A love note to our home

I've nearly finished documenting 22 High Street as it is - just have the upstairs left to do. Here are some snaps of the downstairs before it all gets taken down, packed away and magnolia'd.

This is our wall of numbers and our Dalek clock (it lights up when the lights go out!), an excellent gift from Big T, our brother1. Sadly, only the clock gets to come with us, not the wall. When people visit our house for the first time, they get the heebie jeebies because... someone has drawn on the walls! Worse - someone is asking them to draw on the walls! Imagine having to overcome all that childhood conditioning. It's got all our important numbers - GP, dentist, my work ( three jobs in 10 years), FBB's mobile, NHS Direct, friends and family. Over the years, we've asked various family and friends to add their numbers, so it's a wonderful collection of different handwriting styles.

Good times.

And here we have the "Don't Forget!" list - post-Plate, the throw everything into the rucksack method was useless. After the n-th time we had forgotten sun-shield / rain cover / whatever, we drew a list and Blu-tacked it to the main door.

Somehow when FBB and I "grew up" and weighted ourselves with the requisite mortgage, we couldn't quite let go of our rebel yells. So the living room walls are plastered with pages from magazines, comic books, club promo cards and other tear-sheets from our yoof.

I spent today putting most of the toys you can see below into a box. Believe it or not, they're all FBB's - yes, even the  kokeshi dolls. On the top shelf is the skull of a Jack Russell. Dyed purple. No, I don't know why we have it. And these are just the downstairs books. Yes, that is an Elvira calendar. It's strange the things we pick up in our existence. I don't remember when we got the Chinese stress balls from, but I won't forget the day the 10 year old son of a friend opened a box and asked about some brightly coloured sachets that had round rubbery things in them.
 

Our music corner2 - collectively I suppose that's 40 years' worth. Those are audio tapes on the left and CDs on the right. We still have those tapes because they're mix tapes, recordings of live DJ sets off the radio and various oddities we just can't get on CD, and we haven't got around to transferring to the latest format. The top shelf of CD corner also holds three seasons of Angel on VHS - pm me if you would like to have them (oh, you can just see my little golden muse just behind Plate). It also holds my showreels on DigiBeta that I can't.. let... go...
 

We have seven shelves of VHS tapes and FBB wants to keep them all. He's a sentimental one (*cough hoarder!*). Although, we do have recordings of things that you can't get on DVD, e.g. Michelle Yeoh's hosting of Discovery Channel's martial arts season, Channel 5's "Ideas that Shaped the World", and for some reason, a couple of hours of Singapore shopping TV from 1998 including an info-mercial starring Erik Estrada!








 

Guarding our window is a selection of mythical beasts: dragons, a couple of temple lions, lucky cats, a Chinese Buddha and a fortune frog. Oh, and a Magic 8 Ball that featured in shoot with Shannen Doherty many moons ago. I would never have dreamed that someday we would have knick  knacks. Knick knacks! And we love them all! On the other side of the window is the DVD collection. Oddly, we have neither The Crow nor Threesome3. Hmm. Funny, I just realised that.

All the shelves were designed, cut, shaped and put up by FBB. Pretty darn cool I think. I can still remember the day we picked out the sofas. We breezed into DFS, sat down on these cool black leather seats and thought, hey! these are pretty good. But I was being good and commanded that we'd try a few before deciding. We tried every single sofa they had in the store. Guess which one we ended up buying?

Next step: boxing. Yes, very clever, Plate.

1. My brother-in-law, his brother. Our brother? I think that's right.
2. The other corner houses the record collection. FBB is really into music.
3. Films we saw on our first official date. Contrary to popular belief we did actually do regular getting to know you things.