It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

As per my resolution (suggestions for topics still very much welcome), I'm giving a once a week blog post a go. 

In my request for topics, james suggested I do an alphabet challenge. I've flexed a bit on that and decided to pick a 12 letter word and use a letter per month. I think I'll try for one picture-post a month as well, as I enjoyed that variety when nanila  did her 365 challenge. That leaves me 2 'free' topics a month. I may be needlessly complicating this. I like planning.

The word I've picked is 'housewarming'. Which gives me the prompt of 'H' today and I'm going to double down and write about....

Housewarming (!).

I moved house in August from my beloved but bursting-at-the-seams studio flat in Brighton, to a large one bedroom flat in Southampton. It's taken a while to feel like this is 'home' for a few reasons. And just as I've started to feel settled I've been notified my landlord is selling the flat and I am therefore at risk of being given notice to leave in a 'no fault' eviction.

I have reflected a lot on what makes me feel 'at home' and trying to remember how long it took me to feel that way about my previous flat. The practice of having a housewarming is key, I think. That moment of filling up your house with the people you love and letting memories settle in to the space. Warming up a house until it's a home.

I had two iterations of housewarming here in Southampton. The first was my annual Christmas party which is a very low key event which starts mid afternoon and has evolved from just mulled wine and mince pies to a multi-stage event with different quantities of food and more recently a very idosyncratic quiz which I write. I was pretty fucking surprised that all but three of the people I invited from Brighton came all the way to Southampton for it (3 hour round trip!) and I got to mix some of the new people I'd met with some of my old people.

The second was earlier this week. I was invited to a New Years Eve party which was going really well and everyone was enjoying, and then we left (against all the laws of parties and New Year's Eve) to attend another party at 9pm. The second party was awful, so less than 15 mins after arriving we all left again - and I volunteered my flat for being nearby. I had 10ish people here and got absolutely battered on weed and wine. I can't remember much after 10pm, and I fear I said offensive shit (as I always do when I have missing memories, but which so far has never been borne out in reality) But it was a moment. A loud moment of people I don't know that well filling up my space and drinking from my glasses and laying on my floor and it felt, briefly, like I was really here. Like this had the shape of a home.

New Years Day (and a massive hangover) came and that feeling began to drift away. The permanence of home is a curious thing. It's slippery. It gets readily filled up, but it seems to leak out the doors the moment you look away. Just like any warmth, I suppose. You have to keep topping it up.

My home is also bigger than a flat. It is Brighton. Stepping off the train in Brighton makes me feel like I can breathe. It did when I first moved there in 2007 and it felt laid out for me, it did when I was commuting to London and I'd step off and finally unclench, it does now when I run away for a weekend. My flat here feels like a little enclave sometimes - it did at the Christmas party when it was full of my Brighton people. I often wake in the night utterly disorientated and convinced that Brighton is the otherside of the wall. It will take a lot of heat to keep this house connected to home. I wonder if it is possible.

 I was going to write about how conflicted I am over what to do about mortgage stuff having been to see a mortgage advisor today and being told it's within my grasp.

I was also going to write about how unrewarding, stressful and frustrating my job is.  How I can't sleep for stress dreams and how tired I am at feeling stupid because I don't have a head for figures and doing payroll - dealing with pensions, tax and factored payments makes me want to smash my head against the desk.

How I am also frustrated, tired and upset by how poorly I grasp mortgage calculations and budgeting for a mortgage - and how I will know if I can afford it when I see the bills.  I have no abstract sense of numbers, interest, percentages....nothing.  I nod and I smile and go "oh I see!" when I am no better informed than I was a moment ago.

And I was going to write about the Manics again, and how simple everything seems when I am in front of them, surrounded by them, immersed.  Which is why I have spent every evening since Saturday watching Manics DVDs and listening to albums, to the exclusion of everything else.

But I'm tired.  And I've summarised. And I want to watch more Manics now.

You sit, in a worn down but well loved, lived in living room, you shout from there to the kitchen down the corridor.  The soul you feel most drawn to and most forgiven by shouts back to you; you laugh till you cry.

Text messages buzz, the doorbell rings, the landline dings; "I think I'm standing outside?"

The temperature rises as bodies pack into the insufficient but perfectly workable space.  The thrum of laughter, and smiles - smiling has a sound - and conversation drifts from the floor upwards, filling the whole room with a pleasant din, like a fog which envelops but also multiplies as it spreads.

It is tactile, and comfortable, and it is home.  

It is home.  Far more than 'home' was ever home.

All those idiosyncrasies which were shameful and hidden are jokes - shouted across the room.  All those insecurities which were poured over cease to exist.  Home.  This is what home feels like.

It's a knowledge that happens in the core of the bones and spreads outwards.  And then, suddenly and gradually, there has never been any doubt about where here is.

You catch yourself: just once in a while, standing there, amongst the din, smiling and feeling, even for a few precious moments, perfect contentment.

