31 Postcodes - Poem 22

Higher

A fine, solid house,

4 floors, no doors,

layers of students,

just us in the sky.

Camped in the clouds,

my neighbour turned raver,

bought Peace (in the valley),

played it really bloody loud.

In the kitchen there’s talk,

don’t look in the bathroom.

I had a mattress on the floor,

mixtapes to live by.

Who slept in that house?

Not even the mice,

all eyes were propped open,

not missing a beat.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

In August 1991, aged 24, I moved to the top floor of a big student house back in the Hyde Park area of Leeds and stayed there for nearly a whole year (quite a long time for this period of my life). Each floor of the house was technically a 2-bed flat with its own bathroom and kitchen but there was only one main front door for the whole place so it wasn’t very private. The students downstairs were nice and I don’t remember them complaining about us non-students (though we were very noisy and kept very late hours – maybe they did too, I don’t remember). The house had terrible plumbing – some really foul smells at times. It had been a beautiful grand house at some time no doubt, but it was not much cared for by this point. 

I was sharing this place with the same young woman I’d lived with at poem 18 (I’ve called her A – we’re not in touch anymore). She had the front room you can see in this picture (up in the roof) and my room was next to hers hence she is the neighbour in this poem (whilst technically my flatmate). She had split up from her long-term boyfriend (gorgeous but not much of a laugh) and so, though she had been a goth up till then (a big movement in Leeds in the ’80s), she decided to come and try some rave culture with me. She loved it and pretty much joined in with whatever I was up to for a while (I think she found it liberating to be allowed, nay encouraged, to smile for a change). We still didn’t use our kitchen for cooking. There were a lot of dodgy people hanging around (old goths turned rave providers – at least one of them kept drugs in our bathroom now and then), a lot of loud music, a lot of sleep in the day. I left my advertising job around this time (I just walked out one day, couldn’t pretend any more, no Jerry Maguire moment, no big speech, and I kept the company car for far too long afterwards). Instead I started working much more suitable hours (for me) at a small alternative magazine (the one I mentioned a couple of posts and poems ago). The income came from a string of the kind of job schemes that don’t really exist anymore (income support/housing benefit plus £10 a week) and it wasn’t much but it was enough. We had a lot going on and most of it was pretty cheap (friends running clubs, free tickets for reviews).

The boyfriend I had met in May 1991 lived just a couple of doors down and in fact most of the time he lived with me in this flat (or sometimes I was at his, I can’t remember how we decided where and when, possibly something to do with laundry). By now, he had a show on the Leeds pirate radio station Dream FM (huge with ravers and assorted others in Leeds in the ’90s) and he was always faffing about on decks and hunting down 12” singles. Now free from the advertising 9-5, I got quite interested in all that too (more on that next time).

A and I left this flat in July 1992 and moved across town. See you there 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.