If you were a house, what kind of house would you be?
You get people who are open-plan Australian homes made of white cinderblock and glass, who are open to a fault and dangerous if you assume a closeness that isn’t there. Their bowls are always full of cherries and they have self-help manuals on the IKEA coffee table and a spoonful of mantras in their head.
Or you have people who are tall, thin, stooped homes in Vienna, a house of many rooms with high ceilings and tightly-controlled light coming through diamond-pane windows. They have secrets upon secrets and wear shirts buttoned all the way up to their throat, and they don’t like to have their hair free. But they are strong, and solid, and stand through storms and floods and are keepers of secret knowledge.
Or new builds - those who are becoming a person for the first time, who have some issues with the venting or the shower leaking but who are earnest and trying their hardest to fit in with the hundreds of other new builds on the street, space for one car, front door painted white, number 27 or 19.
Some people don’t want to be a home at all, which is telling in its own way - a forest glade, a cosy cave filled with glowing lichen and stalactites. Their souls and minds are as open as the sky, and just as prone to having something streak across it that changes something vital in them. (sometimes these people were homes before, sad bungalows that had not moved since the 80s, nicotine stains and a stale pantry).
I think I am two storeys, maybe three, one or two broken windows but lovely cherrywood trim. All my rooms have bookshelves, and the kitchen is poky but used. The front of the house gets light in, but the bedroom always has the curtains drawn. I’m somewhere cold, maybe York, and I am absolutely not by running water.
There are people I have met who claim to be log cabins, hewn humbly and from hard work, but if you look closer there’s a basement with servers and tech running near-constantly, and they claim the heat and whirr of the machines is due to a natural hot spring. Or those who paint their walls white and put picture after picture over damp spots, mould, or flowery wallpaper peeping through.
Foundation, that’s the key - make sure your home is somewhere you can be proud of.
Links:
I reread ‘Baking with Kafka’ this week so you guys get to look at more of Tom Gauld’s cartoons.
Tom Gauld imagines a new virtual literary festival – cartoon
Tom Gauld imagines librarians limbering up for the great reopening – cartoon
I think I'm a Roman villa - broken in places but still stand tall and know my worth, gets lost in history and only share my secrets with a select few who demonstrate the patience and understanding to earn that right