I’ve recorded an audio version of this piece here, in case you’d prefer to read it that way:
They say it was Isaac Newton who invented the catflap. What I like particularly about this fact, if it’s true, or even if it isn’t, is it gives the image of the famous physicist trying to lay the foundations of classical mechanics but getting distracted by having to let a cat out then in again 40 seconds later and thinking, “For f***’’s sake, I really need to sort this.” But had nobody really thought of catflaps before that? A few miles from where I live, there is, within Exeter Cathedral, a door containing another smaller door, cut by a carpenter, for a fee of eight pence, to allow the free passage of a bishop’s cat, a whole century prior to Newton’s brainwave. Geoffrey Chaucer mentions “a cat hole” - although not a door - a couple of hundred years before that in his Canterbury Tales. Whatever the case, the catflap had been around for quite a while by the time I first lived in a house containing one, in the very early part of this century.
How on earth did my family and I cope for all those years before that, I wonder, living in houses with cats and being required to repeatedly assist them in their passage back and forth over the border between the clashing nations of Indoors and Outdoors? How did that even work? I expect the answer is that it worked a lot like it does now, when once again - due to some hopefully temporary complications, related to not owning the building I sleep in - I find myself living with cats in a catflapless house. That is to say: I wake up daily at 3am to the sound of cats trashing furniture and pulling art off walls, get up to let them out, then, upon hearing them colourfully questioning how anyone could be so cruel as to make them experience weather firsthand, get up to let them in again. This continues, in collaboration with my partner, for the rest of the day, while we simultaneously try our best to still be people.
We could opt for a different approach: instead of continuing to wait patiently for a gap in the schedule of the enigmatic builder that our landlady has selected to tunnel through a wall and fit a catflap in the way that best suits our and her needs, we could do what Big Edie and Little Edie Beale do in the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens and simply have an approximately cat-sized hole in an exterior door, not bothering with the flap part. “How cold would that have made Grey Gardens - a decaying mansion, overlooking the Atlantic on Long Island, New York, purchased by the Beales in 1924 - during winter?” I wondered, while rewatching the documentary last weekend. But the priorities of the two Edies - Edith Beale, the aunt of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and her permanently headscarfed 50something daughter - were obviously elsewhere: with the ice cream they both liked to eat while sitting on twin beds surrounded by unwashed blankets, dried-up half-eaten meals and other miscellaneous filth; with the wildlife they lured deeper into their attic with cat food and sliced white bread; with the anatomised dissatisfactions of their lives that it was their habit to squabble over. Their numerous cats, it has to be said, appear not at all dissatisfied, sleeping on top of one another on the linty bedclothes and defecating behind the framed portrait of her pristine younger self that the older Edie - who doesn’t believe in cat litter - keeps on the floor in the bedroom. If further advances in technology ever introduce surround smell to the cinema experience, this is one I will probably sit out. The younger people in the cinema laughed quite a lot at Grey Gardens. The older people, less so. My companion and I agreed that we now found it less funny, more poignant and more uniquely brilliant than several years ago when we first saw it. The whole time you watch it you are simultaneously watching another film: the one in your head where you inevitably attempt to piece together the half century of co-habitation that has gradually led these two once glamorous and wealthy women to the point they’ve now reached, talking unhappily across one another in a malodorous vine-strangled fourteen-room mansion while a family of racoons peer at them through holes in the walls.
On walks in the countryside, and sometimes not in the countryside, I clamber over rubble mountains, hurdle ‘KEEP OUT’ signs, flout the crooked warnings of condemned doorways and Flat Stanley myself through slits in walls, all in the name of one of my favourite pastimes: exploring abandoned buildings. I listen to the stories the buildings tell, even if they turn out to be nothing but gossip or rumour. A recent example was a bungalow hidden below a ledge off the B365 on the western periphery of Dorset, opposite Lambert’s Castle. If you visit it, you’ll probably notice via your phone’s map that Lambert’s Castle is “permanently closed”. This is the kind of up-to-date factual information that makes maps on phones so useful. Lambert’s Castle, which was built in the Iron Age, is indeed closed, and the closure only happened around 2000 years ago. The bungalow probably stopped functioning as a residence a little more recently. 2012? 2008? It’s essentially just two and a bit walls and some of a roof now, but as I stood in its former living room, I enjoyed the spectacular picture frame view east over the Marshwood Vale. The building is small, not a family space. I found dozens of bottles on the floor: old bottles, not bottles redolent of a recent teenage break-in. Medium dry sherry, mostly. Positioned in their centre, like a totem, was a Shirley Bassey CD. There was a doorbell and an attractive circular feature window, still intact. When was the bungalow built? I’m guessing 1958ish. I own a pair of shoes that are six years old which I think of as the shoes I bought “last year”. That makes 1958 approximately 11 years ago. Which means 11 years ago someone opened the door of this building and thought, “Here is my smart new home, where I can get plastered on bottles of QC from Asda and bellow along to showtunes.” Meanwhile, time was always there, lurking outside, ignoring the music, tapping to its own merciless beat on the walls.
