There Is No Such Thing As An Unhautned House.

I wrote those words down last night. I must have done, for there they are, scrawled in my semi-legible handwriting across the top of a chapter draft I’m reworking. I’ll often do that. Lines or titles or just an interesting combination of words will occur to me at the oddest times and I scribble them down on the nearest scrap to hand. I’m supposed to keep an ‘ideas pad’, but I can never find it when I need it.

Things is, I don’t actually remember why I wrote this. I don’t know what it refers to. Is it a plot, some dialogue, a theme that, last night anyway, I wanted to explore ?

The mystery of it makes it even more apt, but it’s also surprisingly true and for want of anything else to do with it I’m turning it into this week’s blog.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived the ghosts of those before have tickled my toes in the middle of the night.

(See, you can get copy out of anything…)

When I was five years old (or thereabouts) we moved house. Fair enough. Millions of families do it, but perhaps with not quite the same Byzantine connections. My grandparents moved into the house we’d vacated. My parents knew, in some fashion, the people whom they brought the new house off. It transpired that my grandparents had briefly lived in the same house for a while in-between the births of my Uncle and Mum.

For years I was utterly convinced that you swapped houses with someone you knew and couldn’t fathom how my folks had lived in High Wycombe for a while. Who had they known down there to swap their house with?

When Beck and I first moved in together it wasn’t the spectre of Victorian Londoners that lingered but rather the immediately preceding occupants. Especially in the kitchen.

“Hey,” Beck said unpacking pots, “ they’ve left some wine glasses. Well, that saves having to buy them. Oo, look at that hanging on the wall.”

A couple of weeks later there was a knock at the door.

“Evening,” the former tenant said with an awkward smile. “You know how I explained that I was half-way through a passport application? Has any of the paperwork turned up?”

“Oh sure,” I replied gesturing for him to follow me inside.

“Great. Did I… Um… Did I by any chance leave a wok behind?”

“A wok?”

“Quite a good one, actually. I’d really like it back.”

“Can I finish cooking the dinner in it first?”

“Oh. No, no, no. It’s fine. Keep it.”

“No. Really. I can transfer it to another pan. Won’t take a second to wash it up.”

“Honesty. I can always get another,” he was backing out the door as he waved his hands.

How very English of us. Anyway, we kept it, but then deliberately left it behind when we moved out. It seemed to belong more to the flat than to us.

(Beck had already broken all the wine glasses, though.)

The second place we lived threatened to be haunted by very old, tatty, horrible furniture. I’d negotiated with the agent so that we’d rent it unfurnished.

“It won’t be a problem. I doubt that sofa or the mattresses would pass the fire regs nowadays. I’ll get the landlord to shift it.”

Of course when we moved in a lot of it was still there.

“Is nice furniture,” said the landlord in broken English who, for reasons that now escape me, I nicknamed Slobodan Milosevic and could, embarrassingly, never remember his real name.

“We have our own furniture. Look, the contract says unfurnished.”

“Even this lovely old thing,” he said stroking a sixties formica cabinet with what looked like a blood stain down the side. “Is very, very nice. Okay, okay. I come back Saturday and get rid. Good?”

By “get rid” I’d presumed he meant take to the dump. I didn’t for a second expect him to burn the whole bloody lot in one of the biggest bonfires I’ve ever seen. The air was thick with plastic toxins that sunny April afternoon and, as the garden was only four feet wide, the whole street threatened to catch afire. I sat, nervously, at the top of the stairs to the back door with a futile bucket of water to hand.

This place, where I sit now, is haunted by the world’s most stoned DIY enthusiast. From the doors to the cupboard under the stairs with the hinges fitted backwards so each door only opens a couple of centimetres to the hexagonal Star-Trek-holo-deck-esque door frame to the lounge, it’s just too weird at times. There’s an alarm clock built into the roof truss and a severely over-enthusiastic brick fireplace, but my favourite is the intercom (that no longer works) to the front door fitted next to where the head of the bed would go, in-between the fitted wardrobes, if we used the bedroom as a bedroom rather than an office-studio.

I like to picture him in a white suit with a pink shirt open to the navel, hairs wisping out past the buttons, a gold medallion cool against his nipple.

“Well come right on up, baby.”

All of this pales next to the idea of a friend of mine spending the summer guarding a disused convent against squatters in the middle of the South Downs. Now, that’s going to give off spooky vibes at three in the morning.