On our first Sunday morning the radiator under the bedroom window began to tick at 5.28am. By six the room was properly warm, which should have been lovely, except that it was dark, I was supposed to be asleep, and the boiler had clearly mistaken me for Dennis. His heating programme, which nobody had thought to change, ran from 5.30 to 7.30 in the morning, came back on from noon until 5pm, and then gave up for the night at precisely the moment two people who worked all day got home and took their coats off.
That set the tone for the week. We spent most of it in coats.
Coats, sheets and toast
Matt fixed the programme on Monday evening with a video on his phone and three attempts. The third involved a button called "Advance" that did not advance anything. By Tuesday the house was warm when we were in it, and the rest of the week's problems were cheaper than a boiler.
We had no curtains. The ones from the flat were made for a flat, and fitted nothing in a 1930s house, so the front windows got flat sheets pinned over them with drawing pins into the plaster above the frames. At night the streetlamp outside came through them in a soft, floral glow. Hannah across the road waved from behind her own, properly hung curtains, and I waved back in my dressing gown, in front of a sheet.
The sofa, which you've read about, sat in the front room facing the wall it had stopped at, because moving it again was out of the question. We sat on it in our coats and watched a television that wasn't plugged in, with our feet on box 9. It was, I'll admit, one of the better evenings.
We ate toast for tea on the Sunday and again on the Monday. The saucepans were in box 41, and box 41 was somewhere in the back room under box 12, and by the time we'd shifted a dozen boxes to find it we had lost interest in dinner. I now know that eight slices of toast, two of us, a jar of peanut butter and a bag of satsumas is a meal, though not one I'd recommend.
The things we found
Mid-week I practised turning off the stopcock. It's the sort of thing I'd read you should do in the first week, and we'd photographed it on day one. It didn't move.
Matt gave it a squirt of oil, we left it overnight, and on Wednesday evening it turned a quarter, stuck and then gave way. We both stood there holding our breath for a drip. Nothing came, and we cheered, quietly, like people in a library.
On Thursday evening Matt pulled up a corner of the hall carpet by the front door to see what was holding it down, and under the underlay there was wood: small blocks laid in a zigzag. I looked it up. It's called herringbone parquet. I sat on the bottom stair with the underlay in my lap for ten minutes, then we laid the carpet back and put the shoe rack on top, so nobody gets any ideas until we've decided what to do about it. I've told my mum and no one else, and now you.
Also on Thursday, the broadband engineer came and went. He looked at the pole across the road, didn't like it, gave me a reference number and left. The second visit is booked for Wednesday 19th. I'm writing this on the sofa on my phone's hotspot, so you'll understand if this paragraph is shorter than it deserves to be. I booked the Wednesday as annual leave for unpacking, and on the Friday I took my laptop down the hill to Walkley Library to work, which I'm sure will need a post of its own.
A card, a lasagne and a dish
On the mat on the morning of the move was a card from Maureen next door, with a drawing of a teapot on the front. Inside: "Welcome to the row. Ron's rule was that you find out everything about a house in the first week: where it leaks, where it creaks and who the neighbours are. Knock if you need anything. M." I read it three times.
On Tuesday at 6.15pm she knocked, and held out a lasagne in a glass dish, wrapped in foil and still warm. It was enormous. She said she'd made too much, which I doubt. There was a note on the foil: "Dish back when you've finished, not before."
We ate it at the kitchen table in our coats, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it was the first proper meal since the move. The leftovers did Wednesday as well.
We took the dish back on Sunday with a packet of good biscuits. Maureen turned it over, checked the bottom for scratches and said, "Ron always said you can tell a person by how they return a dish." I think we passed.
