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So this week we get ready to say goodbye to our home of 16 years. After all the sturm and drang of dealing with bankers and lawyers and their dull, unresponsive, uncaring attitudes, it’s come as a bit of an anti-climax really.

British Telecom – God bless their shambolic incompetence! – added a bit of drama by deciding to cut off our phone a week early, but apart from that excitement we tread cautiously round the place, sure that the life-deniers will find some way to balls it all up yet.

Sat here surrounded by cardboard boxes and an air of mounting panic, we prepare ourselves to head off to a former Victorian Methodist chapel that’s so in need of new life it’s almost submerged itself back into the landscape, shrouded by creeper, quiet and lonely.

Leaving here will be a wrench, of course. If memories were solid you wouldn’t be able to shove your way in through the front door: they’re packed in like sardines, squeezed up against the beams, crammed into the fireplaces; some of them are giggling and shoving at the back like naughty schoolboys and others lurk in the darkest of dark corners, occasionally leaping out with an unwelcome “Boo!”

I can conjure most all their pictures. Some, I’m pleased to say, would be X-rated. Each little space has its story, and they’re just our stories in a house this old. The fireplaces downstairs were bricked up for 40 years until we hacked them into life again in great clouds of soot and plaster dust; memories from 1861 must have been tucked up cosily at the back of the cloam ovens, forgotten by their owners.

Houses must find us humans so dramatic: gales of love and hate blow through the passageways and every time it’s the best, the worst, the end of the world or the start of something beautiful. No wonder the beams and the flagstones assume a lived-in air. If you’d had to absorb 150 years of the likes of us, you’d be worn out too.

The ghosts of all our loves surround us as we reach the end here: Max, my beloved Max, how I miss his collie face still; the cats, Webster hauling another corpse through the catflap and Polly spitting blood and thunder at everybody; snows, sunshines, barbecues, music, jobs, triumphs, disasters, leaks, drains; the people, may they rest, who won’t see us out of this house and into a new; their laughters are in one of the corners here. Us. We came here young and in love, and leave here middle-aged parents, not so young and often, in the eye of the hurricane that is family life, forgetting what love is.

Little events run like newsreel films: Kevin the postman stopping us for a chat at the front door as we rushed out the morning Management decided to give birth to Jamie. “Now’s not the time, Kevin,” she said gently, pushing past him. Brian and Rob bringing the place into the 21^st century and the thrill of having central heating and double glazing like real people. The eerie rush of wind and light that ended the great eclipse as we sat in the field next door. Walking the lanes, fields and woods in all weathers. Leavings and returns. Sunsets. The glorious view down the Lynher valley past the tower of St Melor’s.

We’ll be sorry to go, but ready for adventure again.

But then, having said all that, who’d like to bet we’re not still sat here this time next week with yours truly shamefacedly withdrawing this sentimental twaddle?

Love to hate

How lovely to read a couple of columnists saying that last week’s Conservative Party conference made it OK to hate the Tories again.

Well, some of us never really stopped, of course, but Theresa May’s petty bigoted grandstanding – foreigners! Lefties! Europe! – and Cameron and Osborne and their shifty manoeuvring to justify their continued attempts to protect the perpetrators of economic crimes while penalising the rest of us certainly did them no favours.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown summed it all up: “The economic crisis has provided the Tories with the excuse to push through what they have always wanted, a deregulated economy with millions willing to work at any cost. In the developed world, only the US has a worse labour rights record now than the UK.”

I’d say ‘what a proud boast’ in terms of bitter irony; Cameron and Osborne would say the same and mean it.

Ouch

Don’t bother having a go: take comfort from the fact that the fates inflicted upon me first a stinking cold and secondly pulled rib muscles. Every cough, every blow, every sneeze has been exquisite agony for four days. Bet you feel better now…