I live in a house

I suppose the majority of you do. Mine is in an area of Norwich knonw locally as "The Golden Triangle". "Golden", I assure you, refers to the commodity that the local landlords reap from their leaking, cold, shoebox properties. If I went round my landlords house, I reckon that the bathroom taps, the doorhandles and the telephone would be made out of gold. The cutlery would be gold. The windowlock would be gold. The hair of his children, flaxen gold. In the golden triangle, there is an interesting ratio at work. For every nine houses with malfunctioning ovens/gas fires/fire alarms there's one house full of gold and other treasure beyond my most lucid imaginings. In that house lives the owner of nine houses of type A. often, this person combines their career as a slum landlord with work as a university lecturer or column writing for a liberal newspaper. They have many cats, which live off the uncollected garbage in the yards of type A houses. Because they are too lazy to look after their animals (and they are often too busy counting their ill-gotten gains), most of the cats have adopted one of the down-at-heel properties as a second home. The outcome of this system is that anybody who rents a room in one of the quasi-slum dwellings in the Golden Triangle gets a free pet.

I live in what is known as the box room. It's at the back of the house, with a conveninent low roof outside providing easy access for any one of the numerous burglars who do their dirty business in our area. The room is not very large. This is a problem because (being a PhD student and that) I have hundreds of books, which are now all curling up with the damp. I have to study, write music, sleep, eat, make love, make merry, administrate etc from this room, which is tiny.

It's a lovely house though, if you postmodernize geography and think of it as a constantly active space rather than an immutable entity. The five of us (and our girlfriends, who spend enough time in the house to have a right to bitch about its general unpleasantness) have developed a Dunkirk mentality to deal with it. If we play our music loud enough a synaesthetic effect occurs and we can smell the noise rather than the damp or the bin. We also live next door to an off-license/newsagents. If you're sitting in the living room, it's a shorter journey to the magazine rack than the toilet.

Now I must go and write about Henry Green.

how this came about

There are several explanations and all of them are true. Firstly, I was jealous of all the other people who made the vagaries of their day-to-day life sound exciting through their ability to confabulate a little bit. Secondly, I've recently embarked on a PhD thesis on the (still unfairly neglected) 30s/40s/50s novelist/enterpreneur/professional charmer Henry Green. So have about 5,000 other global literati but, as I've perhaps indicated above, I find originality a challenge. Oh, I was meant to be explaining something through the medium of lists...back to the thread...that's it...I thought a weblog (that's a clunking word. Say it to yourself.) would help me put fingers to keyboard on a daily basis. Thirdly, it's a nigh-on peerless displacement activity. And I think, in my heart of hearts, that's my "motivation".