I Want to Share Something
I’ve sold my house! Woohoo!
OK well…….erm……..maybe not exactly a woohoo moment. You see, I haven’t bought myself, or rented, anywhere else to live. So, I guess that makes me technically homeless. But I prefer the term “nomadic” to describe my current (and future) accommodation status.
Selling the house is a bit of a bitter/sweet experience. Not because of the whole nomadic thingy. That actually falls into the sweet category. What also falls into the sweet category is that I got much more for the house than I expected and, as a consequence, I’ve got a very nice chunk of dosh in my bank account.
The bitter part is because this house is the only place that has felt like a home since leaving my parents place many years ago. It’s the only place I tried to make into a home.
I’m typing this in what used to be my dining room come office. I’m sitting at my old desk (somebody is coming to pick it up in the next few days) and it all feels rather empty and sad. Nearly all of my furniture has either been sold, donated to charity or, thrown in a skip. My belongings i.e. the usual crap that we all accumulate to fill up our homes, have either gone into storage or have also been thrown in a skip. Three skips actually.
I’m looking out of the sliding patio windows at what used to be MY garden. At the trees that I planted over twenty years ago. There’s a fig tree, a mulberry tree, an olive tree, a daphnia (aka bay leaf) tree and, a grape vine. I brought cuttings for all of those trees from my homeland and my mother helped me to cultivate them until they were ready for planting into the garden. My Mum passed away ten years ago so, yeah, those trees have a lot of emotional significance to me. The new owners are also Greeks so maybe they won’t dig them up. Who knows?
When I first moved out of my parents’ house (I’m not counting going away to uni or the numerous long working trips abroad as moving out of my parents’ house), I bought myself a little one bedroomed flat. It was above an insurance brokers on a busy high street in North London. A mere stone’s throw away from one of the UK’s top football teams. When they played a match at home, the street was full of pedestrians and cars. Sitting in my little flat, I could hear the roars and the chants and the cheers so clearly that I could watch the game on TV with the volume turned off and feel like I was in the stadium. Maybe that’s why it was so cheap. More likely, it was cheap because it was basically a dump. With the help of my Dad and a couple of uncles, I fixed it up. They installed new windows and re-plastered the walls. I learned how to change all the power sockets and light switches. How to hang wallpaper. How to paint woodwork. How to remodel the bathroom and kitchen. How to hang shelves. All-in-all, I did a pretty good job. Even if I do say so myself.
But it never felt like home. It was just a place where I kept my stuff. Where I kept my self. I didn’t mind the noise of the traffic or from the football fans. I didn’t mind the hustle and bustle of living on a busy high street. I enjoyed those things. I was young, why wouldn’t I.
What I didn’t enjoy was the psycho IRA supporter who lived across the street. Late at night, he would open his windows, regardless of the weather, and blast out IRA folk songs from his obviously crappy stereo system. It was impossible to sleep. I complained to his landlords, an Indian family who ran the newsagents above which was the flat of this nutcase. That would stop him for a few days, maybe a week or so. But, soon enough, it would start all over again.
Things came to a head one summers evening. I was flaked out on the sofa in my living room when, suddenly, there was a loud bang at my window. I rushed to the window and pulled the curtains apart expecting to see cracked and shattered glass. The window was sound nothing was broken. Perplexed, I wondered if what I’d heard had come from the TV and not my window. My confusion soon evaporated when I saw him poke an air rifle out of his window and shoot at something, or someone, down the street.
I lost it! Pausing just long enough to grab my keys, I charged across the street and started banging on his door. I shouted through the letter box. I shouted up at his open window. I called him every vile name that I could think off. I carried on banging and kicking his door. My rage increasing with every kick and thump. The door opened and there he stood. Holding a hatchet.
What transpired next was, perhaps, not my finest moment. Suffice it to say that he ended up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a broken elbow. I ended up in a police cell for the night. Thankfully, I got away with it. Thankfully, the guys from the kebab shop up the street (he had also been taking pot shots at their shop) saw the whole thing and came forward as witnesses in my favour.
A couple of months later, the insurance brokers below me sold their business. It turned out that the new owners also wanted to buy the building. So, I sold them my flat. And made a tidy profit. Enough of a profit to upgrade to a more salubrious part of London.
