Farmhouse weirdnesses

Following the phenomenal success of those omnipresent property programmes where people do up everything from an olde sweety shoppe to a turreted chateau and everything in between, there’s been a mad social media outburst of folk sharing their similar house transitions from ugly to House Beautiful shareworthy in multiple social media episodes. Some are eye-poppingly dazzling in their exuberant use of colour, others a sadness of beige in twenty-five mist and bleak dawn tones, and some make you cry with joy, alongside those that make you glad you’re not living on a set conjured for none other than Fredo Corleone complete with black satin sheets and gold-trimmed tassels.

We seem to have an unending appetite for other people’s domestic environments, and I won’t lie, I have literally dreamt up my ideal interior and recreated it in a novel that will almost certainly never see the light of day – the agents are not biting.

I’ve become increasingly aware that those things I found so quirky and quaint when viewing my current home twenty-one years ago, have become quietly mundane with familiarity, but the mundane still gives pleasure, and you can find it in the most unexpected places. If I had to live in a flat walled, flat roofed, flat floored box, I would be flat of mind.

In the sitting room, next to the kitchen, where we sit with the dogs, watch telly, read, knit, chatter and relax by the log fire that heats the whole house in winter, is a built-in book case. Hidden among the top layer of DVDs that fill this particular bookcase, hanging near the top, are four vicious meat hooks, not coming down from the ceiling but embedded in the wall. I’ve spent hours imagining what these were used for – everything from hanging cooking pots (we’ve learned that the deep fireplace once housed the cooking range) to keeping swaddled babies (quadruplets?) off the floor and out of the way. It’s probably as ordinary as a place to hang slabs of cured bacon, but what if there’s another story behind them? We will never know.

And then there’s the crazy crooked slope of the door to what was the apple and cider store which is now my office, planed to accommodate the equally sloping ceiling behind so that the top of the door, when opened, doesn’t smash into the ceiling or the fearsomely large inner wall behind, that is a metre thick. One day someone will make a hole in said wall and work out why it is as it is. My guess is it was used to secrete some hideous tyrant, and after bashing said tyrant on the head with a warming pan full of hot coals, he was walled up, never to be tyrannical again.

The bible cupboard, where booze is now stored, is pretty ubiquitous in Devon cross passage and long houses, but just because it’s bible-free doesn’t mean it has lost its purpose and charm. The cobbles that make up the scullery floor (ooh, hark at her, a scullery!) are all that keeps our feet off the Devon earth. The very idea of damp-proof membrane hadn’t even been contemplated when the house was built back in the 17^th century, and anyway, it keeps the room and so the food, cool.

When we had a new bath its feet had to be raised on various heights of wood to stop the water sloping at some weird angle. Well, the water would have been level as that’s the way of water, and the bath would have been strangely angled, but you know what I mean. The two hidden staircases which makes things sound a lot grander than they are, leading to a hidden bedroom and the other just a rickety alternative route upstairs. The roof supports in the loft made from spare fencing stakes. All these peculiarities are what makes a house a home and not that dreaded box. I can put up with sash window draughts – it’s just ventilation, innit? Mice in the walls, bats in the roof, battalions of wood lice, kindergartens of spiders, dust and detritus from the wood burners. All of which are inevitable in an old place like this. Have to say though, I’m eternally grateful that the house isn’t thatched. There are enough rats around as it is without them nesting above my head.