When I realised that living in a retirement flat was the only option I had, after being on the social housing register for a few months and discovering it might take a decade to get to the top of the list even if I did exaggerate my needs, my feelings of living in such a place vacillated from abject misery to pure elation. Nope, nothing in between. Like I’ve said before, this is the kind of gal I am:
Abject misery was easy to conjure because at the time I was feeling the lowest I’ve ever felt—the reasons for which I won’t go into as I fear it may affect the relationship I have with someone which is already so tenuous that if they discover I’ve written about it, it’s likely to snuff it out completely. Don’t worry, though, I do speak about it with my therapist because it gnaws at my insides like a disease and she helps me try and soothe it.
Abject Misery placed me in this retirement flat—in my mind—as a hollowed-out shell of a human dressed in loose-fitting clothes; a pale, lobotomised face, wispy hair, sitting in a beige riser chair, covered with a beige blanket, staring past flickering images on a tv in the corner of the beige room. In fact I did see this actual person as I walked past their ground floor flat during one of my viewings and it filled me with such sadness there aren’t words to describe it.
….I could be them….
Pure Elation surfaced at times when, let’s face it, the meds must’ve been working, and I imagined turning these beige expanses of flat into fabulous fantasy wonderlands. Where I could express the wild and whimsical in me which I’d kept dulled-down most of my life when living with other people and needing to accommodate their tastes at the expense of discounting my own.
I could have a feature wall. Two feature walls! Wallpaper depicting parrots in top hats; racoons wearing monocles and carrying umbrellas. Another of exotic jungle flowers and leaves in colours that don’t yet exist. Clashing patterns, myriad hues of paint. A wall of plants. A ceiling of plants! Mis-matched picture frames containing art by both masters and modern-day artists. I could have wall-to-wall bookcases—built-in bookcases! (a dream) and a threadbare vintage reading chair in a reading corner with one of those beautiful lampshades I watch being made on Instagram, and… and… and… well, the ideas were endless. As endless as my imagination.
After exhausting myself with these thoughts, the beige lady would return dragging her blanket behind her, blank of expression, seeking the tv remote, and I’d think, yes, let’s just do that. That’s better. Don’t get so carried away.
One thought that never went away, however, was that I could have a fireplace. Not a real one, because, well… retirement and second floor flat.
I’ve always loved fireplaces. I don’t know why, how or from whom I inherited this love. The house I grew up in had a glass door fire place serving a back boiler which heated our water, so functional rather than aesthetically pleasing. Over time, the beige tiled surround was altered and lavishly extended to include a wrap-around shelf and prettied-out nooks to house tasteless ornaments, topped off with a slate mantle. Incongruously—for a terrace in Clapham—made from Cotswold stone, this monument swallowed a great portion of the living room along with a substantial quota of mine and my brother’s rent money that year. But I digress.
In the last proper job I had at a secondary school, I painted a lot of backdrops for summer drama productions so I had the flare (ha) to design one on the wall of the flat if I had a mind to do so. Luckily I didn’t. Instead, I needed a pretend fireplace to sit against this flat wall. A wall which had neither nooks nor crannies. A wall with no hint of character nor cleverly concealed chimney. At one point I did consider having a fake chimney breast built to accommodate the equally fake fireplace, but all the considering wore me out.
Fireplaces I’d seen during my flat viewings had depressed me with their obvious plugged-in-ness, but they needed to be electric because the inhabitants of retirement flats are not permitted to live alongside combustible elements. Hence why there isn’t gas-fired central heating in these establishments. The risk-assessment correlation between ‘toddler’ and ‘pensioner’ is a necessary, not to mention, legal one, it turns out.
I researched which, as any other neurodivergent will tell you, is quite the rabbit-hole and took what felt like months but can’t have been as I’ve only been here 8 weeks. Facebook marketplace had some I liked, but as this would mean driving somewhere to converse with strangers, where in all likelihood I’d pretend I liked their item knowing I really hated it; hefting this non-starter into the boot of my car, and finally reversing this exhausting procedure at the flat, I discounted this madness. It didn’t stop me scrolling though; I do like a good scab to pick at.
I googled electric log-burners which had ‘living flames’, oak-veneer surrounds, illuminated fake-tiled backs, moulded thermo-graphite hearths. Log-burners with fake marble surrounds; fake Bath Stone surrounds (a nostalgic nod to my previous home). And even though these seemed the infinitely sensible, preferable option to 2nd floor retirement living, I was being drawn to Victorian cast iron fireplaces. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because they’re beautiful? And because I had no one to ask why I might be drawn to these heavy-looking, dark pieces of a bygone age, I did a comparison image chart to gauge exactly how much I was drawn to them.
A lot, as it turns out. A heck of a lot.
The one I fell deeply in love with on the Facebook page of a local charity shop…
… I actually did visit, discovering it be-riddled by Joan-Collins-Syndrome: which is to say that despite looking perfect from a distance, close inspection left much to be desired. It also weighed a ton and, once switched on, the fan might have been heard from space. I was properly broken-hearted leaving this behind, though, because the previous night I’d lain awake beholding its beauty against my flat’s wall, with its pretty painted tiles and me lying on a hearth rug during the harsh Nordic winter I was having. I don’t know where the St Bernard came from, but he’d been welcome company.
Cast iron fireplace companies I’d emailed enquiring about units which could sit against a flat wall with an electric fire, had responded with either full-on radio silence or else insisted I’d need a solid wood surround to bring the whole thing forward to avoid making a hole in the wall to take a back plate. If nothing else, I learnt a great deal about the mechanics of fireplace construction.
If I went back to googling fake log-burners and bought one, I knew I’d hate it. I also knew I’d christen it with a suitably derisory moniker and spit on it every time it so much as dared to glance my way. But these were manufactured with people like me in mind. They positively screamed second-floor-retirement-living. Fuckkit; I’d just have one then; I was too worn out to do anything else. And actually who cared anyway (besides me, I mean)? Nobody comes to the flat apart from delivery people, so if I caught any of them attempting to look beyond the crack in the door through to the living room wall where the embarrassingly and clearly fake fireplace was sited, I’d have to keep the door shut. Simples.
So delivery people might never know, but I would always know.
Jesus in a fucking handcart! I sit on the sofa facing that wall every day. I’d be staring at the fucker; it’d like eyeballing the taunting devil incarnate. I’d hate myself even more deeply than I already did.
Then this appeared on eBay and it sang to me like a siren:
It was perfect. It had everything I required and more; a veritable plug-’n’-go.
The only negatives at this early stage were that a) it was on eBay for a further 4 days so therefore could be ‘won’ by somebody other than myself, and b) it was collection only from a place in the East Riding of Yorkshire. But I’d messaged the seller who’d assured me that if I did win, they’d be happy to organise delivery on my behalf and as another interested party had enquired of this also, advised this would be in the region of £60-70 and I could definitely stretch to that.
My heart, dear reader, had not felt so full since the day I realised the results of removing the doors of the kitchen wall units and light had flooded the tiny space, delivering me a weightlessness I had been sorely devoid of.
My pleasures may be small but they are mighty.
I realise this account is already quite long and worry it may bore you, so will leave you on tenterhooks and encourage you to call back in a day or so where the outcome of whether or not I succeed in ‘winning’ this thing of beauty will be revealed. And, if I did win, what catastrophes might have come with it1.
If my life had a voiceover:
you already know there will be, right? It’s how my life goes, after all
You’ve really got a knack for a cliffhanger!