My next flat was also a one bedroomed affair. But it was in good condition, on the ground floor, had a tiny little garden in the front and, the rooms were much bigger. But, again, it didn’t feel like home. Again, it was just a place where I kept my stuff, where I kept my self.
Work had really taken off and I spent more and more of my time away. Sometimes in various parts of the UK but, more often than not, I was abroad. Eastern Europe and the Middle East were my stomping grounds.
It was probably because of these frequent and long absences, absences where the flat was left completely unoccupied, that some of the local kids started using my flat as a sort of squat. At first, I would come back and notice a weird smell about the place and the impression that things had been moved. I tried to find the source and the cause of the weird smell. Nothing in the flat yielded any answers. Then it dawned on me, it was the smell of stale weed.
Pretty much all of my neighbours where old and were, perhaps, too frightened to get involved and to tell me what had been going on. I installed new locks on all of the windows and a new, more secure, front door. Everything was OK for a while until one fateful Saturday afternoon.
I pulled up in a taxi from Heathrow Airport to find that my front door had been smashed in and that it was covered in tape and plastic sheeting from the fire brigade and the police. I stood there completely shocked. I didn’t know what to do. Do I go in? Do I call the police? What the hell had happened?
The old guy from next door came out and told me what the hell had happened. Late that previous night he and wife had heard the usual noises from the kids. They had somehow overcome my increased security measures. As the night wore on, the noises got louder and louder. They could hear things being smashed against the adjoining wall. Finally, they smelt the acrid smell of something burning. They called the police and the fire brigade.
I went inside. The flat had been completely trashed. Ketchup, shower gel, anything liquid that could be squeezed out of a bottle splattered the walls, my bed and my clothes. Cushions and upholstery were slashed. It’s pointless trying to describe the mess, there was just so bloody much of it. But it was the fire. It didn’t look like they had purposely set out to burn down my flat. It looked more like a moment of mayhem that had gone more than a little bit wrong.
Against the back wall was my desk. It was an old fashioned office desk, a bit like this one that I’m sitting at now but not as robust. That’s where the fire had been started. In the centre of the living room was a coffee table, its legs had now been ripped off and were buried somewhere or other in the rubble. On that coffee table used to sit a large glass goldfish bowl. It didn’t contain water and goldfish, it contained matchboxes and matchbooks from all manner of restaurants, nightclubs, bars, hotels, events, all sorts of places that I had visited in my travels. They had taken this goldfish bowl to my desk, put it directly above a drawer which contained the material for a project that I’d been working on for more than two years, plucked out a matchbox, lit a match and dropped it into the goldfish bowl.
Thank God my neighbours reacted quickly. Thank God the fire brigade got there fast. The blaze didn’t spread. It was confined to the goldfish bowl, my desk and, all of the negatives and prints and interviews and general research material that I believed would have made a great book. All gone. All destroyed.
I got a pretty decent settlement from the insurance company, had the place completely renovated and put it on the market as a vacant possession. I wasn’t going to live there again. I stayed with my parents for a bit, with various girlfriends and, went to the place which had taken up more and more of my time for the last few years. Israel.
That flat was sold, again with a tidy profit and, finally, I found this house. It was very cheap. But, it was basically derelict. I took one look at it and fell in love. Semi-detached, two stories, three bedrooms, a good sized bathroom, a decent sized kitchen, a great back room leading out onto a very good sized garden, an equally great front room, a very generous entry foyer, a wide staircase (with a proper landing half way up, WOW), parquet flooring downstairs, hard-wood floorboards above and, a weird but rather wonderful L-shaped foot print. One part of the “L” contains the front room on the ground floor and the master bedroom on the first floor. The very front of this “L” shape is basically a semi-circle. Which means that it has amazing bay windows top to bottom. The front door is at the join of the “L” and there is a big enough front garden to park two average sized saloon cars. Or to keep as garden. Whatever. I chose the car port option.
It’s a stunning place. It really is. So yeah, I’m more than a little sad to see it go.
But, a new adventure awaits. I said that my future was going to be nomadic. Sometime after the third week in November, I’m leaving the UK. All I’ll have with me is a basic set of clothes, just enough to fill an Eastpak 61ltr duffle bag along with the various bits and pieces of kit needed for travel survival and, a Lowepro backpack stuffed with my camera equipment and laptop.
