New Abode, Second Day
The second night in the new flat ending, I’ve started to settle in a little. There are still bags and boxes scattered around both the bedroom and the kitchen/living room. I now have three rooms to myself: the living room/kitchen, the bedroom and a squashed up bathroom. Dividing my things between two rooms is proving tricky; previously, having only one room has made the decision moot. I am currently splitting the bags and boxes between each room to see whether each room can fit its allotted bags; if the bags fit, my working assumption is I’ll be able to make the contents of the bags fit too.
The flat itself is nicer than I remember: both rooms are fairly large and airy, with lots of natural light. The kitchen/living room is about a one third/two thirds split respectively. It contains an ugly sofa, a couple of occasional tables and a desk. I am trying to figure out how to arrange these in a way which doesn’t leave any dead space in the room; the arrangement when I arrived left around a third of the space in a kind of limbo. The layout process is eased by not having a television to arrange around, an unexpected benefit. At current I have a reasonable, but very temporary arrangement while I figure out my usage patterns.
I took a trip to John Lewis yesterday to pick up some essentials. I am now the proud owner of both a kettle and toaster; for some reason this makes me feel rather domesticated. I can now make tea and toast, however, which overrules any desire to live in a non-domesticated manner. Previously, I’ve been fortunate to live with people who have brought these items along with them, so it’s been a shock to the system to have to provide these myself. There are actually a couple of kettles under the sink. They look like they haven’t been used in a long time, however, making me wary of touching them, let alone drinking water boiled by them.
As there were no chopping knives in the house when I moved in, I bought a very cheap knife from Sainsbury’s (conveniently just around the corner, literally). The knife came in that vacuum packed plastic stuff which is incredibly hard to open. After nearly cutting myself several times trying to extract the knife from its prison, I came to the decision that the packaging was far more dangerous than the knife itself. Oddly, we provide this packaging to children at Christmas and birthdays without a thought. As an aside, I bought a good chef’s knife yesterday that came in a very simple to open plastic sleeve, secured by a little tie. Manufacturers of the world should learn from this.
As I sit on the sofa typing this, looking out at the grey skies and attending upon the BT person that has come to get my internet connection working, I’m oddly happy.