My feet are cold as I write this. But that’s because it’s blowing a gale outside. I live in a well-insulated house. I’d be far colder if I still lived in the building I rented between the autumns of 2020 and 2022, where an electricity-powered AGA competed counterproductively with the house’s many perforations, its gappy fixtures and flimsy damp-swollen doors. In that more romantic building, outdoors relentlessly looked for ways to be indoors. Disused sheds generally contain fewer spiders than its kitchen did. We were nice to the house - wallpapered it, cleaned and polished it (careful to go around the spiders and their webs), put rugs over the holes in its rotting floors, chopped the ivy that constantly tried to thread its way under windows and gables - but merely in that shortish time that we were there, we witnessed an extra layer or two peel away from the building. That’s what happens to houses. They might look tough but they’re just like us: dying from the moment they are born, in need of regular care and love, even when they pretend they’re not. In the end the kindest thing of all we did to the house was to move out of it, which gave our landlady the necessary nudge she needed to mend its floors, put a panel on its bath to hide the damp concrete underneath, fix its windows, maybe even replace the boards on the little rotting balcony we always feared would fall away beneath us and send us crashing into the river several feet below. To do, in other words, many of the jobs she would very likely have continued to postpone doing if we’d stayed.
Our present home is different: it’s light, smart, clean. Most of the building is only eight years old. Its owner is big on maintenance, interested in the architecture of happiness; she patently thought a lot about the practicalities of living when she renovated it. But you can bet, given half a chance, time would wreak its havoc on the place. I found a rat, drowned in the rain water in the spare food waste bin the other day. They say you’re never more than six feet from a rat. We just feel more than six feet from our local rats because they’re very emotionally distant. Brambles have more or less eaten the greenhouse. I need to cut some others back before they start nibbling at the utility room. We were told two farming brothers lived here before the renovation. After one brother died, the other drank himself to death amidst Grey Gardensish squalor. Did he listen to Shirley Bassey during his descent? Did he, like Little Edie Beale, lament his lost chance to be a chorus girl or a dancer in the city? We will probably never know. At the far side of the back bedroom, the light often flickers off and on, inexplicably. I’ve decided that’s where it happened.
Down the road, there’s a disused greenhouse, Victorian or extremely early 20th Century, and so vast it puts me in mind of the original Crystal Palace, built in 1851 to host London’s Great Exhibition. A man in the area told me he’d offered to buy the land off the owner, knock the greenhouse down and do something more useful with it, but the owner refused. The thwarted would-be purchaser conveyed to me that he viewed this as a shame and nonsensical. My immediate gut reaction was that the refusal was neither of those things. I want to climb over the wall then into the greenhouse and read a Virginia Woolf novel inside it. I want the greenhouse to be around forever, or if not quite that long, at least considerably longer than me.
I was pleased to receive a message the other week from my friend John, after John had Googled “1993” and some bands we used to listen to and found a piece I’d written about 1993 and some bands we used to listen to. The last time I saw John would have been 1996 or 1997. A few years prior to that we’d been in a noisy punkish group with my friend Matt and John’s friend Joe. My memory is of John being quiet and astute and wry with an aura of swiftly accrued musical wisdom about him but also of innocence, perhaps because he was the younger brother of my friend Paul, and I’d been with both of them the first time John was allowed to accompany us to a nightclub. John will be 48 this year. He and Matt and I are hoping to meet up. I realise that, when we do, John will probably not have shoulder length hair or an inquisitive seventeen year-old face or a t-shirt that says ‘Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’ or ‘Archers Of Loaf’ on the front, but even so, there will still be a part of me that will fully expect him to.
