We moved in almost a calendar month ago, into a house – detached – with four bedrooms and a very fought-over office, with two reception rooms, a garden, parking space, three loos, a massive loft, a staircase, and a house-worth of stuff leftover from the previous owners. From that stuff we have discovered we would have very much liked the previous owners because they were clever, liked a drink, liked a first edition book or two, liked a mink coat, bought good furniture and invested in good carpets and handmade blinds. They read and spoke various languages and entertained with cut crystal flutes and perfectly-sized martini glasses. They also had the good sense to leave a couple of little touches from the more religious Jewish couple before them, so we have a sukkah room out the back and mezuzahs on most of the internal door frames.

The house has good juju, so sayeth my friend Fiona, and she is right. It is an almost perfectly preserved 193os house but renovated in the 70s or 80s or bits here and there from the 60s – who knows, but the mid century stamp is clear. I was a bit worried that the stuff we had would look a bit mental here, but it turns out the old bird can handle it. And it turns out that this old bird (me) can also handle it.

We kind of rushed into the moving in, leaving our old place the afternoon of completion date, and then just arriving here and assembling beds and trying to find things and all just feeling a bit weirded out and stressed by it all. There was a steady stream of boxes and furniture and previously hoarded and unseen for years stuff coming in daily, so every time we (or a bunch of beautiful friends who kept turning up to help with wine and crackers and cheese and cards and fun gifts and muscles and cleaning products) cleared a space, it got filled again.

Reader, we are both more hoarder-y than I knew, and Mark even more so, and it is pathological and emotional and triggering and associated with all sorts of things, namely living here but thinking we didn’t, or not REALLY, and that we could just leave at any time and go back ‘home’ and saving up for what that might look like and how we envisioned it and the selves we thought we would become and the lives we thought we would lead, and the lives we wanted to lead, but not really because then we would have led them but we kept them there as a ‘maybe’ and when you see what you have amassed in a drawer or a storage facility it just takes your breath away. And then you have to make decisions, and the decisions are too hard. It isn’t just a yes or a no or a sparking joy thing – it is a ‘what is it, do we have one or need one, should we bin it or thrift-shop it or give it away or sell it?’ Then husband, he of grand pronouncements without the wherewithall or skills or desire or time to do anything about things, will jst state loudly that

‘That’ll be worth something. Let’s put it on eBay.’

And I’m like ‘Who should put it on eBay?’

And he’s like ‘Well, you have an eBay account so probably you.’

And then walks away after giving what feels increasingly like an executive order of the most Trumpian kind, leaving the world/me wrecked and reeling and furious and screwed. AND tasked with another bloody job.

We have also had and continue to have exhausting fights over

1. the office space
2. his brass antiques
3. net curtains
4. sofas and chairs
5. doorknobs and fingerplates
6. the white French armoir thing
7. where his sailboats will go
8. beer tankards
9. my Victorian room divider
10. the plastic lawn chairs
11. a kitten
12. trampoline
13. oversized artwork
14. house keys

The office thing is a huge huge potential divorce issue. He wants the office, but he is only there one or two afternoons a week. I am there in the office every day except for the one day a week when I go into Canary Wharf to the KPMG HQ. He has taken over 4/5th of the office, building in a huge desk and wall unit, taking the good chair, taking the corner cubbyhole, insisting on the industrial-sized printer that I think he uses about six times a year. He says that I can have a desk though I must exit the room when I have calls. It is so infuriating that I have kind of left the whole thing alone and obviously plan to colonise it back from him slowly, one scented candle and cute family photograph/pen arrangement/neat pile of notebooks at a time. You have to pick your battles and as you can see from the list above, I have enough to go on.

Wembley itself is a bit of a disappointment. There’s a huge 24 hour Asda a few minutes from the house but as I had to note in my Instagram stories a few weeks ago, all of the garlic is Chinese garlic which is Bad Garlic so the cheapness and the open-all-hours-ness doesn’t really cut through. There’s one fancy bakery, a Bread Ahead, with excellent focaccia and donuts and hot cross buns, but there’s nothing much else for a lady very used to W2 and all of its chic £££ness. Also, the dog keeps running away and the local neighbourhood app has turned on me in a very feral way because they think he escapes because he is starving (not true) and because I am a careless mother (middlingly true).

The good stuff about the new hood, if I am pressed, include:

a Post Office two minutes from the house which made me want to dance with joy in the street when I found it and was told the postmistress has been there for 28 years

an excellent cheap barber who cut Ned’s hair in a marvellous and perfectly constructed mullet

a glazier, hardware and framing store which looks like it has been there since 1952 (in the best possible sense)

a very nearby Timpson shop for shoe fixes

a pharmacy within Asda for the HRT refills

the tube with two great lines only five minutes from the house

a massive country park with ponds and paddocks and an acnicent woodland

a compost in the garden.

These things are indeed wonderful, though the pharmacy is super slow and kind of closed quite a bit, and the park is a bit tricky for running as it is full of big and little hills and dried muddy dips which look likely to trip me over. It is also quite famous for a recent double homicide of two women so…that feels disconcerting.

So it’s just a huge learning curve. I have closed a chapter and have to start a new one. It hurt, more in an anticipatory way, and now I have farewelled my friends and Remi’s school and the Waitrose and felt sad and odd when I went back to our old communal garden last weekend for an Easter Egg hunt because I was suddenly like a guest in my old, familiar home. Which is now an ex-home. Against my wishes. And I still am in love with it. And it doesn’t notice – it just takes the new wave of young enthusiasts who chat on the whatsapp group about the wonderful community they’ve been so lucky to find and I want to scream at them and tell them to piss off because we have only been gone two minutes and the bed/flat/my usual table in the garden is STILL WARM FROM ME AND MY FAMILY. But everything just moves on, doesn’t it? So I better move on too.

Photos of my new home with my stuff in it (including my friends):

And, lastly, a ChatGPT generated image of Magic the dog as a human running away from home: