Summer 1997

There used to be that old ritual of moving into a room, which is not so common now I am older, and I move into houses or flats. I suppose it was always seen as moving into a room because this was primarily a ritual of student days, when, most often, you would live somewhere for nine months - often shorter - and you really only had time to make a single room feel like home rather than the rest of the house you had moved into. The odd irony to all of this was that, without exception, all of the places I lived in during my student years were far nicer and luxurious than anywhere I have lived since. They all had gardens and more than one floor - sometimes a downstairs as well as an upstairs toilet - and my first house in Worcester even had a cellar that was carpeted. Housing since Worcester has been vastly disappointing, or maybe that's just Brighton, where it is notoriously hard to find anywhere even vaguely affordable to live.

The student bedroom then, was important during student years. I had some excellent rooms, and some mediocre. The worst room I had was in my second house in Worcester, in The Narrow House, as I ended up christening it. It was a tiny room - the smallest I've ever had - looking out onto Bransford Road, the sound of lorries - just below - would wake me in the morning. The room had a plush blue carpet and that pleasing new smell of fresh paint, -but it was just too small to do anything in, terribly claustrophobic. Aside from one other person (whom was a flat mate at the house previous) I didn't really get on with anyone else who lived in the house. So, it was with great relief that I moved into the house on London Road on June 20th 1997 (I remember the exact date). I was to share this house with friends and their friends - all fellow students - aside from one other person - Paul - who was already living there. Apart from Al and myself, everyone else who was to move in had gone home for the summer, and, apart from Paul, already there, I was to be the first to move in.

136 London Road was a terraced house, one of four, which - including the attic and basement level (the house was built on a slope, so the basement level opened out onto the long grassy garden) stretched over four storeys. The view from the street belied its interior size - or quite how tall it actually was. Viewed from the garden the house - or rather the four houses that comprised the terrace seemed almost imposing.

I don't remember the actual moving itself. I remember the unpacking though, that strange luxury of unpacking. My room was on the second floor, if you entered from the back door, or the first, if you entered from the front. There was an open fire in my room I was too scared to use. If I stuck my head up there I could see, through the jagged chimney interior, a distant distorted square of sky. The wallpaper on the walls was floral and pink, but though it gave the room a certain feminine air, it was in no way girly, and sought more to resemble (or so I thought) something from the Victorian or early Edwardian period. My window looked out onto the garden two floors below. I could see the extensions stretching out from the main part of the building - the kitchen, which led onto a bathroom, which in itself led onto another bedroom. This could only be reached through the bathroom. There was also what we came to call The Playroom, running alongside the kitchen, another cheap addition. The roof of the Playroom was made from translucent corrugated plastic, and from my room I could see into the stretched out interior full of junk, a rickety shoddy pool table with uneven legs, and other odd bits of junky furniture - I think there was an old bed there somewhere. There was certainly a chair, as when it was cool enough that summer I would sit and stare glibly at the walls, at the mural that ran the length of the Playroom 'A for Apple'... and so on, This mural was the reason the Playroom got it's name.

I remember listening to the album 'Green is the Sea' by And Also The Trees as I unpacked, their English-deep and mysteriously summery album. Happy hours spent that afternoon sifting seemingly hundreds of books and magazines and records and compact discs. In my memory there was a coolness about the room that day, a flickering grey haze as if cast by tree-shadows in dreamy sun / cloud light. How true this is I don't know, as I remember the summer of 1997 as being (mostly) continually hot and sunny. The rest of the rambling house may well still have been a mystery but my room felt already mine. I met Paul that night. Another student house ritual - meeting the people already there. He wasn't a student but a computer programmer somewhere in town. He liked cricket and pizza, and was tall with absurdly curly hair and dreadful glasses (when he wasn't wearing contacts). We sat in the gloom of the living room watching cricket and I wondered if we had anything in common at all - As it happens, we did, and Paul was the first of us who moved down to Brighton in summer 1999. We lost him later to schizophrenia and psychosis (too many endless nights of cannabis that were to come).

I didn't spend that first night in 136 London Road. I joined Al and another friend - Suzanne - at her flat at the Halls of Residence. Suzanne was later to move into London Road - in December of that year. She would take over the room directly below mine, after 'History James' (who no-one saw much of) vanished into, well, wherever... I think he moved to a quieter, more tidy residence, but I don't remember seeing him around college. 'the house never really liked him' Al said darkly, sometime after he had moved out.

I remember walking back to London Road at dawn, that strange, almost guilty delight, of using a new key in a still unfamiliar house. That dusty, summery smell of the hallway. I remember my first bed there - the bed that would see me through the summer - it was shallow and not very comfortable, the mattress thin and plasticky. That first sleep there though was luxurious and strangely feverish, like a slumber in a period of mild but exhausting illness.

Al moved in the next day I think. I remember opening the door to him in my socks - a strangeness at the time - it meant that I would now be living in the same house as him, and that the days of the Narrow House in Bransford Crescent were far, far behind me now.