Leavings

We are relocated and somewhat set up in St. Leonards, Hastings! There’s much to share, but today I want to make time to say goodbye to everything we left when we packed up our previous home of nineteen years in order to come here.

Every home is full of memories. I can’t believe it has been eighteen years since I first visited Mark at home in 2005; in the house that became my home too, in time.

The beautiful polychromatic brickwork of our street that brought to my attention its distinctive role in the aesthetic identity of Reading. Brickwork I have gone on to celebrate in my work.

The apple tree that was in the garden long before we came, and whose apples provided the base for many crumbles, ciders, juices, pies and cakes.

The mulberry tree that was just a stick in the ground in 2012, and that has grown so big and tall and beautiful in the intervening years… and the walnut tree, a gift from a coworker of Mark’s in maybe 2005/2006; now a towering canopy of leaves and branches, and a haven to ravenous and relentless fat grey squirrels.

The damson we planted in 2007 after I lived briefly with a friend who grew damsons on his allotment, and we tasted the jam for the first time and realised that we must make it ourselves, every year.

The dining room that became a warehouse and packing station as the KNITSONIK books – inspired and fuelled by all the everyday treasures and textures of this place – took over the room, and required their own dedicated space for shipping and fulfilment.

The kitchen we lovingly redesigned together; a place of laughter, sourdough, crumbles, pies, salads, soups, stews, roasts, sandwiches, omelettes and joy.

The living room, in which all my knitting over many years has mostly been done; sitting in the corner of the sofa, watching the TV. When Mark and I first met, he commissioned me to help redesign his house with my creative/artistic skills. I have such happy memories of us choosing all the pinks and reds for the room; and of coming home one time to discover that, deciding the red ceiling was too oppressive, Mark had painted it the colour of the sky.

The studio that Mark organised when I first moved in with him, realising – and wanting to support the fact – that as an artist I would need my own workspace. That studio was the creative space in which I made all my work over the last sixteen years or so. It was a palace of dreams. Always cluttered and chaotic; filled with inviting things; sometimes unusably messy – a deep well of creative nourishment that I loved.

I loved looking out from it, in winter, to the warm lights of the kitchen window.

And I loved looking through its other window into the gorgeous world of the mulberry tree with its many inhabitants.

It is very difficult to summarise how much love and gratitude I feel to this red brick building that was such a warm and happy shelter to us for so long; the place where Jack and Sam grew up; the place where we planned, and baked the cakes for, our wedding; the place where I wrote my books, finished my PhD and established KNITSONIK. Where Mark got his MBA with the Open University; worked on too many project-management contracts to mention; discovered his love of community-led IoT projects; and founded Thingitude. The place where we planned our future, had a million conversations, watched TV series both sublime and ridiculous; listened to music; packed up orders; wrote Christmas cards; and made each other laugh. A home we shared with a dear and much treasured little cat called Joey Muffkins; with ducks; and with chickens.

I have a special fondness for this view of the house that would always greet me on days when I’d pottered in the garden too long and gotten cold and hungry. On such days the house would seem to beckon and smile like a big warm friend, welcoming me in; I’d go indoors and warm up with a cup of tea, happy with that smell of soil on me – and often covered in it, too.

What a lovely house it was, and how happy we were there.

On the morning of the move it was raining slightly, but the amazing team of movers who came to take our boxes to St. Leonards were undeterred, enthusiastically loading many boxes into their two Luton vans, and talking to our hens as we prepared to load them into the van that we had rented for the move.

Well-organised packaging up and labelling of boxes gave way to a more improvised style of scooping up the bits and pieces still not yet packed.

We followed the movers from room to room, vacuuming and cleaning as each one emptied of our stuff, and I took photos because I didn’t want to forget this momentous day, nor the comforting everyday textures of the place that was home to us for so long.

It felt hard to leave.

I have no regrets and know we’re going to love it here by the sea… but perhaps it felt especially hard because we were not just leaving the house, but also our dear feline companion of many years – Joey Muffkins – who died just a few days before the move.

I can’t write about it yet because I’m still too sad.

I will say, though, that it’s kind of fitting; he had his whole life on Shenstone Road and it would have been hard for him to adjust to a new place while feeling unwell and not as spry and adventurous as he once was.

Still.

In a weird series of coinciding events my car has also totally stopped working. For whatever reason, it feels like this leaving – this moving – must be a totally fresh start. So far, it has been, and it’s been really good. But it has also still felt hard.

Writing this has made me think about how deeply my home is interwoven with my work. The Things, Places and Plants of that old life in Reading laid the foundations for everything I wrote about in my Sourcebook and my Playbook; those books are a celebration of everyday life. They provide a template for creativity that I’ll apply in new ways as St. Leonards-on-sea becomes our home, in time. But I’ll never forget the amazing place where they were originally written and made.

Goodbye dear old Red House on Shenstone Road; goodbye Joey Muffkins.
Thank you for everything you gave us.
Thank you for being our home.