Moving again

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I should be moving house soon. Nothing is signed yet but I really do want this place. It’s less rent than this flat, it’s way out of town and it’s the house that Jack built.

Or rather, the house a hundred Mad Jacks built.

It looks like it was once a two room cottage with farm buildings behind. It’s been gradually knocked through and added to. The kitchen is immense, I could live in that alone. There are cupboards on the way to the bathroom and in one of them is a staircase that leads to another two rooms.

There is also a sweeping curved staircase to two attic bedrooms.

Rooms within rooms. Doors that go nowhere. A hidden staircase. A random toilet. This, I thought when I first saw it, is my home. It’s made out of bits that don’t really fit. Like my life.

It has a flagstone floor in the old part. I’ve always wanted that. The stones don’t have names carved into them which is always good. It needs re-pointing but that’s an hour’s work.

I’ll have a greenhouse and a garden. A dirt track driveway under a creepy tree canopy. Might need a better car than my current rusty blue Ford but it’s due for the knacker’s yard anyway.

I can be a writer and publisher in that place for sure. It’s probably haunted too.

I hope so.

41 thoughts on “Moving again”

  4. It may be haunted now but my guess is that only the very toughest of ghosts would be prepared to share house-space with your imagination.

    I looked at something similar many years ago (in deepest Cornwall); it turned out that the second staircase and counterintuitive doorways dated back to a time when it was the local house of ill repute and much frequented by smugglers – both good reasons for the occupants to be able to disappear at short notice.

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  8. Sounds a bit like my last place in UK. 400 years old Cotswold stone place, odd shaped black flagstones worn smooth, oak beams that were at a height of 5’10” except the main beam, which was at about 5’6″, huge hearth of about 5 ft x 4 ft, stairs in odd places, doors in odd places and walls 2 ft thick. Altogether very quirky. I loved it.

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    • Oh, and it was right on Ermine Street, the Roman road, and I found Roman walls buried in the half-acre garden. I also had a huge ancient Yew tree at the bottom of the garden that an arborist friend estimated at possibly 2000 years old.

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    • I don’t know how old it is: it’s granite but most of the buildings round here are granite. There’s a lot of granite.

      The ceilings feel low but then the flat has exceptionally high ceilings. Nothing as low as you describe though or I’d have banged my head by now for sure 😉

      The Romans didn’t get as far as that house. They got as far as Kintore, that’s proven by the fact there’s still a pizza shop there.

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  10. Nothing’s signed yet?

    I’d suggest you’ll be wanting that little formality sorted pdq.

    No mention of central heating, nor double glazing.

    Stone floors in a detached, converted farm building. Best get cracking with the firewood. And do take care about security Leg’s. Those places are a magnet to scum.

    We shall be wanting a photo in due course.

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  11. I almost didn’t wander over tonight. I saw a news story and thought Leggy had been playing dress-up while bein’ naughty at work ‘n gotted hisself Arresteded! See:

    http://fox17online.com/2016/09/02/police-janitor-used-floor-cleaner-to-poison-boss/

    :>
    MJM, who started to make this comment a while ago, but clicked over to Roobee’s and got mesmerized by The Shining! LOL! DEFINITELY re-watching that movie: It’s been YEARS! Jes’ gotta find the right companion to do it with…. }:>

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  12. One of my favorite repeating dream themes that doesn’t happen as often as I’d like involves me living back in the old “castle” where I hosted nonviolence training programs in the 1970s. It really WAS a castle, albeit a fairly small one. It had a turret or two and was made out of big rough gray stones with a wide semi circling porch with great stone archways. I live in what’s called “West Philadelphia” — about three miles from the heart of the city — and back in ye olden days this area had estates with big grounds around them before everything got subdivided and turned into big duplex Victorian homes. Every few blocks you’ll find one of these old homes or churches.

    Hmmm…. got off point here a bit… OK, my dream will more or less be in a house that’s symbolic of that house and will usually involve hidden rooms and staircases and such. The actual castle (which our commune called “Stone House”) actually DID have a hidden servant’s stairway AND something of a hidden room that was kind of a ??potato cellar?? between part of the first floor and basement. It also had some fairly inaccessible areas in the attic that I can’t actually remember whether I ever fully explored.

