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I went back to my old life today for the first time in over a year. My tenants, you see, moved out last week, after 12 months of renting my flat. So I’ve decided to sell up. I was up before the crows and out buying paint and brushes and dust sheets and rollers and, after breakfast, picked up the keys from my agent and headed over to the pseudo village to see if anything had changed.

It hadn’t. The walls were the same sunflower yellow I’d chosen eight years ago, the light in the hallway was still a little too dim for my liking, and I recognised some of the neighbourhood cats (although sadly they didn’t recognise me).

I went to Asda to buy some lunch and found it full of the same brain-dead zombies and pre-cooked chickens as it had been when I last went there, almost two years ago, although they’d done away with some of the more ambitious lines in their home prettyficating department to make way for toilet brushes and plastic cups.

Just about the only thing that had changed was the size of my flat, which seems to have grown by at least 75% since I was last there. I’d been hoping I may have been able to blitz every room by the time I knocked off for a bath, but by six I’d done a first coat on just the two bedrooms and the hallway, with the kitchen, lounge diner and bathroom still in their virgin unpainted state.

It felt good to be back there, though. I sat on my familiar and now well-bettered settee drinking tea as the sun streamed in through the windows and for a little while wondered what it would be like to move back. I’m quite tempted, although I know it’s the wrong thing to do for a hundred different reasons.

Whoever gets it, though, I hope they’ll feel the same way living there as I did all those years.

But… whether I feel the that way myself by Monday evening, which is my revised ETA for the end of painting, is another matter altogether.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 26th, 2006 at 7:05 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.