When I first used to hang around with John, I lived on a new estate about six miles from Nottingham, near a motorway, with my mum and dad in a cheaply made pristine house they both disliked and about which I had no strong feelings. When my parents bought it, it was the final complete house on the road. But then more houses appeared and the road got longer. There were big fires and riots and looting less than a mile away that were covered on the national news and most of the houses on the estate, including ours, were subject to break-ins. At the end of the road was a small old ivy-choked farmhouse, near to which, egged on by her friend, a girl from one of the newer houses pinched my bottom one day when I was walking to the school bus stop, but then later the ivy-choked farmhouse vanished. When I think about the farmhouse it always glues itself to a memory of another small farmhouse I visited midway through my 20s, the one old building in the middle of another monotonous late 20th Century housing estate, where an elderly folk singer gave me coffee and a plate of homemade biscuits, one of which contained a wiry white hair, presumably from the elderly folk singer’s head. I am aware I was polite to the folk singer and listened to what he had to say but when I go back to that day I invariably think with regret about how much I focused on the hair in the biscuit and how much more attention I should have paid to what he was saying and to the house and to the privileged opportunity I was getting to spend time with him in the twilight of his long and interesting life. But what can be done?
Halfway through their third decade is a time when people often believe they’ve become a persisting version of themselves. They’re fully grown and, since they feel like they’ve been them for a while by that point, they reason that this is pretty much the way things will be from here on in. It was a little after that point in my own life that I first started to realise that looking and feeling ok required a certain level of upkeep: that, unlike previously, it wasn’t just about not becoming a raging cocaine demon or bedding down for the night in a drainage ditch. Around the same time, I began to see old people as ex-young people in a way I hadn’t before. I had probably always suspected, somewhere, that middle-age might be better suited to something at the root of me than youth had been. But even that phase of life, now it’s here, keeps delivering its little surprises. 25? You soon work out there’s nothing permanent about that after all and that you were absurd to imagine so. But 40? 40 is rumpled and robust, self-knowing and unpretending. Surely a person can expect a level of permanence and solidity to accompany that? Well, yes, and no. 40 can be “I am only just getting started, in a way.” Three months away from 49 - as I find myself right now - meanwhile is “More than half of my life is definitely gone unless I transcend my genetic destiny or some freakish - and probably quite disturbing - advances in medicine occur in the next few decades.” I am calmer, more eroded, less requiring of approval, more vividly aware of history’s infinite sadnesses, hungrier for knowledge. I find myself less afraid of entropy and often struck by the sensation that I’m on the beginning of some surprisingly ecstatic downslope of realisations, a tumble of words and crystallised feelings. The edifice is not all that different to what it was nine years ago but I am aware of some aspects of maintenance and care required that weren’t required then. You can’t just leave the foliage climbing up the walls, unsupervised. Well, you can. But I don’t plan to. At least not yet.
Another interesting abandoned house I squeezed my way into was up on Dartmoor in the summer of 2020. The cottage’s locks had already been picked by foliage but there were signs of recent occupation: dirty dishes in the sink, half-full bottles of spirits and nature books on window ledges, some groovy orange wallpaper – not yet peeling – that I couldn’t help coveting. Films condition you to believe that an old, abandoned house with an exterior like this one is a place where something awful has happened, but there were signs of a nice life being lived here not long ago: a life of spiced rum and birdwatching. Around the back, though, there was a hole in the wall and a scene of greater chaos: scattered rubble, an upturned chest of drawers, clothes strewn across a workbench and the floor. So so many clothes. More hard liquor. It looked less like somebody had died there and more like somebody had fled, possibly to Nicaragua or Japan, as an alternative to clearing the debris of a party that had got out of hand. That night I dreamt about the house: its tall bent iron gates, the fawn I saw in the woods beyond it, the song of the nearby stream. “Put us in a novel,” the song seemed to sing. So I did.
In our band, which wasn’t much of a band, especially when I was a member of it, Matt was the guitarist, John was the drummer, Joe was the bassist and I was the “singer”. I have now known Matt for 31 and a half years. In the quarter century since we last lived anywhere within easy travelling distance of one another, we have succeeded in meeting up at least once every year. For all of that time, Matt has worked for the same organisation and - with the exception of the first couple of years - lived in the same house in suburban Nottingham. Over the same period, I have sort of worked in the same job, but done so many different versions of it that it doesn’t feel like the same job at all, and lived in 17 different houses across eight different counties. Other friendships have come and gone for both of us. But when I see Matt we always still seem to be us in some crucial core way. It’s one of the cushioning marker posts of my self-image and I find him unfailingly medicinal for my faith in humanity. The last but two time I saw him I took a little nostalgic trip beforehand to the college where we had first met, in 1992, on the first day of a course in something that was very nearly Media Studies. The building turned out to be derelict, smashed windows and panels leaving its rooms fully open to the elements. I hankered to climb inside but it would have made me late. There aren’t many people to whom I could truthfully say “I’d forgo exploring a derelict building for you” but Matt is one of them.
