Andrew Kay: Refugee status
It’s not that we’re homeless, far from it. The people who deal with our now devastated home (Property Shop) have acted with such integrity and we are now settled in a smart holiday let until the works have been completed.
But the whole process has been deeply unsettling. It’s odd how distressing it has been. Last week I wrote about how one reassesses the things that clutter your life. This week I am feeling somewhat cut adrift.
I suppose that there are things in life that act as anchors and some of those things are possessions. I’m not going back on my previous thoughts, far from it, friends and family matter more than anything else. No, it’s now the silly things that matter.
For instance, it’s really cold and I only have one jumper. A bright red woolly that I genuinely like – but I am rapidly tiring of. In the mad panic that saw us evacuate our flat we managed to gather together a random assortment of clothes, unplanned, just grabbed and rammed into bags as we left for fear that further rubble would descend on our lives.
The rubble was pretty terrifying, tons of it all lined up in sacks that filled from floor to ceiling the back of a big white builder’s van. Rubble with history too, probably there for nearly 200 years and, as a consequence, filthy, really filthy. The builders looked like they had done a long shift down a coal pit.
Our clothes were pretty filthy too and no doubt there will be a lot of laundry and dry cleaning when we do get the go-ahead to return.
“I have decided that I can manage for now without my batterie de cuisine, and I even managed to assemble a pretty good paella for dinner on our first proper night there”
The holiday let we now occupy is wonderfully central and absolutely spotless. It has pretty much everything we could need. I have decided that I can manage for now without my batterie de cuisine, and I even managed to assemble a pretty good paella for dinner on our first proper night there. I would certainly recommend Citypads for holiday lets to visiting friends.
The red jumper is becoming a bit of a problem though and with the weather being so cold I have to wear it every day. I know I could go out and buy another jumper, but in our pre-disaster life I have been working hard to cut down on clothes. The T-shirt cull has worked and since then I have managed to dispense with two more large bags of perfectly good but no longer required clothing to an assortment of charity shops. How I wish I had them now.
What has been really cheering is the way friends and family have rallied around, and business colleagues too. We spent a much needed night in the luxury of a room at Hotel du Vin. The bed was delicious, the bathroom divine and the croque monsieur that we ate for supper ticked all of the boxes.
When we move back, please God make it soon, we will have new ceilings and new carpets, we will have a lot of cleaning to do, that’s for sure, and a lot of thinking too.
The clean simplicity of our temporary home has its plus sides, it’s easy to keep tidy and clean, lacking the clutter of our own home, it’s central, very central and it is modern by which I mean that it has efficient heating and double glazing. Life without cold draughts, how lovely is that?
What it doesn’t have is character or charm, it hasn’t got the heart that we have instilled in our own home and at the end of the day it is that which is making us feel like refugees.
For all the kindness that surrounds us, the care and concern that we are housed and warm and dry, we still feel cut adrift. And without all of those personal things we both feel restless and bored. There is a huge television with a full satellite type service but after a few hours of channel hopping I realised I have no need for such things. What I want more than ever is to stand in my own kicthen and bake a cake or make some bread. I want to look at my own pictures and dust my own pots.
In short, I just want to get things back to normal – and soon.
