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I read the electric meter, had one last look around the empty echoey rooms and then dropped my keys through the letterbox tonight, as I finally said goodbye to the flat.

Funny, isn’t it, how you can go through months of smartening it up, advertising it, selling it, answering solicitors’ questions, redirecting your post and finally moving out your furniture, but it doesn’t really register that you’ll never see a place again until you no longer have your own set of keys.

I took mum up to the top floor for one last look out across the ‘Village’, which always struck me as a fanciful name for a suburb, and then we drove off, the little block I lived in for almost seven years shrinking in the rear window.

I left a bottle of wine and ‘new home’ card on the kitchen work-top for Timothy, the guy who’ll be living there in my stead.

Somehow I’d always imagined I would never sell that place. It was going to be an investment, and as I’d paid off the mortgage I saw it stretching into the future as a source of income that, if I hung onto it for long enough, would be a healthy supplement to a meagre pension. Fanciful, I know: I’d have had to keep it for 30 more years for that to happen.

Times and circumstances change, though, and while I might have preferred to find a way that I could have kept it for the financial security it would offer, I stood in the lounge for one last time and thought to myself - not for the first time - that while I’d been very happy there I was glad that someone else, not I, was moving in tomorrow.

With that thought burning bright in my mind it was clear once and for all that it was time to move on to something bigger, better, and more ‘me’.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.