The Wunderkammer

Honey, I'm Home

For those of you waiting for me to finish my Canadian odyssey, it is coming. I have been somewhat distracted of late because I have been busy buying a house.

We had been attempting to buy a house for so long, I still can’t quite believe that we have actually done it, but we took possession of the keys last Thursday so it is really, really real now.

This has felt like one of the longest plot arcs in history. It started when we sold our house in lockdown to release some much needed capital. After that we moved into a rental house for two years before we bought the boat. We have lived on the boat for two years and now we are home owners again.

I have moved house a lot over the years. I think I’m coming close to twenty moves altogether. I don’t really want to think about it too closely, because moving PTSD is a real and vibrant thing. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have been able to afford to use a removal company during those moves. What I know for sure is that it doesn’t get any easier, no matter how many times I do it.

The last two moves involved a lot of winnowing. The rental house was smaller than our home, so we had to let go of a bunch of things. Then, when we moved onto the boat, the paring back became more of a ruthless slash and burn. The whole process was holistic, a shedding of physical things and a fierce pruning of emotional things alongside it. By the time we arrived on the boat I felt fairly naked. I had given up a lot more than some Ikea Kallax.

The boat has been brilliant. I believe with unshakeable conviction that it saved our lives. It has kept us afloat in every way during some of the choppiest times of our lives. It lifted me up when I couldn’t lift myself. The lack of clutter and the focus on basic survival was necessary then. As long as the water tank was full and the waste tank was empty, we were good. It was all about survival.

Now though, it is time to get busy living.

It’s not that I wasn’t living before, of course I was. I think I’ve lived several lifetimes worth of stuff in my time and I’m still going. It’s that life was very much about getting practical and putting other people’s needs front and centre. It’s been about coping with big, dramatic stuff.

It’s fair to say that I’ve made a lot of lemonade over the years from all the lemons I’ve had. Often though, to stretch a metaphor to breaking point, those lemons were not even mine. I was just handed them. Sometimes I was given the whole bloody fruit shop to look after. As a woman whose interest lies firmly in the biscuit aisle, that meant a lot of adapting, a lot of compromising and a lot of ingenious fruit wrangling.

This time, and what took the longest time to mentally navigate, was realising that this house would be something we bought just for us. It’s not that the children are barred. Our home will always be their home, but for the first time we were not buying a house because of the demands of schools or the needs of our children. We could look for a house based on what we wanted. This seems delightful on paper. In practice it was quite hard, because we had to practice figuring out what that was. All I knew was that I was done with being a fruiterer.

And for me, having a home was vital. Not a house, not a place that would do, but a home that felt like my own. The boat came close, but my life, out of necessity has had to be quite small here. It’s been good for me to experience that smallness, to understand what was possible and to think about what was needful. For a long while I needed that tiny neatness because life had been big and overwhelming for so long. But in the last year I had really begun to yearn for what was delightful and entirely unnecessary.

We spent about twelve months trying on every place we visited for size. There is a big difference between imagining that this place would be ‘lovely,’ and actually fitting our real lives into a new space. It’s the shift between a holiday and daily life. Will this place drive me insane when I am trying to park/shop/go to the gp etc? What can I compromise on? What is vital for me to be happy? Do I really love living in a field or will I be haunting out of town shopping centres before the first month is up?

We made an ideal shopping list and measured it up against all the places we visited. Then we started sorting and discarding in earnest. We narrowed it down to one county and a few areas. Thus began the haunting of RightMove. We were fairly sure we wouldn’t get everything on our list, but we would shoot for the stars. If we landed on an adjacent asteroid, we’d be pretty thrilled.

Eventually we found somewhere wonderful, and we were delighted. Then as the weeks dragged on and things got weird, we were less and less delighted until we were actively distressed. Then everything fell apart. We swore off house hunting because we felt broken by the terribleness of it all. Of course, two weeks later we found the house we have just taken possession of. Of course. And we drove by it on the street. Rightmove wasn’t even fired up. It felt like the universe had gifted it to us.

This house ticks nearly every box on the list we made for our ideal home. It turned up when we were ready to receive it. All the way along the buying process I held my breath, because how could this even be possible? And then it was and it is and I am so excited to be living there.

This bank holiday weekend has been a monster. We spent the weekend driving backwards and forwards from our storage unit to the house, from a furniture warehouse to the house, from my parent’s house to the house. The children came and helped us and were magnificent. I am now just a mass of sore muscles and indigestion from too much motorway service food.

The house is full of boxes. We still have furniture to retrieve from various friends and family who have been holding onto things we couldn’t bear to part with and had no room in the storage unit for. We still have a boat to empty and then refill with things for Oscar, who will be living on it until we can sell it. He has just been accepted into a drama foundation course in Lambeth for a year, so that will work out quite neatly for us.

I am calling the house the Wunderkammer, because it is already a cabinet of curiosities, and it delights me. Jason says it’s a stupid name, but Swan Ronson was a stupid name and it’s what the boat is called, so why break the habits of a lifetime? I am also the proud possessor of a knackered brown leather, Seventies sofa which we have called The Sweeney because if John Thaw was a sofa, he’d be that. I am very much looking forward to living there full time. It feels like that time will never happen because I am impatient, but my word for 2025 was slow and it’s bearing fruit, so I’ll stick with it.

In the meantime we are spending as much time in the house as we can, unpacking, buying more Kallax, and running our lives from two locations for a while, but it feels like the best sort of adventure. It feels like a beginning.

It feels like home.