WYL2: Putting Myself On The Map

Piers Cawley

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.

Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down.

If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroom first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floor plan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.

Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down.

If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroom first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floor plan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.

For the majority of you: Tyneside flats are purpose built flats. Originally built as rental accommodation, a large proportion of them are now owned by their occupiers. Built in terraces of two storey buildings, flats are arranged in pairs; upper and lower. Ours is an upstairs flat, which means it’s slightly larger than the flat below it because there’s no hallway apart from the stairs, there’s also a possibility of extending up into the roof void.

You enter the flat through the right hand door and come straight upstairs to a small inner hall with three doors leading from it. The door to your left leads through into my office, a small, cluttered space which barely contains a huge, height adjustable desk with a dual screen PowerMac G5 setup, a Digidesign Command|8, a couple of audio monitors and an A4 Wacom tablet on it. There’s a certain amount of other detritus on the desk, and every other available horizontal surface. I really should tidy the place up;

2025 update: I’m still crap at tidying, but I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD. Hopefully, once I get on the appropriate meds, that should improve

it’s driving Gill up the wall, but somehow I never seem to get around to it.

Back at the hall, the next door, moving clockwise from my office door, is the door to our bedroom. It’s a large room, with a King size bed, a couple of built in wardrobes, a couple of bedside tables overflowing with stuff, and an airer full of drying clothes. Gill’s side of the bed is the tidy side, my bedside table is as disorganised as my office. Unusually, there are no dirty clothes on the floor by the bed at the moment. Probably because we’ve just done a load of washing.

The last door on the landing leads into the sitting room, which is reasonably large, and it needs to be. There’s a small sofa; an easy chair; a Stressless recliner (which is causing a depressing amount of stress at the moment — it keeps breaking); Gill’s desk; three deep bookshelves filled with books (most of the books aren’t here yet); a (small) dining table; a small dresser base with a mini hi-fi on top; the TV/TiVo/DVD collection; a surprisingly pretty new gas fire; and an annoyingly proportioned built in cupboard.

Opposite the door you came into the room through is the door into the small galley kitchen. It’s cramped but there’s all the essentials there, except for a dishwasher (we’re still trying to work out how to cram one in. If you’ve ever owned a dishwasher you will no doubt be aware that they very rapidly decay from luxury to essential). Carrying on through the kitchen there’s the cats’ landing (where their food and drink bowls live) to the left, stairs lead down to the back door and the litter tray and straight ahead is the bathroom complete with too small bath and the depressingly cramped (when you’re built on my scale) shower over it.

We spend most of our time in the sitting room, as you can tell from the books scattered about, the teapot that always seems to be on a side table or in the kitchen beside a kettle that’s about to boil…

However, I wouldn’t call this flat home. Not properly. It’s a transitional space; where we live until we’ve sold the Newark house, when we’ll be able to sell this flat too and move into big old house somewhere, with room for guests, an office for Gill, a recording area, a darkroom, a decent sized kitchen…

The Newark house?

The Newark house is where we used to live, and it’s far nearer to the kind of place I want to make my home in. From the street, it almost looks like a child’s drawing of a house. Four windows, a door in the middle, a pan tiled roof with a chimney stack right in the middle of the roof. The bit you can see from the road is an approximately 400 year old, timber framed cottage. You come in through the front door into a long, low-ceilinged dining room with a 12 foot long dining table running the length of it. The Newark house is a huge, rambling building, from the road it looks like a simple two up/two down cottage, but it’s deceptive, the house goes back a long way. There’s four bedrooms; a big kitchen with massive range cooker; a library with built in shelving holding some of the books; small bathroom holding a lovely long, deep and wide bath and a shower room with a fabulously large shower.

There’s a lot wrong with it too. For a start, it’s in Newark, which is a little tricky when I’m training as a maths teacher in Middlesbrough and Gill’s doing a degree at Newcastle University. Then there’s the surveys…

We thought we’d sold it. We really did. The buyers liked the fact that it’s old. They liked the eccentricity and general lack of verticality in the front section. They liked the beams and the lime plaster. They even liked the 4’ high door from the main bedroom into the bathroom. What they didn’t like was the results of their structural survey. According to their surveyor, the house is subsiding and subject to progressive and continuing movement and even if remedial action is taken, he can’t guarantee that the house will remain standing. The phrase “only delaying the inevitable” was used in his report. Understandably, our buyers were somewhat taken aback by this.

So, we’ve called in our original structural surveyor, who reckons that there’s been no movement since he surveyed the building over a year ago. Our insurers’ surveyor has paid a visit and reckons there’s no subsidence (but there’s some engineers turning up for a peace of mind check on the drains). With any luck we’ll be able to get away with reinforcing some of the ties and supplying a bunch of certifications from the various surveyors and the buyers (who love the house) will be willing to complete. Or they won’t.

If they don’t, it looks like we might be moving back to Newark for a while come the summer while we get the work done and maybe while I do my induction year as a newly qualified teacher, then sell the house and move back to the North East so Gill can either complete her degree or switch to a masters. Or we’ll stay in Newark for a while longer; it does have the advantage of being a good deal nearer to friends in the South, but it’s still within striking distance of Gateshead, which is where my step-daughter lives.

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