personal ritual of some kind before you move in might be helpful for you to mentally put some space between what was then in the house..and what is now. Just a thought.

Posted by: hd at July 27, 2005 06:06 AM (IU7wl)

10 Emily, Melissa only lived there until she was about 4 and has very little memory of the place. Jeff was born just after they'd already moved and so has never been there.

Posted by: Helen at July 27, 2005 08:34 AM (ATx6T)

11 Umm yeah, except the tree hugging. People in Brighton only hug trees to hide that they're peeing against them, hide their stash, or make up to the tree by mistake because the ate/smoked/jacked their stash already. It has a dark and druggy underbelly, lots of gay bashing and some very poor areas. Its just a city with a bit of tourist gloss laminated on top.

Posted by: cheryl at July 28, 2005 01:52 PM (dES0k)

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