    Fun times in that old house. And it was actually there that I first BECAME an Anti-Antismoker: it was 1977ish and a housemate popped home one day with a fistful of ASH pamphlets and proceeded to declare that there should be no smoking in the common areas. Since the commune was set up by the Quakers, there were sympathies against smoking and drinking to a mild extent as not properly being part of “the simple life,” and there were also strong sympathies toward what later developed into “support” for any who had “difficulties” with others’ attitudes, thoughts, non-peaceful actions or expressions of disturbing feelings etc etc, and although we formally ruled by consensus the smokers were bullied into accepting the ban. After all, the pamphlets had all SORTS of convincing “science” about how terrible “secondhand smoke” was. ::sigh:: I *knew* there were things wrong with the information in the pamphlets, but back in pre-internet days it wasn’t as easy to track down the lies, and the ban eventually resulted in the entire community fragmenting and one of the most promising and productive hippie-nonviolence-training communes on the East Coast withering.

    Heh, it pissed me off.

    It’s not good to piss me off.

    I’m still fighting the buggers almost forty years here!

    :>
    MJM

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  14. One trick you might like to consider with an old place is sticking a dehumidifier (of the zeolite variety, these work better at low temperatures) in the cellar to try and intercept some of the damp. You also need to remember that most of the cement and mortar in the place is old-fashioned lime mortar; DO NOT repoint with the modern stuff or, like me, you will find that the building moves and the modern mortar simply cracks off.

    Bunging the odd infra red illuminator of the visible-to-humans variety around the place is another nice touch; doesn’t really matter if there aren’t any CCTV cameras around the place because in a scumbag’s mind, if there’s illuminators there’s got to be cameras somewhere, cameras that he hasn’t found yet. Mind you, one of these days I really must get around to building a camera-based tracking system which simply tracks anyone in range with a laser dot aimed at them, which in most people’s minds is a very unsettling thing indeed.

    Apart from that, best of luck.

    If you need extra money and don’t mind a few strangers around the place, talking the place up as exceedingly haunted and inviting ghost hunting groups in for a fee is always a good wheeze. Given that tri-field EMF meters have now found their place in the ghost hunter’s arsenal, I rather think that the Leggy School of Dark and Dirty tricks could be brought to bear; tricks like running very fine copper wire around random doorways to form invisible Helmholtz coils which, when energised trigger the EMF meters spring to mind (especially a mechanical clock as semi-random triggering mechanism for the above).

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      • There *IS* a downside to the appearance of security though: it makes it look like there might be something worth stealing! :> I think that’s part of what’s kept me secure for so many years. The one time I *did* have an attempted break in the guy’s lawyer got him off with the explanation (complete with pics) that the miscreant thought the house was abandoned and he was just trying to pry off the storm window frame for scrap metal.

        :>
        MJM, in his Big Tobacco Mansion that even the kids are afraid of on Halloween! LOL!

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          • The quiet squirrel is still there and still quiet. (Although there’s a far more active squirrel in a tree out back that seems to be psychotic: it makes the weirdest barking noises and goes into these wild whirlygigs around a branch that are so manic they strip the bark off!)

            The zombie/killer cat that would open the mouse skulls, eat their brains, and then give the rest to me has passed on, but I now have a psychotic/scaredy-cat who bit into a line of Christmas tree electrical cords at about six months old and has been hyper-afraid of ANY new thing in his world ever since: even going from one room into another, in a situation where he’s done it a thousand times, is usually prefaced by a careful examination through the door to make sure there are no monsters awaiting.

            – MJM

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  15. Dear Mr Legiron

    Forget Airbnb, start letting rooms to your faithful followers.

    We shall expect a permanent floating smoky-drinky, with only the finest single malts and a selection of fine cigars, cigarettes and tobaccos for pipe and rolling. Non-smokers will be banished to the outdoors, if they want.

    I recently saw an advertisement for ‘sober october’, which of course doesn’t stop you having a drink. The implication is you should not get totally ratted for a month, which is awfully nice of them, unlike the stoptober crowd, who say you mustn’t even think about smoking for a month. This is a nice change from the usual ‘public elf’ diatribe, so I won’t have to drink more than ordinary in October.

    DP

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      • Dear Mr Legiron

        Plenty.

        The whole point is that you do know that someone has moved in and is sharing a drink, a smoke though not necessarily a heavy hat …

        DP

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      • “Someone could move in and I wouldn’t know…”

        ::creeping out of the tunnel that opens into a dark corner of the basement::

        ::sniffing the air::

        ::smells a LEG IRON!::

        ::dives back into tunnel and heads back to the alligator swamp::

        -Da Kreeper

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