pre-emptive nostalgia

Sundays are for sleeping in, watching the sunlight stream into the room through bleary eyes, and then getting out of bed to watch breakfast being made.

And also for a walk to the Newington Library in the Cuming Museum Building on Walworth Road with huge skylights and dainty balconies all along the top half of their walls filled with books the reason for their being placed so high and beyond a door marked ‘Private’ I was yearning to know. And all the walls were painted in a lovely mint/pistachio-green.

Then, feeling absolutely saintly after finishing my Political and Legal Anthropology report a day before it is due (hurrah!), I spend the rest of the afternoon reading the Sunday papers by the dying light of day whilst having fridge-cooled Spanish omelette (leftover breakfast that tastes so much better cold with a dollop of salad cream or mayonnaise) washed down with a cup of tea.

Perhaps it’s that voice in the back of my head telling me to collect all my memories of living ‘sahth of the rivah’ that make these everyday things resonate with greater meaning than one would usually attribute to them. But all things must pass, as T said on Friday as we drank that last bottle of wine in the little late-night Italian place on Lower Marsh Street. And so they do.

Moving in with the ‘east-end wallahs’, as a classmate of mine once called her kind. Hopefully everything goes smoothly, and I’ll be there before Easter comes around and all settled in by the time I need to knuckle down and do some serious studying for my final exams.

Until then, I’ll continue making up lists of what I want my new place to have – sash windows, balcony/garden, kitchen with all mod-cons including an oven, rooms at least 3m in width and length, high ceilings, wooden floors, central heating, bathroom and/or power-shower, lots of light, nice quiet tree-lined street etc etc etc.

If I am going to move somewhere else, I really should make the most of it (and my lettings agent), shouldn’t I?