The Times Magazine 53I’ve lived in a few really horrible places. There
were two grim flats at university. One was a
dark basement room that stank of damp; the
other was incredibly noisy, with thudding music
and students crashing about. My room was
next to the front door, which slammed like
the Devil himself was going out for the night.
I didn’t sleep for a year and lost my mind a bit.
At one low point, I very clearly heard Natasha
Kaplinsky talking to me out of the telly.
Little wonder then that when I came home
from university, I was reluctant to move out of
my parents’ nice, dry, quiet house. They more
or less had to ask me to leave. All my friends
were already in shared places, so I went to live
on my own, on the very top floor of a tall block
of flats with no lift. It was grindingly lonely,
freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in
the summer, and the whole place had a weird
smell. I became convinced it was haunted.
Then, when I was 27, I met Giles. He had
bought his house years before with a previous
girlfriend but she left him a few weeks after he
got the keys. Not knowing what else to do, he
lived in this big family home all on his own,
shivering in the top corner of it like a solitary
bat in a huge forest. It was a dump – threadbare
carpet, curling blue lino and hideous furniture.
When Giles needles me about some sloppy
housekeeping, I remind him he used to keepthe lawnmower in the kitchen. So I threw
everything away and started again. And now
it’s my house. No, wait. It’s my home and I’m
not leaving. I know how bad it is out there.
Giles has been grumbling for years about
not wanting to live on this same street until
he dies, and it’s getting annoying. But I have
come up with a solution: every time he starts
talking about moving, I say, “Sure, by all means.
Why don’t you go online and have a look at
a few places?” Mysteriously, he never does. nJoin Giles and Esther for an online Times Talk,
Couples in Lockdown – How We Stayed Sane,
on February 11. See mytimesplus.co.uk for details