We got a new kitchen – something I have wanted to do for about the last decade. Getting a kitchen with the specific equipment I wanted was obviously impossible while renting, and then after buying a house, there was a) other house costs, and b) getting married, and other stuff, we had to wait for there to be room in the budget, but we finally managed it.

The process was not without a certain amount of pain and fustration. We were told it would take about two weeks from start to finish (so we assumed that somewhere between two and three weeks is what it would actually take), and in the end it took over six. But in the end, we have a kitchen that is brighter, better equipped, has more storage, and somehow, feels much larger. I am delighted.

In a week’s time this blog will be old enough to drink in the US. 21 years of my drivel is more than anyone needs, but I’ve been re-reading the stuff from my mid-to-late 20s (I needed to look something up and fell down a bit of a hole), and it’s simultaneously wince-inducingly egotistical (with the caveat that a lot of that period was written for Livejournal, which had it’s own set of content norms) and well, actually quite funny in parts, if I say so myself.

I’d try and write a bit more like that now, but I don’t think I can do it without also invoking the wince-inducing parts. Obviously, 40-something year old me is enjoying how much 20-something year old me thought he knew. My major sin appear to have been being far too impressed with my own cleverness, and when 60-something year old me reads this, I imagine he’ll think much the same. Still, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

All credit to those of you who put up with me in my twenties and are still around – you obviously have the patience of saints. (Those of you who put up with me now will get thanked when I’m in my 60s, obviously. Stick around.)

But wow, the number of people I’ve more or less lost touch with from that era is both humbling and bit saddening. (In as much as they were lovely people I was hanging out with.) Obviously, that’s just life at work – there are only so many hours in the day, and people grow and change, and there really only so many relationships one can properly maintain.

I could fill this post with a list of names of people I’d love to catch up with in the manner of a school reunion, but there’s no real social construct for a 10/20 year reunion of a random set of friends that some group members have drifted apart from – the closest was the V-reunion we had the other year, but the other friend groups have nothing like it. (And in many cases are still going reasonably strong, I just don’t see the people involved in the flesh more than once in a blue moon.)

There’s a decent number of the obvious names that I’m connected to on Facebook, but it’s absolutely not the same – but then we’re all (I was about to write 10, but it’s closer to) 20 years older, and doing memes spelling out our usernames in the titles of albums we like is probably something we’ve outgrown. And there’s still more that I’m definitely not connected to any more. Casualties of my not being on Facebook at the time Livejournal died, as much as anything I imagine.

But those various social-network memes of “if you’re reading this, even if we don’t speak much, post a memory of me” make quite a lot of sense in that context. They’re a way to assert/check for a form of intimacy that social media robs us of, and the last year has particularly robbed us of.

I’m obviously not going to do one of those, but in the unlikely event that the people I’ve dropped out of regular contact with – those of the V I don’t see much any more, the varous semi-reformed-goths, the Saturday afternoon coffee-opposite-the-British-Museum people, the London actual goth crowd of Slimelight and various other clubs circa 2004-2007 are reading this: yes, I do still think about you with a smile. (And not just when I’ve been re-reading old blog entries.) If anyone is organising a reunion, do let me know.

Well, we’ve owned a house for slightly more than a month, and we’ve been living in it for exactly four weeks today. Somehow, it feels longer. That may be because the internet has yet to be installed, thanks to a series of fuckups by Openreach, and I’m still hotspotting off a phone, so most of the things I would normally do to pass the time are off the table. But it’s not like there hasn’t been plenty to do.

But still bit by bit, the place is starting to take shape. It’s got any number of little niggles – the cooker is too small, there’s a horrible cupboard in my office, and if we tear it out, the carpet will look dreadful – but we own a house.

I’ve been pleased to find that for almost every niggle, there’s been something I like more than I expected to (because, like I said last time, we bought it on the basis of 5 mins viewing). The carpets are better than I thought, the red in the bedroom is much more liveable with, most of the kitchen cupboards are pretty decent…

We’ve already had the first bit of work done – ripping out a hideous old 70s gas fireplace in the dining room – and we’re booking people to get new floors in downstairs, which will hopefully take care of the rather chilly draftiness we’re getting with the current exposed floorboards. (They look nice, and they’re characterful, but they’re not remotely insulated at all, and we like to be warm.)

Each week brings something new, or at least something booked to look forward to – this week, our dining room table and chairs get delivered. It’ll be nice to actually eat at a table again. And we have a list of ongoing stuff – painting and decorating, cabinetry, furniture and so on that’ll last us the next few years, in a one-step-at-a-time sort of way.

I am 100% sure that all this rubbish, and the fact that I have unquestionably become someone whose major topic of conversation is “their new house and what they’re going to do with it” makes me wildly tedious at the moment. In my defense, I’ve been renting for 20 years, living with a place that I liked living in, but could not change. Now, we live somewhere we really can make our own, and Covid means there really isn’t anything else going on in my life right now. But I am at least aware of how fortunate I am, even as I bore my friends rigid. That makes it better, right?

I’m sure I’ll want to add more to this in the future, hence the part 1.

So, at the start of the year, Miranda and I decided 2021 was going to be the year we bought somewhere to live. We thought we might just about have scraped together enough deposit money to get a toe-hold on the ladder, thanks to the latest round of freelancing I’ve been doing. (Thanks to a couple of surpises, and some fortutitous timing, we’re doing a bit better than that, but we didn’t know that when we started.)

So we went house hunting, and we’ve had an offer accepted, and mortgage approved. There’s a couple of survey-type hurdles to clear, and we’re very aware that nothing’s final until we’ve got the keys in our hands, but in the space of 4 weeks we’ve gone from “can we really do this?” to already being very much into the tedious part, where paperwork largely gets sorted out at one remove from us, and other people get their ducks in a row so that we eventually end up with a moving date.

The speed that this has gone from “a pipe dream” to “this is really happening” is little scary. And at the same time, it can’t possibly happen fast enough.

Tune in next time, when I’ll either be complaining about how the survey was terrible, and the house not fit for purchase, or about the sheer stress of moving after most of 20 years in one flat.