Down the Street

Still keeping my fingers and toes very much crossed, and trying too hard not to think about it, build up expectations. But at the moment it is looking like my house purchase in England is going OK and maybe within the next three or four weeks I'll have a place of my own again. This last three years I've been sharing a property with my daughter but it is time for us to move on from that temporary arrangement.

I've bought a place in Kirkby Stephen. It all feels a bit of a gamble but then what isn't? I'm not planning on spending a lot more time back there than I do already, but probably much longer in the summer, give some of the Japanese heat and humidity a miss. The house is well placed for me to take advantage of my time in back in England to get fitter, and do lots of walking, and maybe during the summer we'll have the chance to have friends to spend time with us there. Some will also get the benefit of using the place when we aren't using it ourselves, I'm hoping it will be kept used.

It has struck me this week just how much of a return to 'roots' this all is for me. Of course I chose the place because I really love the area but now that I have there are a couple of angles to it that I hadn't spotted. Firstly the house is very like the one I lived in as a child in Barnard Castle - basically the same room layout downstairs. Perhaps I can get a proper 'range' installed in the kitchen, have bread dough 'rising' on the hearth on windy Spring and Autumn days. Hmm ... that might be a bit ambitious. But I can sense that a lot of my furniture - most of which dates from that time - might end up in the same places. I already find myself literally dreaming about this. and suddenly remembering a lot of the detail from our home back in the nineteen-fifties.

On the other hand the place mustn't become a museum, at the same time it must reflect who and where we are now. And I have about 5000 more books in England than my grandparents did! And four filing cabinet's and a map chest. And where will all the tools go?

The other thing that hadn't occurred to me was just how close this brought me to my grandfather again. The place is about a mile from where he lived, but I'd forgotten that most days he actually walked past this place, right outside the bay window, with his battered old brown shopping bag as he walked 'down the street' to get his groceries. When I pull my cloth cap down over my eyes I've got to look very similar to him.