Restless

During the summer I became quite discontented with my house (sadly not the one above), which felt smaller and noisier than ever. Outside, builders shouted, drilled and listened to hideous power ballads. Inside, my wife, sons and cats occupied every room except the main bedroom.

At one point I started viewing property websites and looked longingly at houses with spacious kitchens and gardens larger than a bath mat. Many of them had a study and a shed - catnip for a middle aged man - plus the en suite bathroom that my wife has yearned for all these years.

To add to the temptation, the houses weren't selling for any more money than the value of our home. If we could buy one of these houses (and somehow lose our cats during the move), how much better life could be. I could have that book-lined study I'd always dreamed about.

But the bubble always burst when I clicked on the maps and realised that there is a simple rule to purchasing a property in this area: unless you're blessed with a large sum of money, you can either have a small house in a good location, or a large home in a less desirable one. Invariably, whenever I saw a house I liked, there was a catch.

Also, many of the larger houses I saw conformed to Patrick Hamilton's snobbish but amusing description in a book I'm reading at the moment, Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse:

'The houses were squat, two-storied affairs. Their fronts had all been most oddly treated. It looked as if the builder had had some sort of infantile sea-mania for shingled beaches, and that, to indulge this passion, he had, having covered the external walls with thick glue, used some extraordinary machine with which to spray them densely with small pebbles.

In the front gardens of most of these houses there were, in addition to sundials, countless images of Gnomes, Dwarfs, Fairies, Goblins, and Peter Pans - the inhabitants of Sispara Road having, it seemed, a strong turn of mind for the whimiscal, the grotesque and the beautiful.'


So for the time being, I am staying put in the unpebbledashed, gnome-free streets of Lewes, resigned to living in a terraced Victorian shoebox, but grateful to live in a town that is full of delights, with solid, unpretentious housing.

In a vague attempt to improve my fitness and leave my cramped surroundings behind, I've been going on long walks around Lewes. I have a particularly good pair of shoes that were originally designed for postmen (if you look carefully, you can see 'Royal Mail' embossed on the side) and they enable me to stride around the town at a speed that burns off a few calories and gets the heart racing.

The other day I explored the ruins of the Priory of St Pancras, which was built roughly 940 years ago:

 

There's nothing like a good ruin to put things into perspective, whether it's a Norman priory in Sussex or a deserted office block in Detroit. Ruins are humbling, or should be.

Last night, the Priory of St Pancras looked particularly beautiful as volunteers had lit over a thousand candles, all strategically placed either on the ground or in the nooks of the stone walls. It was quite magical.

(My only reservation was over the decision to lay a double row of lights, as it looked like one of those makeshift landing strips that feature in war films. When, at one point, I heard the drone of a light aircraft, I was worried that its confused pilot was about to make a descent. But that aside, it was a magical evening.)

As the sun set, a choir started singing Carmina Burana and I felt incredibly grateful that I lived in a town that did things like this. If my pokey, Victorian terraced house was the price that I had to pay for living in Lewes, it was probably one worth paying.

Also, at a time when so many people around the world have been displaced from their homes, it seemed absurd to be complaining about something so self-indulgent and trivial.

But when the car exhausts and builders' hammers get too much, I can faintly hear the quiet call of the garden gnomes whispering "Shed, conservatory, en suite bathroom, study, parking space, large kitchen, guest bedroom..." and a part of me weakens.


P.S - In response to Joan's comment, I have a very short video clip of the choir, which I've added. I didn't bother trying to film anything in the dark, but I hope this captures something of the evening's magic. Oh, and did I add that it was all free?

Abandonment

The highlights of last week were an exploding laptop, a leaking sink, a dead mink (the rats will inherit the earth), a new crisis with my older son and the discovery that I have a lung infection. As none of these things make a particularly edifying blog post, I'm posting some photos I took of some abandoned buildings in Iceland.

If that seems a bit 'random' - as the kids like to say - I should add that I've just been reading Andrew Moore's superb 'Detroit Disassembled' and have been thinking about why ruined buildings are often so more interesting than well-maintained ones.

These crudely-built structures, with their rusted, corrugated iron roofs, were once a hive of activity for Iceland's fishing industry. Why they were abandoned is a mystery.

 

It looked as if the buildings had been abandoned in a hurry. Sou'westers were strewn across the floor of one room, while another had mattresses propped against the walls. But the thing that unnerved me most was a small entrance to a dark, unlit basement, which I nearly fell into. After adjusting my eyes to the gloom, I could see a chair and lengths of rope, as if someone had been held captive here.

It was like being in a Mike Nelson installation, but without the irritation of being constantly distracted by other people. Here, your imagination - and paranoia - could run wild. I've no doubt that everything there was related to the fishing industry, but the murky basement and discarded syringes were a little unsettling.

It is shocking how quickly buildings fall into decay. As the roofs of these structures rust, the late rains will seep into the walls, freeze and create fissures until, eventually, the inside is hard to distinguish from the outside.

Every ruin is a reminder that even the most solid-looking building is in a state of flux. We struggle to maintain the illusion of permanence, but the moment we abandon the fight, we find ourselves in Detroit.

We wonder,—and some Hunter may express
    Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
      Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
    He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
      What powerful but unrecorded race
      Once dwelt in that annihilated place.