Home.




It is 11 days until I get to go home.  It is too long, and my retreat will be too short.

 In 26 days I will be 26. Struggling to have any positive feelings about this.

Today I visited the job centre to transfer my claim from the Brighton office. As with the previous visit the advisor was rude and...stupid.  He mocked my signature for looking silly (I know, wut?) and kept laughing at the course title of my Masters (Sexual Dissidence in Literature and Culture) before needing convincing that yes, that is what it says on my degree.  He snorted once more and said "I won't write that on your file" and simply typed 'M.A.'

I spent the afternoon with my brothers, which was lovely.  Although we all had a bit of a weird psychic moment where brother 2 and I left his flat to surprise brother 1 with a visit - 1 didn't know I was even going to be in town today - we arrived to 1's flat but he wasn't in.  So we nipped into the nearby Asda and received a call from 2's partner who was still at their flat.  1 had just arrived.  This means that we both left our respective departure points at the same time, having not planned to meet or visit and all three of us deciding on the spur of the moment to visit at that exact time.  Weirdness.

I got home to my parent's house and my Mum tells me that the school at which she works, the same place I had an interview the other week, want me to work there in some sort of admin role.  Apparently it pays better than the one I interviewed for and I won't have to interview again.  So obviously I'll take it if they offer it to me - don't look a gift horse and all that.  

I was planning on going to the cinema with brother 2 tomorrow for Orange Wednesday to see Salt.  We were going to go to a matinee because it's cheaper and he needs to get home at a reasonable hour to go to bed as his schizophrenia medication makes him sleep for at least 12 hours and he's at work at 7am the following morning.  ANYWAY, I'd be leaving at 1:15pm for the cinema, not unreasonable that I won't be constantly in the house between 8:30am and 4pm, surely? My parents believe I'm being reckless with a solid job offer and I should arrange to stay in ALL DAY.  This is particularly stupid given my Mum could just say to the recruiting woman tomorrow morning "oh, she's only in until 1pm as she has to go to the job centre" or just "go out".  Not unreasonable, right?  Parents continued repeating same thing.

Eventually I packed up my stuff and went upstairs to my room, once again - I've spent a significant portion (if not all) of 5 of the 6 evenings I have been living here for, in my room (and the sixth night was spent at a friends house).  I may as well have got a bedsit and stayed in Brighton.

I am, despite my above refutation, thinking about looking a gift horse in the mouth.  I have spent the last 3 years trapped in a job I hate in a city I love.  I say trapped because of the working pattern of 1 day on, 1 day off, 4 days on, 1 day off, repeat didn't allow me time or energy to look for new jobs with necessary zeal.  Financially, of course, I was also trapped, unable to afford luxuries or save any money, but earning just enough to pay rent and bills; making myself unemployed in Brighton would have been suicide/was unthinkable.  But the gleaming, shining, bouncing, glowing star of optimism that convinced me to move back up North was the idea I would have space and time to find a job I might enjoy, as well as live in a place that would allow me to save for the now mythologised PhD.

In short, whilst the prospect of a job falling into my lap seems a delight, I can't help but sigh a sad sigh and prepare myself to be reinserted into just the working environment I so gleefully fled in Brighton.  I feel trapped all over again and I haven't even had the job offer.

I was meant to be having some sort of careers guidance meeting with an advisor a week on Friday.  I was feeling really positive about that.  And I was planning on going to Nottingham on Thursday to register with some agencies in the hope of striking out into publishing/editing industry - copy writing? Yes please.  But agencies and waiting for the career you've picked to turn up requires having an empty calendar - you have to be able to answer the phone call that says "we have a 3 month contract for a copy writer in x, can you start on Monday?" with "yes" not, "no, I have to give my one months notice first".

I keep getting trapped in this stupid fucking economy with my fucking useless (although, apparently amusing) degree and attempts to break out of it last LESS THAN A MONTH.  I just want a good job.  A graduate job - £20,000 p/a is not an unrealistic salary expectation.  What was the point in going to University, getting myself a £15,000 student debt, when I could have got a job at a local paper or something and worked my way up.  I could have done a degree at 50 if it was still something I felt I needed to do.  Instead I'm completely fucking stuck.

I'm single. And I'm 26(ish) and I'm living with my parents again - the latter being my choice in principle, by only because I thought it was a radical move that'd give me the opportunity to break out of the have no money-get paid-pay rent-have no money cycle of finances I simply couldn't break free of in Brighton.  And here I am, feeling more hopelessly stuck than I have done since I made the decision to move if I didn't find a new job in Brighton back in May.


ETA: Oh, and the rats aren't settling in nearly as well as I hoped they would and the only time they come to me is when they are cowering in fear and want to hide from everything/nothing in my arms/under my legs, rather than for kisses and tickles and hugs like they used to.  I feel fantastically guilty for upsetting them so much