I’ll only be travelling by ship, train, bus or car. Or my legs of course. I’m going to start in France and work my way west and south to Spain, Portugal, cross The Mediterranean into Morocco, follow the North African coastline as far as personal safety will allow (or maybe not, who knows). Then it’s back across The Med into southern Europe. Go east through the southern European countries then another Med crossing to Cyprus. From there, it’ll be Israel, Lebanon and Jordan. Back to Cyprus then back into continental Europe this time staying east for a while before heading west across the northern European countries on my hit list.
I’ve budgeted for a year but it could take longer.
After that, back to the UK but ultimately settle in Cyprus, my homeland.
In 1989 I went on a month long holiday to Cyprus with my parents. Much to my mother’s chagrin, my Dad had invited my girlfriend to join us for the last two weeks of our stay. My Dad adored her. As did my maternal grandmother and all of my family in Cyprus. I say all but, truth be told, my five year old cousin didn’t take to my girlfriend at all. For the first two weeks or so of or holiday, my little cousin had me all to herself and, of course, I spoilt her rotten. My girlfriends’ arrival changed that and my little cousin was none too pleased.
“She can’t even talk properly! Nobody can understand what she says”, opined my little cousin.
My girlfriend was English and couldn’t speak Greek. My little cousin was yet to learn English.
On our last but one day, my girlfriend and I drove into Nicosia to return the awesome Mini 1275GT that I’d hired for the duration of our holiday. We caught the bus back to the small town where I had spent the first five ears of my life. If I had tried to make a movie of that final scene, I couldn’t have scripted it better.
The sun was a huge, orange fireball low in the sky. As we left the city and drove through what was then rural countryside, the sun burnished the upturned soil in the fields to a deep dark red. The red from the copper deposits which caused the Romans to take the Latin name for copper from the name of my island home.
I got a lump in my throat and my eyes welled up.
“What’s wrong?” asked my girlfriend.
“It’s our last day. We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah, it’s been a great holiday.”
“That’s not it at all. This is my home. And I’m leaving. Again. It’s where I was born. It’s the only place on the planet where nobody can call me a bloody foreigner. It’s my home.”
She didn’t get it. A few weeks later we split up. Sorry Dad. Hey ho.
OK well…….erm……..maybe not exactly a woohoo moment. You see, I haven’t bought myself, or rented, anywhere else to live. So, I guess that makes me technically homeless. But I prefer the term “nomadic” to describe my current (and future) accommodation status.
Selling the house is a bit of a bitter/sweet experience. Not because of the whole nomadic thingy. That actually falls into the sweet category. What also falls into the sweet category is that I got much more for the house than I expected and, as a consequence, I’ve got a very nice chunk of dosh in my bank account.
The bitter part is because this house is the only place that has felt like a home since leaving my parents place many years ago. It’s the only place I tried to make into a home.
I’m typing this in what used to be my dining room come office. I’m sitting at my old desk (somebody is coming to pick it up in the next few days) and it all feels rather empty and sad. Nearly all of my furniture has either been sold, donated to charity or, thrown in a skip. My belongings i.e. the usual crap that we all accumulate to fill up our homes, have either gone into storage or have also been thrown in a skip. Three skips actually.
I’m looking out of the sliding patio windows at what used to be MY garden. At the trees that I planted over twenty years ago. There’s a fig tree, a mulberry tree, an olive tree, a daphnia (aka bay leaf) tree and, a grape vine. I brought cuttings for all of those trees from my homeland and my mother helped me to cultivate them until they were ready for planting into the garden. My Mum passed away ten years ago so, yeah, those trees have a lot of emotional significance to me. The new owners are also Greeks so maybe they won’t dig them up. Who knows?
When I first moved out of my parents’ house (I’m not counting going away to uni or the numerous long working trips abroad as moving out of my parents’ house), I bought myself a little one bedroomed flat. It was above an insurance brokers on a busy high street in North London. A mere stone’s throw away from one of the UK’s top football teams. When they played a match at home, the street was full of pedestrians and cars. Sitting in my little flat, I could hear the roars and the chants and the cheers so clearly that I could watch the game on TV with the volume turned off and feel like I was in the stadium. Maybe that’s why it was so cheap. More likely, it was cheap because it was basically a dump. With the help of my Dad and a couple of uncles, I fixed it up. They installed new windows and re-plastered the walls. I learned how to change all the power sockets and light switches. How to hang wallpaper. How to paint woodwork. How to remodel the bathroom and kitchen. How to hang shelves. All-in-all, I did a pretty good job. Even if I do say so myself.
