Last waltz.

You won’t have seen it. You’re too young. You’re too lofty. You’re too intellectual and just too cool.

But my studio looks just like it.

The last episode of Blake’s 7.

Budget for special effects is about right.

Surrounded as I am by boxes and packing crates, I am reminded of the little waltz around the bridge of the Scorpio that Tarrant performed in his console seat, as the ship plummeted to its destruction on Gauda Prime, showering him in a few sparks, turning the lights off and on a bit and turning his place at the apparent helm into a very low octane kind of ghost train ride.

Hit me like a slug to the chest when I was ten.

—

With all but total life support off here now, I am down to the bare essentials: an internet connection and a hi fi. And even these will not last much longer now. For I am about to bail out.

Tomorrow we move.

And to mix my low budget television metaphors horribly, I don’t know whether I’m about to regenerate or just get killed off in a death dive into a squashed looking planet named after an intergalactic cheese.

—

Most things are in boxes. But still much more parcel tape gun work to do yet, be sure.

Yet, before I commit the final act and unplug the studio and switch off Momo’s phones and internet connection and music, I am listening to a soundtrack that could not be more appropriate in my own mind.

The Gotan Project, La Revancha Del Tango.

Never listened to this supremely daytime, work-helping new-tango soundtrack in the evening before, but I have been saving it for now, the final moments. The last CD to get played. Just because it transports me to the optimistic early days of Momo like no other record. Not for some clever, universally obvious thematic meaning. It just so does.

One last tango in the bright orange room I have loved working in for eight years.

One final strut past the window before I shut off the machines and let this wonderful chapter of our lives – a decade of learning to fly creatively – crash into history.

For new adventures await.

Yet old memories, the fondest of them, will live on in the mental construct of this space that I will take with me and visit often. This creative home.

As the breezy, un-philosophical music spools to the end, I shall feel deeply for all the good things that have happened to us here, and how simply happy we have been in the home’s comforting calm, despite the sadnesses trying to challenge it from time to time. They never quite won out.

The many instances of dad’s practical handiwork around me here will probably make me pause a moment even longer tomorrow. And I hope to toast the old girl – this hundred-year-old house – with a few tears before I walk up the hill one last time and leave the keys with the agent.

For I am very grateful for those adventures had here.

But I wonder whether they will pale in comparison to the ones coming.

x

Blitz and mortar.

It’s a sort of cross between praying and illustrating how far you’ve had it up to.

The ‘time-out’ signal.

I’ve been upwardly jabbing my fingertips into a downward palm mutely for some weeks now. And no amount of stoic cups of tea could have floated me through the blitz of it: moving house.

I have yet to move house still, you understand. The actual trauma of piling all our worldly crap into a wheelbarrow and wobbling it around the block is still ahead of us and I really couldn’t care less.

Drop my vintage china. Cartwheel my fridge down the stairs. Saw my sofa in half to get it through the door. Don’t care.

And inevitable weeks without internet access at home, while people on the sub continent show me super-human levels of patience on the phone while simply repeating that the engineer in my area is still booked up until Christmas? Pah. No kind of trauma to me now.

Do your worst, forces of removals chaos – because the relief of finally getting solicitors to let us move our ruddy lives ON at long long last has made me so giddy I have been walking the grid of streets nearby hugging random English people to within an inch of their social conventions, tears streaming down my blood-pressure-blotched face, holding them until they too are sobbing, out of the incomparable shame of sheer cultural awkwardness.

—

The truth of English people as a society is, of course, not only do they feel uncomfortable showing un-earned emotion, they also can’t abide bureaucracy. Plus they have a perverse sense of humour, delighting in things backwards.

Which is presumably why they have a housing system designed to be as bureaucratic and likely to induce significant outbursts of decidedly uncomfortable emotion in front of strangers as humanly possible.

And why they have built their entire modern economy upon this process.

—

One estate agent, a friendly client, unconnected with our sale and purchase, responded simply to my property market indigestion: “Politicians are all frustrated lawyers. Country’s run by ’em.”

And I heard a little penny drop.

Now, it’s worth saying up front that I shall be reclining in a hot tub with a solicitor, a former solicitor and a barrister at the weekend. Each of them happens to be remarkably thoughtful and, well, human. This is in large part why they are not just friends of mine, but friends I am prepared to strip to my shorts in front of and percolate warm fluids around myself with.

But evidence like this not withstanding, the job of a solicitor is really that of a sort of vaguely ennobled engineer.

—

As I have said before, we really do rather sort of completely need engineers. I walk over bridges and under glass roofs and through under-sea tunnels because of them. If foppish daydreamers like me were professionally responsible for turning their hands to such things I tell you I would never leave the house. I would never get IN the house in the first place.

Thus we need engineers to be utterly nutterly anal about nuts, bolts, ones, twos, cantilevers, plumb lines and flat-out level-headed detail. Or just about everything will fall down.

But as I have also said before, engineers really do rather sort of completely need other people around them to point out the obvious needs of, ah, actual humans. Because squishy soft pheromone-crazed, half-baked-inspiration-prone animals do not behave like helpfully well- programmed robots.

Which is a fact that precisely incurs the need for the law. And precisely annoys the tits off your average lawyer.

—

To get its own back, the legal profession in Britain helpfully assumes the reigns of authority in all significant transactions of life, to ensure an objective engineering of all parties’ responsibilities and rights and so secure fairness and equity and, effectively, harmony in society – and then sods off on holiday without telling anyone.

Now now. Everyone needs a holiday; I know all too well how much my three legal examples have earned their place in that hot tub and how much, frankly, we probably just need to hold each other and rock together gently there for a while. So I dehumanise only for a pithy moment to exact a knowing smirk from you. There it is.

If I have a point – or the strength to make one after trying to buy a house as an Englishman in his own country – it is simply that what I have learned is missing from the house buying process in the jolly ol’ Green And Pleasant, is someone who actually knows what the Elgar’s arse is going on.

Forgive my Anglo Saxon. But tedious frustrations from my own unremarkable little life aside, it is the thing that seems needed for my countrymen as they seek for some reason to rebuild their nation’s economy on the same property market foundations it failed on last time: a role somewhere in the chain that can pull together… well, everything.

Estate agents can START everything.

Solicitors can STOP everything.

No-one seems empowered to DRIVE anything.

Which is perhaps why I should have stopped feebly making pathetic time out signs all summer and put my hands on the bloody wheel. Even if my metaphorical motor is on the back of a tow-truck.

Still. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to bear in mind when observing all this from a comfortable cultural distance is that mostly, eventually, we seem to get there. And perhaps most perversely, thanks to a lot of people trying to help each other out when things appear to turn grim. Like humans.

Like Brits in the blitz.

Jeepers we just love all this, don’t we?

See you round the corner. I’ll have the kettle on.