In the past week, I have:
+ Assembled a 45-page collection of documents, passports, dutifully hideous photographs and nail parings with which I aim to pummel on the door of the UK Visa Office yelling 'SANCTUARY',
+ Given said UK Visa Office my biometric details, so that if any dastardly character is walking around with my eyes and fingerprints they can tell the blighter what for,
+ Written nine out of ten requested articles on things like 'Manscaping', 'Cougars' and 'Ways To Feel Better About Your Body In Bed' (the last article has the topic 'How To Tell Your Partner He's Crap In The Sack', and I took a break because I was inclined to reply with things like 'semaphore', 'sign language' or 'on Stephen Colbert'),
+ Opened a UK bank account, which involved three trips into the city and a prolonged interlude in a foyer making faces at a very small Chinese toddler called Charles,
+ Chipped the front of a tooth trying ineffectually to dismantle a kite,
+ Helped an old lady with an alarming goitre across the road,
+ Procured a new Mac laptop, and spent approximately twenty minutes looking at it cooing 'SHINY' repeatedly,
and
+ Been attacked by two blowholes in two days.
In the wake of all this heady achievement - and because, frankly, I feel a little as if I want to crawl back under the covers and give in - I am going to go make a cake.
It's done.
It only took five months, ten housing agents, innumerable Emails To Express Interest, equally innumerable flats rejected because they lacked heating/fridge/floor, two blessedly helpful British Angels Of Mercy who trooped out to inspect possible abodes and will shortly be put up for knighthoods, a series of increasingly harassing intercontinental phone calls, several expressions of horror at the exchange rate, four scribbled diagrams and the sacrifice of a goat at a crossroads -
- but I've done it. I have a flat in the dead centre of Oxford. I will not, bar an act of God or Barclays Bank, be homeless and box-dwelling come September.
Hurrah!
The place itself is teeny-tiny. Let's not even talk of swinging cats; I'd be lucky to take a gerbil for a turn about the room without giving it a few decent cracks on the skull. However, it also has a gigantic two-storey window and a deeply amusing loft for a bedroom. Any visitors will have to be hung out of said window in a basket if they wish to sleep over, but that's their problem.
Its kitchen is brilliantly well-applianced and (far more importantly) blue, and it's in an old Edwardian schoolhouse, so presumably I will be haunted by the charming ghosts of young boys killed during the routine application of Edwardian caning, which will be nice.
There is, however, a small problem.
Actually having, for the very first time, an entire apartment to legitimately call my (rented) own, appears to have awakened a long-latent and utterly unexpected fervour for interior decorating. My bedroom and study in my Australian home have suffered 21 years of half-hearted adornment, resulting most memorably in years of doll-collecting staring down at me as I sleep (I still don't understand why people think this is creepy). Any possible ideas about creative decoration in Norwich were squashed back into the subconscious by the insane college regulations (No Posters Or Wall Hangings And Don't Lay Out Your Washing In Indiscreet Ways) and the disapproving eye of the Hungarian cleaning lady. I looked at my dad's design magazines with the lofty eye of the Philosophy Student Scorning The Superficial (most philosophy students have this eye, if they manage not to get it punched by third year).
Now, however, I have white walls and carte blanche, and some animal in me has reared its ugly head and said OH GOODY. I am looking through Design*Sponge like a particularly focussed madwoman. I am making plans about arrangements for pictures in my head. I am talking to bemused family members about Chinese lanterns and thrifting wardrobes. I have gone insane.
To be honest, I should have expected this. I only ever enjoyed The Sims and my dollhouses for the elaborate plotting of arranging dwellings; the actual dolls and Sim-people held precious little charm compared to making elaborate digi-mansions and begging for wallpaper samples from decorators for the dollhouses. (Might I add that I was 10, and probably quite scary.) At the time I thought it was just harmless megalomania run amok. Now, it appears, it was something far more sinister.
Lord. I'd better get stuck into writing this novel, before I start hanging about hungrily at linen sales and having conversations about the charms of mismatched glassware. Superficial nothing - if I become That Person I'll have to start breaking out the penitential hair shirts and begging for alms.
