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