But it never felt like home. It was just a place where I kept my stuff. Where I kept my self. I didn’t mind the noise of the traffic or from the football fans. I didn’t mind the hustle and bustle of living on a busy high street. I enjoyed those things. I was young, why wouldn’t I.
What I didn’t enjoy was the psycho IRA supporter who lived across the street. Late at night, he would open his windows, regardless of the weather, and blast out IRA folk songs from his obviously crappy stereo system. It was impossible to sleep. I complained to his landlords, an Indian family who ran the newsagents above which was the flat of this nutcase. That would stop him for a few days, maybe a week or so. But, soon enough, it would start all over again.
Things came to a head one summers evening. I was flaked out on the sofa in my living room when, suddenly, there was a loud bang at my window. I rushed to the window and pulled the curtains apart expecting to see cracked and shattered glass. The window was sound nothing was broken. Perplexed, I wondered if what I’d heard had come from the TV and not my window. My confusion soon evaporated when I saw him poke an air rifle out of his window and shoot at something, or someone, down the street.
I lost it! Pausing just long enough to grab my keys, I charged across the street and started banging on his door. I shouted through the letter box. I shouted up at his open window. I called him every vile name that I could think off. I carried on banging and kicking his door. My rage increasing with every kick and thump. The door opened and there he stood. Holding a hatchet.
What transpired next was, perhaps, not my finest moment. Suffice it to say that he ended up in hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a broken elbow. I ended up in a police cell for the night. Thankfully, I got away with it. Thankfully, the guys from the kebab shop up the street (he had also been taking pot shots at their shop) saw the whole thing and came forward as witnesses in my favour.
A couple of months later, the insurance brokers below me sold their business. It turned out that the new owners also wanted to buy the building. So, I sold them my flat. And made a tidy profit. Enough of a profit to upgrade to a more salubrious part of London.
My next flat was also a one bedroomed affair. But it was in good condition, on the ground floor, had a tiny little garden in the front and, the rooms were much bigger. But, again, it didn’t feel like home. Again, it was just a place where I kept my stuff, where I kept my self.
Work had really taken off and I spent more and more of my time away. Sometimes in various parts of the UK but, more often than not, I was abroad. Eastern Europe and the Middle East were my stomping grounds.
It was probably because of these frequent and long absences, absences where the flat was left completely unoccupied, that some of the local kids started using my flat as a sort of squat. At first, I would come back and notice a weird smell about the place and the impression that things had been moved. I tried to find the source and the cause of the weird smell. Nothing in the flat yielded any answers. Then it dawned on me, it was the smell of stale weed.
Pretty much all of my neighbours where old and were, perhaps, too frightened to get involved and to tell me what had been going on. I installed new locks on all of the windows and a new, more secure, front door. Everything was OK for a while until one fateful Saturday afternoon.
I pulled up in a taxi from Heathrow Airport to find that my front door had been smashed in and that it was covered in tape and plastic sheeting from the fire brigade and the police. I stood there completely shocked. I didn’t know what to do. Do I go in? Do I call the police? What the hell had happened?
The old guy from next door came out and told me what the hell had happened. Late that previous night he and wife had heard the usual noises from the kids. They had somehow overcome my increased security measures. As the night wore on, the noises got louder and louder. They could hear things being smashed against the adjoining wall. Finally, they smelt the acrid smell of something burning. They called the police and the fire brigade.
I went inside. The flat had been completely trashed. Ketchup, shower gel, anything liquid that could be squeezed out of a bottle splattered the walls, my bed and my clothes. Cushions and upholstery were slashed. It’s pointless trying to describe the mess, there was just so bloody much of it. But it was the fire. It didn’t look like they had purposely set out to burn down my flat. It looked more like a moment of mayhem that had gone more than a little bit wrong.
Against the back wall was my desk. It was an old fashioned office desk, a bit like this one that I’m sitting at now but not as robust. That’s where the fire had been started. In the centre of the living room was a coffee table, its legs had now been ripped off and were buried somewhere or other in the rubble. On that coffee table used to sit a large glass goldfish bowl. It didn’t contain water and goldfish, it contained matchboxes and matchbooks from all manner of restaurants, nightclubs, bars, hotels, events, all sorts of places that I had visited in my travels. They had taken this goldfish bowl to my desk, put it directly above a drawer which contained the material for a project that I’d been working on for more than two years, plucked out a matchbox, lit a match and dropped it into the goldfish bowl.
