For One Night Only…

I am back on the internet at home. But for one night only… The old bird at sky didn’t manage to properly connect the broadband first time around, which has meant that further calls were required and met by the sound of a crappy apology and a further 10 day wait.

My sister has lent me her USB 3G thingy, so am up and running for the time being and there's a lot to tell.

But let's start at the very beginnig, a very good place to start... The New Flat.

But, before I can tell you about The New Flat, I am going to have to tell you about an old house in order to clarify what's bad about The New Flat (still with me)?

My room in the old house was what had once been the front room - that is, it had the front door in it. We didn't use it as a front door (however other people did - the mailman, taxi drivers arriving to pick people up, people's friends arriving really early in the morning when I was still trying to sleep... you get the picture). It being a rather old and inordinately run down house, there was no insulation of any sort, no double glazing and no modern heating system.

The wind howled in through my front door during the winter, while the ice cubes in the radiator rattled about. That winter, I wore thermals to bed - two pairs of pyjamas, two pairs of socks and a jumper - and I'm not one to feel the cold easily. (When I tell you I could see my own breath when breathing out, I kid you not).

Meanwhile, upstairs on the middle floor, one of my housemates sweated it out as the radiator in her room worked in overdrive, creating a sauna effect, hardly cancelled out by the wide open windows.

But the reason for bringing up my old arctic home was that the problems did not just stop with the temperature.

The door we did use as a front door was the back door, which was reached via a very dark outdoor corridor (between our house and next door's), at night or on dark winter mornings/evenings, it was impossible to see further than your hand in front of you. Which, in honesty, is a good thing - because that mechanism was essentially our burglar prevention scheme. Because I will tell you now, the back (front) door was far from secure.

There was a very old lock on it - however given a shove with the shoulder, or perhaps just a little finger, it would have given way - if not the lock, the rotting door would have. But just to make things easier - the door had to be locked from the inside at night or remain unlocked... I cannot tell you how often it remained unlocked, but I can tell you it was often.

Further to that - the kitchen window was left open pretty much every night - because, like everything else in the house, the kitchen was not a hub of modernity. There were no extractor fans, no units, an oven with a grill shelf above it (just to illustrate how old it was), a bare wooden floor with large gaps between the planks (thus collecting bits of sweetcorn, peas, spaghetti, cutlery, you name it).

So the smells of cooking had to escape via the window (or through the living room and under my gappy doorframe, to delight my senses while I tried to sleep in arctic conditions). So the window remained open at perfect height and shape to climb through if desired.

The kitchen was also home to the boiler. And when I tell you that for a couple of weeks I had been telling my other housemates that the kitchen/living room/my bedroom area had been smelling a bit peculiar and I had been getting headaches for a while, I suspect that you will, like I did, suspect the boiler. And right I was too, because a couple of days later, the boiler blew up. It was a relatively silent blow up - the water stopped coming out hot and the heating completely packed up (no difference to me). When the boiler repair man visited he mumbled about us being lucky to be alive, pointed out thick swathes of soot and mentioned that he hadn't seen one of these boilers in approximately 30 years.

But the point I was trying to reach was the bathroom. The bathroom was my sanctuary in the winter (not becuause I like moldy, dustiness or peeling paint), because it was on the warm level of the house. Therefore I did not only shower there, but got both undressed in the evening and dressed there in the morning. The issue however, was that the shower was rather low...

The bonus being that I left with very toned thighs from the sustained knee bends required to get my head under the damn thing to wash my hair, and here we reach the point of the story. The people who lived here before (the landlords) were clearly of the hobbit variety (or, perhaps, more likely, were just not of the giant variety I come from).

But as we know, every cloud has a silver lining. It could well herald the return of toned thighs. And right now, given the state of my body, I am willing to cling on to any possible vague toning possibility.