Footfall

 

After driving myself half mad for the past couple of months bouncing around the empty rooms, I've bowed to the inevitable and put my house on the market. The place was initially very much Mrs S's vision, but it's a home that I truly grew to love. Now though, it's an echoing shell - an ever-present reminder of all that I've lost. Coming back from work every evening to the silent darkness is particularly painful. It's a quirky property, there's no two ways about it - and therein lies the possible problem as regards finding a buyer. Whoever takes it on must have the same vision thing that Mrs S had eight years ago.

The bathroom only became attached to the main body of the property, by way of an extension, 50 years ago. For the previous 200 years it was the wash-house, separated by a couple of yards from the rear of the building. The wooden door-frame is original and the step shows a considerable dip from the weight of the countless feet that have crossed its threshold over the past two centuries, mine and Mrs S's included. I wonder whose will be next.

The Ex - Footfall

This Is My Home, The Place Where I'm Lonely

A photo of Swede Towers taken in the late 1800s

It's been a long stretch - two six day working weeks followed by a seven day one. Keeping mind and body busy is definitely a good thing for me at the moment and the exhaustion guarantees I get at least a few hours sleep each night. It's the coming home from work that's the difficult part though. The house is quiet and empty and the person I want be in it with is no longer here. I'm trying not to rush into anything, but I need to decide what my next move, if any, is going to be. Do I stay in a house that I love, is bought and paid for, but is full of memories and too big for my needs, or sell-up, downsize and take a chance somewhere else?

Husky Rescue - My Home Ghost

Home Again

On the hottest Bank Holiday Monday in living memory, my cousin and I spent a couple of hours walking along the towpath of the River Lea from Stratford to Walthamstow, a stretch that we both regularly walked with our Dads when we were young children in the early 1960s. It was the first time my cousin's husband and kids had visited our old stomping grounds, while for us it was a period of reflection and not a little nostalgia - over 40 years had elapsed since we last walked alongside that river together.

Here's Doug Tuttle from his recent LP, 'Peace Potato'.

Doug Tuttle - Home Again

(This is just a flying visit i'm afraid. I'm off back down to London for a few days, to look after my aunt as she undergoes a cataract operation.)

Dust Is Everywhere - Sweep!

Monday is cleaning day here at Swede Towers. Mrs S tackles all the intricate stuff - the nooks, the crannies, the out of the way crevices and sundry cobwebby corners that I would otherwise surely miss - while my own main contribution to proceedings concentrates on somewhat larger brushstrokes, or, more precisely, vacuum-cleaner strokes. Yup, every Monday, for my sins, I'm charged with hoovering each room in the whole house, from top to bottom. When delegating this particular task to me several years ago, Mrs S justified her decision using very sound logic - there aren't many ways in which I can mess it up. She knows me so well.

I invariably sing while I work, dragging the vacuum-cleaner behind me, its howling motor drowning out my own peculiar vocal howling. I can latch onto any random tune that comes to mind, but more often than not, for the past few months at least, one particular track from 'Human Performance', the fifth LP by Parquet Courts, has been my full-time hoovering earworm and it's easy to see why.

Too Much Space

It seems I struck a chord of recognition with a few blogging chums in my last post. Space - not just the final frontier, but also the arch enemy of the record and CD collector. I had a massive clear-out in 2011 prior to our move, but the quantity of physical product I own is still fairly substantial. About a year ago I bought a 6tb external hard-drive and started ripping all the CDs that were within easy reach and also moved a great deal of my downloaded music onto it from my laptop. Then the hard-drive crashed and I lost a ton of stuff. Until that point I'd had vague thoughts of getting rid of all the actual CDs, but losing so much so quickly, changed my mind. Hence my current attempt at reducing volume.

Here's how slim an unjewelcased CD in a cellobag is.

What I've done so far. A dozen boxes cut down to six. In alphabetical order, natch.

And this is how much more there is to do, another 25 or so boxes.

I'm listening to stuff as I go too. Wondering why I ever bought this, finding I own two copies of that and generally chipping away at the chaff. I'm also reacquainting myself with a few choice nuggets, some of which will find their way onto these pages in the coming months I've no doubt. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Here's one such old favourite I rediscovered yesterday, French combo Hey Hey My My with the title track of their 2007 EP 'Too Much Space', a state of affairs we'll never suffer from here at Swede Towers.

55 From 55 - 2012

55 songs in 55 days - one for every year of my life...so far.

My self-imposed rules going into this series (I do like a self-imposed rule) were; a) No tunes that have previously graced these pages, b) No appearances from any of my all- time favourite bands, c) One song per artist, d) No photos I've shared before and e) No stories I've told before. As '55 From 55' winds down, I can say in all honesty that while none of the above rules have been badly broken, some of 'em have taken a bit of a bending. We're now into the years where I was really having a proper crack at this blogging lark after initially just playing around with it and therefore I realise that I'm at a greater risk of repeating myself, so these last few posts will be more in the nature of a general rounding-up of present day life in and around Swede Towers.

A while back, I found myself musing (here) on the total number of places I've called home so far in my life. In October 2011, after a few frustrating legal delays, I, along with Mrs S, moved into what I calculate to be my 14th home. We're in a small village, though just a mile across the marsh from the nearest town. Our house used to form part of a much larger one, but the two were divided in a roughly two thirds/one third split. We're in the one third bit and we call next door 'the big house'. In the second half of the 19th Century the building was the village shop and close inspection of the brickwork, internal and external, shows the ghostly outlines of where original configurations of doors and windows once were. This is how the it looked back then.

I'm currently sitting at the window above the lamp, which is presumably positioned to light the shop window. The lamp is long gone, as is the window. Below me now is our street door.

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Baltimore's Lower Dens have just issued their third LP, 'Escape From Evil'. The record is the follow up to 2012's 'Nootropics', which featured the fabulous motorik driven 'Brains'.

Misty Mist

Down the garden, over the allotments and across the marsh beyond. I always stop to look out of our bedroom window, whether I'm on my way into bed at night or stumbling out of it at the start of a new day. It's never the same view twice. Here's what I saw this morning.

I could write a whole piece on the range and variety of mists that gather on the marsh, but would struggle to illustrate any of them. Successfully capturing mist on camera is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle, for me anyway. This morning's mist/frost/sun combo was particularly beautiful though. And as I looked out, I too was being observed. I guess the view in the other direction is no big deal to this little 'un.

Later in the day, we endured a private mist of our own - inside the house. The next door neighbours were sanding down a beam and, as our two houses were once one and thus we share some floorboards, a gentle sawdust fog drifted up and through the rooms, leaving a fine covering over everything. I'd only vacuumed yesterday too.