31 Postcodes - Poem 18

Feathers

A and I flew the coop,

moved our minimal possessions

to a cavernous ground floor

with views of a road.

There was so much space,

we didn’t fill it or fuss it,

not the homemaking types,

we just let the dust reign.

The kitchen at the back

was a place little troubled,

not a trace of a cookbook,

nothing matching, one pan.

I don’t even remember 

what passed for a bathroom,

but there must have been one,

we were clean, I am sure.

And in my giant room,

I did sleep, here and there,

not always alone,

sometimes in a pile,

say, 5 of us heaped

on the great island bed,

feet worn to the bone, 

fairy tale style.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

At the end of February 1990, after six months in the first Leeds place, one of the other tenants and I moved from Hyde Park to a flat in the nearby area of Headingley. The two landlords of the first place were older guys (in their 30s maybe – they just seemed old to me, I turned 23 in that house) and they were friendly but also more than a little creepy. One talked about his genitals a lot and the other was a really heavy drinker with a bit of a twisted sense of humour so I think that’s why the only other female tenant and I moved to a place of our own. A and I didn’t have much in common – other than that we both went out late and neither of us liked anything remotely homey (no cooking, very little cleaning, not a scatter cushion in the place). So we moved into a pretty sparse ground floor flat that had good access to pizza and we were sorted. I feel like maybe someone else lived there too but it was a lively, much stimulated time so that might have been a dream of some kind (or just her boyfriend). Or did we bring the young Sicilian guy from the last place with us for a while? I really can’t remember.

It was nice to be in a home where we could make our own decisions and have a bit more space (I had that corner room on the ground floor with the huge windows – I certainly didn’t have blinds, it was very minimally and cheaply furnished, I’m not even sure there were curtains). I was pretty heavily involved in raving/clubbing at this point so that took a lot of my time and attention (in Leeds and in London, quite a few friends were living there so me and my crappy little Fiat 127 or borrowed cars from work knew the M1 pretty well). I did still have a full-time job but luckily it was one where quite a lot of the time you could pretend to work whilst really sleeping with your eyes open or talking to your friends on the phone. Often I would finish a task in a day then stretch it out so it looked like it needed to take a fortnight. As I mentioned in the last post I’d only gone for the advertising job because several famous writers of the time had been in advertising first and it seemed a possible route. Of course I wasn’t actually writing anything at the time so there was a massive flaw in that plan. I was, however, having the time of several lives. Novelists often seem so miserable, I’m not sure I made the wrong choice.

I moved out of this flat after 6 months. But why? And where next? See you tomorrow...

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.