Sunday seems to have gone on for so many days but rumor has it that tomorrow it will end. There is a confusion of wheelie bins in the street, but the main consensus is that the next bin day will be grey.

When time begins again, I may even write a poem. It has probably been a month since I last wrote anything. This used to worry me, but my poems seem to come like buses – nothing for a while then three at once. They get caught up in some kind of traffic jam of real life events and stuff.

To write, I need a bit of quiet in my head – but not a Sunday quiet. I need the quiet of life going on, just out of earshot. When the bin men come, it will be Tuesday and time will begin again.

Christmas and New Year have pretty much gone ahead without us this year, though we have indulged in a smattering of traditional occupations. I am currently eating a slice of Stollen, for example. If cake-eating is an occupation – I am sure it could oh so easily turn into one.

Today has been spent decking the halls with pictures and mirrors and curtains and things, endearing ourselves, I’m sure, to our new neighbors and their New Year hang-overs. The drilling and hammering was orderly and in short bursts, so hopefully no harm is done there. (Though some of the walls are suffering from a little scarring underneath the pictures and mirrors and curtains and things, poor dears.) Mostly today, I have been amazed at the variousness of fixings. I praise the Black and Decker drill with its attachments, and the multi-purpose screwdriver. Amen.

The house is slowly coming together and becoming recognisable as home. Like printing photographs in an old-fashioned dark room, it is appearing out of the print-tray. It needs a few more days in there to come more clearly into view though. And I need a beer.

For some reason, best known to itself, my throat has decided that the cold I had a month or so ago didn’t demand it enough attention, so it has decided to be sore again.  When I lived in the field with the chickens, I didn’t really have a cold for ten years.  Mixing with people has its drawbacks, but overall it’s to be recommended and is worth a little sneezing.

The office is now looking more like an office.  My desk arrived today, and I have put all of my PhD books onto a smallish bookshelf.  They are watching me now, expectantly.  I haven’t really had a chance to do any proper work on the Critical component of the PhD since September when the teaching started again, more’s the pity.  Before I can even think of Vasko Popa and Semantic Primes and whatever else I was thinking of before, I have a little stack of marking  looking at me squinty-eyed.  It has expectations of me, and must be done.  But first some more sneezing.

They say (whoever they are) that the state of your room is the state of your mind.  If this is true, my mind is like this: fairly organised clusters of things you cannot immediately find, but a bit of shifting will unearth them eventually.  True enough.  I think that even after the physical unpacking of belongings, my mind will still hold the ghostly imprint of my room no matter how much housework I do.

Yesterday, I began to populate the place with pictures and photographs and they are creeping like clusters of Plathian mushrooms up the stairs.  This is a house of many stairs, and we will need more pictures.  And I will probably not need to join the local gym, since we also live at the top of a hill, but we will see how that works out in the normal run of things.  I am thinking the kitchen floor might tolerate a trampoline and the ceiling seems high enough to cope with Tiggerish bouncing. But we shall see.

Our new house is a converted 1908 Co-Operative butcher’s shop, and still has  the ‘Butchery’ sign above the front window in green and gold.  Next door, which is now  flats, is ‘Grocery and Provisions.’  We slept here for the first time on Wednesday night, and have thus far been unhaunted by the souls of a hundred cows, nor heard midnight bleatings from long dead sheep.

All of the boxes have been unpacked except the books which edge the office like a Manhattan sky-line.  Our trusty builder and hero of all things complicatedly practical is making bookshelves the first week in January, and then once again indexed order will reign, praise be.

A couple of weeks ago I remembered the Butcher’s shop which I used to visit as a child, and thought this would be a good idea for a poem.  The collection I am writing is loosely based on my childhood, and in my childhood Butchery, the floor was covered in sawdust.  I wanted to include sawdust in the poem, but it didn’t want any.  Here is the poem:

The Butchery

By the time I was ten
I went to The Butchery alone
with a five pound note wrapped up
in a shopping list
inside my mother’s basket.

I always saw the pheasants first,
tied up at the ankle,
the empty screens of their eyes
clocking me as I dragged myself past,
my shoes turned to glue.

When I passed my list to Mr Lingly,
he would move his hands over
the inside-out animals on the counter
picking out eviscerated bits
to match my mother’s writing.

On the walk home
I thought of the thinly sliced tongue
sealed up in wax paper,
of the empty pelt I glimpsed
through a door at the back of the shop.

I still had the list in my hand,
with his blood fingerprints all over it.
The one thing not crossed off –
a line of illegible whorls
with a scratched question mark at the end.

It's nearly the last night of being in this house, and everything is terribly echoey. As I look round the office, there is more bubble-wrap than furniture. We are in a strange liminal place, recognisable only from the colours of the walls and shape of the rooms, as home. Tomorrow, at some point ntl will cut off the internet from here, in order to reconnect it to the new house on Wednesday. More then. And a new poem for a new house.