For a decade, I’ve been working in “The Turret” – my office at the top of our west London home. Despite the dedicated space, the book I’ve been working on for a ten years has never even glimpsed completion. I’ve been perpetually distracted by electrical devices needing repair, wardrobes demanding sorting, and books awaiting organisation.
Today, the words are flying. In London, the charity shops in Richmond are bulging with my donated clothes, and hundreds of my books have found new homes with a simple, “Free. Please take”, sign outside our old front door. And here’s the secret. I’m writing in a different turret now, in Cambridge.
My newfound productivity and peace of mind can be summed up in one word: eviction. This office isn’t mine, nor are the books I’m surrounded by, the clothes in the wardrobe downstairs, or the devices that need fixing in the utility room. We are house-sitting. At 70, I’m technically homeless – and it’s gloriously liberating.
Since 2015 my wife Dawn and I have been renting our dream home by the Thames in “Old Isleworth”, west London. Then came the news that many renters dread – our landlord decided to buy a chateau in France and, with just two months’ notice, kicked us out to sell our home to fund her French castle fantasy.
Our first cry was, “She can’t do that!”. Our second cry was, “She just has!”. Back in the day our third cry would have been, “Pub, now!”, but we don’t really drink any more, so in a slightly numb state we started making silently tearful lists. At a landlord’s whim our local friends and our favourite walks were becoming a black and white flashback in a TV drama.
Then we rallied, stuck some flip chart paper on the kitchen wall, blasted out Sly and The Family Stone and made a colourful plan worthy of a drunken circus ringmaster. Not exactly joyful but with a definite attitude of, “OK then, bring it on!”.
square RENTING First PersonAt 74, I got evicted - I was homeless, and terrified
Read More
While I have no property or savings, Dawn owns a small studio flat in Buckfastleigh, Devon, but it’s too small for us both to live in without killing each other and it’s currently rented out. And anyway, we don’t want to do to her tenant what our landlord did to us.
We looked for similar properties, and found a couple of places that were “OK”, in the area we once called home. But in an almost surreal twist of fate we found ourselves invited to join bidding wars, offering rents way above asking prices for places we didn’t particularly like, by brash young men in cheap suits. We needed a bit of luck.
By chance I wrote about our predicament on social media and a friend offered us this three-month house-sitting arrangement in Cambridge, 63 miles from our former Thames-side home. We said yes, disposed of 90 per cent of our possessions, put 9 per cent in storage and the remaining 1 per cent in the car.It was all a bit of an emotional rollercoaster skirmish getting out on time but when we got to Cambridge we found that we hadn’t only left a lot of physical baggage behind, a lot of emotional baggage didn’t make the journey either.
And here’s a surprise, we think of ourselves less of a married couple now and more of girlfriend and boyfriend. Here by the River Cam, we’re surrounded by young lovers on bikes, young lovers in punts, and young lovers experimenting with living together in first-floor flats. They are working things out as they go along and sharing a cake in the cafe downstairs rather than buying individually wrapped delicacies to be consumed in private. Love on a budget. It’s a boyfriend and girlfriend town with a romantic street culture. We can’t help joining in, even though we’ve been together for 26 years.
It’s not the “second honeymoon” vibe you save up for to fly to Bali with tantalising Tantric expectations. It’s not the residential workshop in Tuscany which promises to relight that passionate fire. It’s fish and chips outside The Mitre Public House before a sunny walk home across Jesus Green. And I can tell you now it works just as well.
What’s remarkable about our situation is how our past generosity has created a safety net we never anticipated. We have little money, but our “currency” appears to be goodwill. We’ve done a lot of generous things in our work life and social life. And now – this is a surprise – people want to help us.
We’ve received further offers for places to stay after we leave our new base in Cambridge at the end of June. One is nearby in the village of Reach, another in Normandy and one in Cyprus. The world, it seems, is our oyster.
Glamorous as it may sound, these places are in various states of renovation. Lack of Wi-Fi may be good for retirement meditation but not for continuing to run a business. There’s lot to be taken into account.
Still, we’ve decided to be nomads for a year – to keep working from different bases, and see how it goes. No rent but contributions to monthly costs (currently £300 where we are). We haven’t yet needed to use house-sitting websites like “TrustedHouseSitters” and “MindMyHouse” but we’re aware these options exist.
square BILLS 'I went from a five bed house to being homeless. Mental health help must include debt issues'
Read More
Do we wake up in our king-size bed at 3am thinking, “WTF?!”. Of course. Do we let it trouble us? Of course not. The secret code is courage. When one of us loses it, the other keeps the project on track.
Our professional background has luckily prepared us for this unexpected lifestyle shift. Our niche? Getting teams out of their comfort zones. It’s ironic then that we had to be crowbarred out of our own comfort zones, then catapulted to a place where we’ve been forced to walk our talk. It’s a good job we’re enjoying it.
We have lived “on tour” as performers – me in the band Scritti Politti and Dawn as an actor in her twenties, touring Europe and America. So we’re used to tightening our belts in the bad times and buying crates of champagne for the tour bus in the good times. “If you don’t know the dark, how are you going to recognise the light?” might be our current bumper sticker.
Our friends, with their mortgages paid off and enjoying their grandparent duties, seem to be more concerned about our welfare than we are ourselves. Maybe the full scope of the tragedy has to kick in but right now there’s definitely a Passport to Pimlico vibe about our everyday life. There has been great paradigm-smashing liberation in this experience leading to “just get on with it” behaviour.
It has prompted us to question deeply held British assumptions about the necessity of property ownership to feel safe. We’re moving away from that UK obsession with “personal castle” as a tangible but spurious form of existential security, promoted relentlessly by Margaret Thatcher and her gang to get us all into debt.
We’ve decided to ditch the bankrupt aspirations of late-stage capitalism and live more in the present. Every authentic spiritual practice points towards the indisputable fact that we only ever have this moment, right now, anyway. So let’s live it fully.
You could, if you were feeling generous, say our landlord did us a favour. We’re three grand better off every month with no responsibilities, and we’ve got a spring in our step.
I’m enjoying the freedom that comes with our nomadic existence. Right now I’m going to put the kettle on then sit in the garden with a nice cup of tea, looking at the flower beds I don’t have to weed, dreaming up chapter titles.
At 70, when many expect settled security, we’ve found freedom, renewed romance, and the discovery that living with less can mean experiencing more. Our serendipitous story, though completely personal, might present an upbeat counterpoint to the fear that many renters face, showing that even life’s unwelcome surprises can sometimes lead to unexpectedly joyful adventures.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Losing our home was terrifying – then it turned into a romantic adventure )
Also on site :
- Man shot and killed after standoff with Columbus police during barricade incident
- NYT Connections Sports Edition Today: Hints and Answers for May 20
- Japan mulls accepting US tariff reduction, not exemption - Kyodo