The call came at 2.15pm on Friday 31 January. I was standing in the kitchen of the flat in Crookes, holding a coffee that had gone cold an hour earlier, and the conveyancer said the sentence I'd waited nineteen weeks for: "You've completed." Five minutes later the estate agent rang to say the keys were on the desk. I wrote both times on the back of my hand in biro, which is not how I normally record anything. I have a spreadsheet for that.
A morning of watching nothing happen
We'd both taken the day off. In payroll the last week of the month is not a time you leave your desk lightly, so I'd done a very long Thursday to earn it. The lender's money, £168,750, left our conveyancer's account a little before midday, and after that there was nothing to do but wait for it to turn up at the other end. Matt cleaned a hob that was already clean. I opened a sealed box to check what was in it, then sealed it again.
The slow part, as it had been all winter, was on the seller's side. Dennis's daughter Karen was selling under a power of attorney, so every step went through one more set of hands than I was used to. I refreshed my email eleven times between noon and two. Matt counted, and was kind enough not to say the number out loud until later.
Keys, then a kettle
We collected the keys at 2.40pm: a brown envelope holding two sets, with nothing to say which key did what. The agent said we'd love the place and shook our hands, and we were ten minutes up the hill when I realised I had no idea which box the kettle was in. The honest answer was one called LAST BITS, under eleven other boxes, in a bedroom we weren't going back to until the evening.
So we pulled into a supermarket car park and bought another one for £22. The £12 kettle looked like a toy and the £40 one had a digital display and, I think, an app. Matt picked up the £22 one, weighed it in his hand like a man buying a hammer and said it would do. We added a pint of milk and a box of 80 teabags. The mugs were already in my bag, wrapped in a tea towel, because I had planned for tea but not for the kettle.
The house at 3pm
Inside, it was colder than the street. It smelled of pipe tobacco, lemon furniture polish and, underneath, the closed-up damp of a place that hadn't had its heating on properly since Dennis moved into the care home in the spring. Karen had cleared it so thoroughly that our voices bounced. The only thing left was the fridge-freezer, humming away in the kitchen as if nothing had happened.
I did a lap on my own while Matt filled the kettle: front room, back room, kitchen, up the stairs. The box room is 2.1 by 1.9 metres, and I stood in the middle with my arms out and could very nearly touch both walls. I said "my office" out loud to nobody. Then at 3.10pm I remembered the meters and went outside with my phone torch, and the kettle boiled, clicked off and went cold behind us with no one there to hear it. The meters are a story of their own.
The first cup of tea in our house was therefore the second one we made. We drank it on the floor of the front room with our backs against the wall, under a window with no curtain, and spent twenty minutes arguing about whether the woodchip was staying. It wasn't.
Somewhere in those twenty minutes I said "keys and kettle" out loud to hear how it sounded, and Matt said it sounded like a pub, which I decided to take as a yes. Until that afternoon this blog had a working title so dull I won't repeat it. That evening I changed the header.
One more night in Crookes
We locked our own front door for the first time at about five and drove back to the flat, because the bed, the duvet and everything else we owned was still there. It felt like leaving a party early. We ate fish and chips off the lid of a box marked KITCHEN 6, and I lay awake doing sums about the first mortgage payment, got the date wrong twice, and went to sleep mid-calculation.
The £22 kettle is on the worktop behind me as I type, next to the teabags, exactly where it landed on day one. I suspect it will stay there until it dies.
