Hello, happy Sunday, it’s five in the morning and even the cat is asleep. The light is this very pale almost dove grey, but somehow very clear through all the rain left on the windows by the night.
I couldn’t sleep: my book is out on Thursday, and if you have been here for even a little bit of a long time (or if you know any other writers, or are one) you will recall that the week before publication is the traditional time for writers to go insane. It is the most crazy-making time! Am I a star? Am I a worm? Am I the voice of my generation, or a talentless hack? Am I just a completely normal person somewhere in the middle trying my best at my job like everyone else? (Surely not!) Anyway, here I am, by myself in the kitchen before it’s even morning. So I thought I would write to you. Everything I write is about trying to make it feel like I am not alone in my kitchen, and you are not alone in yours.
And! I have solved the pantry problem of previous letters and it cost me £40 plus a guy called Dave (who had a van). And I thought you would like to see. Here’s my pantry! Here’s the stuff I can’t do without! Here’s how we got here! Here’s lovely links for a Sunday morning! It’s not finished, so I’m just going to show you where we are right now: the good bits, and we will skim over the fact that I’m writing this looking at a plastic crate of drills and an IKEA bag of bubble wrap and the telly is much too big for this space. (How do you sell a telly, does anyone know?).
So when we saw this house for the first time, we got back in the car and drove in silence for, like, five full minutes. We had seen approximately forty houses and flats in approximately eight locations in the previous six months.
Then R said: “Well, I think we feel the same about that?”
And I said “Yes!”
Then at the same time I said: “We offer NOW, right?”
And he said: “Another total shithole.”
I had thought he was playing clever hardball with the estate agent; he thought I was trying to make the estate agent feel better for having to sell such a mess. Anyway, we bought it, and here is why:
a deceptively spacious walled garden
fireplaces in every single room
proximity to both the sea and the South Downs
the kitchen flagstones
the size and shape of the kitchen
The kitchen was the only kitchen we saw, in all those forty-plus houses, that I thought I could work in. I would show you what it was like when we saw it first, but it had all the previous tenant’s stuff in it, but it was like a crowded family sitting room— homework, wet laundry, birthday banners— on top of what was very obviously a lot of damp. All the paint was peeling off and you could see black mould in the corners. An ancient boiler; a broken tap. They used all the rooms upstairs as bedrooms, and all their living had to happen in here. It is a basement room, although it has two windows, a Dutch door with a third window, and a stairwell. I loved it on sight.
We thought we would tackle the damp first, just in this one room. The survey thought it was probably brick, so we would surely be ok? Hahahaha. The gypsum plaster had blown, and underneath it was not brick. Underneath it looked, unfortunately, like this:
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