Living the good life

Subject: Living the good life.

"Thump" that's the sound of hitting reality as we return home from the delux accommodation of our holiday home in Wales. From the gosh what a super place, look at the kitchen, and marvel at the bedrooms, to the reality of the way we live on the other side of the railway track. Take the work area of the kitchen work tops. I had measured up the cupboards in the fantasy of transporting my kitchen into something along the lines of what we had there even if only to find ways of storing things away out of sight when not in use. The reality is that in calculating the work top space alone I would say we have about an eighth of the space and in fact everything is roughly scaled back by the same proportions. The size of the bedrooms and bathrooms each on suite has in our house to be rescaled to one bathroom for all the bedrooms in a house of 'just about making it'. Underfloor heating is replaced with hot water bottles to supplement the central heating as we replace the heat which has drained out over the week of our absence.

The sheer clutter of our living as we surround ourselves with things is a far cry from the spartan utility of a holiday home where having limited yourself with the actual things you need, not the stuff you've bought over the years which mostly are superfluous and makes one realise how much we accumulate. This lack of clutter is the main cause of the shock between where we stayed and home but the moment you try to throw things out that nagging, niggling voice in your head says "no, I might need it".
Closing the door on a house returned to its pristine condition 'made a condition of the let', my memories will play havoc with me as I struggle to shift things around at home seizing any space to place the things you bought when on holiday, little realising that your home was already full.
It's only a passing reflection, soon we will settle back into our normality, the occurrence of an earnings gap which has become steadily wider over the decades. We have to keep things in proportion and remember the gaps below us, from the destitute and homeless sleeping in shop doorways last night, to the houses who's occupants have to choose between the heating or putting food in their mouth. The families which fill each nook and cranny with children and a trail of unpaid bills and the ongoing fear of being evicted are another level as are the overcrowded homes with rebellious teenagers distraught by their own impotence to leave the nest and make a life of their own. Up and down the land the demographic dictates the level of expectancy, some have none whilst for others their expectancy is limitless and they find the palaces which are available in the Sunday Times Property Magazine, a snippet over three million.
Each wakes up in the morning and anticipates a new day. Some busy with making more, some contemplating what they don't have and others what they can never imagine to have. Perhaps as with most things it's in our imagination that we allow ourselves to play tricks with ourselves, indulging in a dose of how the other side lives and whilst unsettling we all have to come to terms with reality and I can't wait till next years extravaganza is revealed.