We got the email on November 28th.
It quite simply stated the owner would be taking over the property in 2015 and
we needed to be out by 22 January 2015. I remember exactly where I was standing
down to what I was wearing, black dress, black mottled leopard print tights and my smart camel and black felt jacket which
has lapels like Cheryl Cole circa 2013.
All those years. If I could slot in a
reference to London 2012 I would cover all the big events that had happened
from the base that was my home most securely and definitely of anywhere I’d
ever lived since 1997.
I moved into my Deanhaugh Street flat with
Laura in March 2012. The week of my birthday. We had looked at the ad for the
flat online in the pub below, in the window seat, not realising the bay windows
of that pub, Hectors, swung round to meet what would be our front door for two
years and mine for another after that.
I didn’t know then it was going to be the
first place where I really felt like I belonged, to become my office when I
quit my sensible day job and set up a company; a party flat, fitting sixteen
people into a kitchen that on a grumpy Tuesday night didn’t seem to have room
for two; the place I got into cycling; the place that meant I afford to buy a nice
duvet; the place I got round to putting my own framed pictures up on the wall.
Laura’s huge tapestry from India pinned up in the huge hall immediately lent
warmth and colour. The place I could have a cupboard of all my cosmetics in the
bathroom and twelve different moisturizers I never used. It didn’t matter what
the flat was filled with as it was mine.
I loved the flat mostly as it was so
strange. Long and thin, freezing cold, top top floor and a level above all the
other high-street tenements so it felt like one was in the set for chim-chiminy
from Mary Poppins. I owned those chimney tops. No one else had that view. From
the back rooms, a glimpse at a far off Edinburgh Castle and skittles and layers
of houses and flats rising up and up into the city centre, also the side of the
flat that caught the sunrise. The front end of the flat, sitting room and the
big bedroom looking out onto the busy high street caught the sunset. This
meaning twice a day one end of the flat was bathed in the warm, pink light of
magic hour and the other end was bathed in the pinky reflection of the sun
waxing or waning.
The front end of the flat lent the best
people watching of anywhere I’ve ever been let alone lived. If you like
watching people – live on a high street or on a street that reaches long into
the distance – this flat had both. I remember when friends came to stay when at 2am one night a couple of the staff from the pub below left work and he
– out on the street – declared his love for her. We craned our necks out of the
window in silence to listen. I got in a lot of trouble for making a noise that
may have alerted them to our eavesdropping. I have watched people dancing home with
headphones in at 9pm on a Friday after after-work drinks, I have watched men
locked out of their flats by flatmates, partners, parents wandering
listlessly drunk round in circles before turning round and going back to try their luck at the
intercom.
That flat watched the Yes campaign gaining
speed. I sat in my front room with the windows open on the evening of the referendum
soaking up the carnival of tooting horns and exuberant chatter. Yes’s and No’s
sprinkling the windows of the flats and flats and flats stretching down the
road.
The night we finally emptied the flat out
and moved a Subaru of residual crap round to my friends spare room where we are to pitch for the foreseeable – we watched Chris Nolan’s Intersteller. A
film about dimensions, relativity and time and space and home – the story
centres on a bookshelf in a home that no one can bare to let go of.
In all of the time and space and
possibilities, time moves at a speed relative to activity. Those three years in
that flat feel like decades. The eight weeks notice dragged and tripped me up,
rendering me incapable of picturing a reality beyond not being in my home. It’s
not mad to cry and scream and holler at someone taking your security away. It’s
fairly mad not to. I feel a pang when I take a tent down that I’ve stayed in
for a weekend. I’ll find a new home, that no-one else wants as it’s weird and
long or tall or cold or hot or high or bright or similar to the set of a
childhood film if I were able to wander out the windows without falling three
floors – but for now I reserve the right to wonder how my sitting room is
without me chatting on the phone gazing out the window. If my neighbours are
wondering why my bike has gone from the hall. Why my evenings aren’t bathed in
a pink light – and who’s going to clamber over the rooftops in their mind,
tripping over chimney pots and slipping on tiles, gazing into skylights,
sneaking at other people’s top floor lives and disturbing birds’ nests.
Maybe I’ll reserve that right just for
me. In my own dimension.
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