Thank God my neighbours reacted quickly. Thank God the fire brigade got there fast. The blaze didn’t spread. It was confined to the goldfish bowl, my desk and, all of the negatives and prints and interviews and general research material that I believed would have made a great book. All gone. All destroyed.
I got a pretty decent settlement from the insurance company, had the place completely renovated and put it on the market as a vacant possession. I wasn’t going to live there again. I stayed with my parents for a bit, with various girlfriends and, went to the place which had taken up more and more of my time for the last few years. Israel.
That flat was sold, again with a tidy profit and, finally, I found this house. It was very cheap. But, it was basically derelict. I took one look at it and fell in love. Semi-detached, two stories, three bedrooms, a good sized bathroom, a decent sized kitchen, a great back room leading out onto a very good sized garden, an equally great front room, a very generous entry foyer, a wide staircase (with a proper landing half way up, WOW), parquet flooring downstairs, hard-wood floorboards above and, a weird but rather wonderful L-shaped foot print. One part of the “L” contains the front room on the ground floor and the master bedroom on the first floor. The very front of this “L” shape is basically a semi-circle. Which means that it has amazing bay windows top to bottom. The front door is at the join of the “L” and there is a big enough front garden to park two average sized saloon cars. Or to keep as garden. Whatever. I chose the car port option.
It’s a stunning place. It really is. So yeah, I’m more than a little sad to see it go.
But, a new adventure awaits. I said that my future was going to be nomadic. Sometime after the third week in November, I’m leaving the UK. All I’ll have with me is a basic set of clothes, just enough to fill an Eastpak 61ltr duffle bag along with the various bits and pieces of kit needed for travel survival and, a Lowepro backpack stuffed with my camera equipment and laptop.
I’ll only be travelling by ship, train, bus or car. Or my legs of course. I’m going to start in France and work my way west and south to Spain, Portugal, cross The Mediterranean into Morocco, follow the North African coastline as far as personal safety will allow (or maybe not, who knows). Then it’s back across The Med into southern Europe. Go east through the southern European countries then another Med crossing to Cyprus. From there, it’ll be Israel, Lebanon and Jordan. Back to Cyprus then back into continental Europe this time staying east for a while before heading west across the northern European countries on my hit list.
I’ve budgeted for a year but it could take longer.
After that, back to the UK but ultimately settle in Cyprus, my homeland.
In 1989 I went on a month long holiday to Cyprus with my parents. Much to my mother’s chagrin, my Dad had invited my girlfriend to join us for the last two weeks of our stay. My Dad adored her. As did my maternal grandmother and all of my family in Cyprus. I say all but, truth be told, my five year old cousin didn’t take to my girlfriend at all. For the first two weeks or so of or holiday, my little cousin had me all to herself and, of course, I spoilt her rotten. My girlfriends’ arrival changed that and my little cousin was none too pleased.
“She can’t even talk properly! Nobody can understand what she says”, opined my little cousin.
My girlfriend was English and couldn’t speak Greek. My little cousin was yet to learn English.
On our last but one day, my girlfriend and I drove into Nicosia to return the awesome Mini 1275GT that I’d hired for the duration of our holiday. We caught the bus back to the small town where I had spent the first five ears of my life. If I had tried to make a movie of that final scene, I couldn’t have scripted it better.
The sun was a huge, orange fireball low in the sky. As we left the city and drove through what was then rural countryside, the sun burnished the upturned soil in the fields to a deep dark red. The red from the copper deposits which caused the Romans to take the Latin name for copper from the name of my island home.
I got a lump in my throat and my eyes welled up.
“What’s wrong?” asked my girlfriend.
“It’s our last day. We’re leaving tomorrow morning.”
“Yeah, it’s been a great holiday.”
“That’s not it at all. This is my home. And I’m leaving. Again. It’s where I was born. It’s the only place on the planet where nobody can call me a bloody foreigner. It’s my home.”
She didn’t get it. A few weeks later we split up. Sorry Dad. Hey ho.
