Home Sweet Home

For the first time since 1999, I have moved back home to live with my parents.

Well, technically, I have lived at home for university holidays, where I cleaned old people for less than the minimum wage as the more appealing alternative to working for Ginsters or selling ice creams where the majority of my friends seemed to be distributed.

But this time (thank god) I am not faced with the prospect of moving into a rat/mouse* infested house, with a blow-torch wielding landlord or violent egg poachers (the rather unstable cartilage sticking out of the side of my nose, and an unnaturally flat bridge are my physical scars from one such experience when I was descended on from a great height by one particular pan).

*to be deleted as appropriate, but my second year accommodation had the luxury of an assortment of rodents, one being so kind as to appear in my toaster, the other dying ungraciously under my floorboard.

I'm home. All my belongings in the world are here (apart from an assortment of clothing that I left at my SP’s house, which she has since told me doesn’t fit and I am yet to decide whether to be insulted or flattered).

I have wardrobe space. I have a bedroom, although I have decided to commandeer two as my room, in true ‘parents-with-grown-up-kids’ syndrome, has now been adopted as the computer room, but I refuse to sleep in my sisters as it is unsettlingly cold and I have a strong feeling its on Ley Lines (although I don’t think anyone would be particularly impressed if I begun excavating in search of ancient burial grounds or the remnants of a Cornish stone circle so a suspicion it will have to remain).

I have a desk of sorts, situated by the kitchen door so I can try to overcome the terrible eyesight I have adopted through screen laziness and working in windowless/viewless offices, and close enough that if I push with enough force from the desk I can propel myself to reach the kettle (the chair has wheels, if that sentence sounds a little odd) although I am proud to say I have yet to abuse this discovery.

I know where things are. I know where my things are – they are where I’ve put them. I don’t have to ask to use the phone. I don’t have to tell anyone I’m having a shower. I don’t have to make any more mistakes. I don’t have to get things wrong. I don’t have to learn anymore ‘this is how we do it’. Because I know.

I have experienced more love and support than I could have possibly predicted since we moved in February, even more so since my boyfriend left over 11 weeks ago. I have slept in 10 different bed since he left, been given more glasses of wine than my liver will ever forgive me for, been fed more WebStress-friendly dinners than I believed possible outside of the remit of ‘anything including beans’.

But for the first time since I packed up the last of my belongings from my second floor flat in North London, jammed in between the sophistication of dinner party riddled, middle class homes and a questionable housing block (unruly youths and prostitutes as standard), for the first time, I’m home.