Sometimes when I post a photo of what I think of as an interesting abandoned building online, I’ll receive a comment with the general thrust of “How terrible and sad that somebody has let this happen to this house/barn/old radar station” and I will be left feeling a bit confused. To me, those comments always seem like someone saying, “What a shame that somebody let nature take its course on this aging person’s charismatic face and didn’t take them aside and convince them to opt for the more palatable option of plastic surgery?” Not that I want the buildings to completely collapse to rubble. I just can’t help finding endless beauty and curiosity in dereliction. What would Grey Gardens be, without the dereliction? It would be a film about two posh people, largely free of regrets, living in a nice clean house overlooking the sea. And who wants that?
Late on in Grey Gardens Little Edie stands on the balcony of the house - probably a little less rickety and slippy than the one outside our old kitchen, but with a significantly inferior catflap - and looks out in the direction of the ocean, over the phenomenally overgrown garden, and remembers the time that the leaves and branches swallowed one of her scarves, forever. At this point you remember, from earlier in the documentary, that the Beales employ a gardener and you can’t help but ask: “What would it look like if they didn’t?” The house I moved into in April 2020 - the one before the one with the rickety balcony - had a garden a bit like that, albeit much smaller. I didn’t lose anything in it but when I started chopping it back I found all sorts: a Victorian grass roller, moss-lined wine glasses, richly rusted spades and forks and trowels. The building soon revealed less attractive secrets. A septic tank, unsafe, and unopened for years, which, after it exploded, the person I was renting from claimed to possess no knowledge of. A chronic damp problem in the walls. I got ill, then got iller, got out, probably just in time. The problems the house caused me weren’t my fault. But maybe I could have avoided them - and others - if I wasn’t such a sap for neglected buildings, didn’t have such a saviour complex where they were concerned.
That’s close to four years ago, now, the old neglected house I thought I could rescue that instead came close to wrecking me. In my head, it’s last year. Life thunders on when you’re working hard and obsessing over old buildings. Sometimes it’s a while before you find a moment to check the stats. 2024: the final year I won’t spend at least some of as a person who isn’t in his 50s, the centenary of the Beales moving into Grey Gardens, the 20th anniversary of me half-watching the film and not getting half as much out of it as I did this time, the 25th anniversary of me moving away from the place where I grew up, the 32nd anniversary of me meeting Matt, and then John, shortly afterwards, even though it didn’t feel like shortly afterwards because months could last whole years back then. Sometimes you step back and have to face the realisation: “Oh, it really is the date it says on the calendar isn’t it? That’s not a joke after all.” You discuss it with peers, shaking your heads so much that you could be mistaken, from a distance, for wet dogs. Was that really 4 years ago? Was that really 7 years ago, 9 years ago, 20 years ago? Was it really 80 years ago that a wealthy bloodsport-loving southern attorney divorced me by telegram from Mexico and left us alone together, haunting these rooms like living ghosts? The fact that what you’re saying is repetitive doesn’t make the crumbling away of it all, in your hands, any less fascinating, and as you sift through what’s crumbled in your hands, you sometimes discover an unexpected substance in there that’s closer to magic than almost everything you were told was magic back when you never found dust in your hands. Your occasional failure to grasp time and its relentlessness comes with benefits. You are more forgiving of the broken promises of the man who said he’d make a hole in the wall of your house five months ago. The diminishing space ahead of you liberates you from old unnecessary seriousnesses, unfulfilled ambitions. You never became a chorus girl or a dancer in the city. You never were able to buy a tumbledown building and rescue its good bits and repair its broken bits. But because you didn’t, you have time to go on walks and explore other ailing buildings and listen to their memories. And sometimes, when you do, even though you should be elsewhere, you stare for a while at the ivy on the walls. It looks so pretty, so permanent. You look again. No, it’s definitely not moving. Despite what life has taught you up to now, right at that moment no tiny disintegrating part of you can bring yourself to believe in its more devastating motives.
I’m also currently funding a new novel. And have another coming in August.
"I find myself less afraid of entropy" really resonates with my own feelings about advancing age!
Well I just love all of this (except cats going outside, but let's not argue), especially your word choices and in general your thought patterns and how you don't cut them off at the knees but unleash them to stride right left and center (and up and down) for our reading pleasure. Thank you.