home sweet home wee home crap home OK home

Not including temporary abodes used during brief visits for resits or when waiting for keys. The three homes I lived in up until the age of eighteen were a little out of the way so I've skipped them too although they could be done in a day if I was of a mind to and had eight or nine hours to spare.

The shortest tenancy was a few months when I stayed at one of Nicky's flats a bit before we moved in together properly. The longest is the current at six years, seven months and a few days. Through mood, space, people, smell, thoughts, shape and happenings they are remembered. There's the First One, the one above Tesco, the one where we left a sack of potatoes in a cupboard for six months, the one with the very dodgily-wired downlighters, the one where a snail came in through the kitchen window one floor up and was sitting on the rim of MY mug one morning, the one which was really well-lit but smelt a little odd, the one which was ace but wasp-infected and the one with not enough cupboard space. Front doors which faced west, west, south, east, south-west, west, east, east and east. One decorated by matrix-printed pictures from the primitive internet, one decorated by a stack of Yop bottles and a poster of Keanu Reeves with a kitchen knife in his nose, one decorated by the potato-shoots emerging from the cupboard, one decorated by nothing, one by printouts from the Onion, one with a nasty picture of yellow flowers, one with printouts from h2g2, one with the sun through the windows and one which we were allowed to paint as it was ours. 4/3, 5, 2/1/0/2/3/4, 3/4, 3/2/3, 1/3, 1 and 1 flatmates in each. Twelve years' worth of personal growth. Little way-points along which to stick memories from those twelve years and tie them to a specific time. Doors.

I probably have photographs from all of them even if it's just a picture of a teapot on the kitchen worktop with a bit of wall behind but with something like this a photograph only jogs the memory rather than providing the meat of it.