It’s a bit of a dull and damp day but still I feel nervous excitement. When we arrive the door is open and we just wander in, like as if it was just any old bricks and mortar. I watch how I step up the path my feet were smaller and my school shoes come to mind. The agent breaks the magic with his introduction and then I begin to look around. The stairs always set aside our house because my Dad turned them around to face the other way. He did this so that we could make the landing into a shower room upstairs. The bathroom was down stairs and so bloody cold and damp. The stairs are slatted and so fashionable in the seventies but now look just weird and nothing of what I would choose. I remember the day he took the stairs out,  it was fine walking up the aluminium ladder to go to bed but heck I was not keen on coming down in the morning. Dad threw me over his shoulder fireman style and carried me down with my eyes fast shut. The lounge was plain and had nothing of my Dad’s DIY efforts visible. The coving and ceiling rose are the same and I can remember the design because as a kid (and probably only children have the time or inclination to study things in this way), I remember lying on my back studying the shapes of the coving thinking it may be fruit or boobs which was amusing to me. There still remains a ‘borrowed light ‘ Perspex window between the dining room and the hall with my Dad’s trademark (cover all) beading in all the joints of the woodwork, and the serving hatch that mum insisted on and then moaned for two years that Dad never got around to adding gloss paint but left it undercoated. He lost interest after the main thing was completed. She had lots of proper seventies dinner parties, just like Abigail’s party. She had a Kaftan and they would listen to James Last Does Classic eating prawn cocktail, Goulash and black forest gateaux around a candle perched onto a Mateus ros’e bottle. I don’t think dad gave a shit about having people over but he usually got wonderfully amusingly drunk. Mum not so amusing but totally bladdered none the less. The kitchen reminded me of Sundays, chops and mash with horrible white cabbage which I never wanted to eat because it looked like white cabbage butterflies and no gravy. The bathroom and toilet much worse that I remember, even colder, even damper and very black with mould. Mum stuck me and Jayne in that bath together with a bottle of Matey and we loved it once we were in. Mum bathed my cousin Emily once when they stayed with us and Emily was not keen at all, I thought it was funny. Upstarts polystyrene tiles still remain on the ceilings; they have a broken eggshell pattern which reminds me of childhood Easter egg surfaces. It’s still there I am sure because it’s a complete bugger to get off. All the bedrooms seem smaller but maybe I am just bigger. In Jayne’s room there is little evidence of the amazing carpentry my Dad did to make up for the fact that she basically slept in a cupboard. The only thing remaining of it is a small over the door cupboard and a shelf which she put all of her cassettes on neatly. The corner was curved because Dad didn’t want her sitting up in bed a catching her head on it. My room was dull and I struggled to see how I had such fond memories. Dance routines, Duran Duran everywhere except the light switch and the view from the window where I would write messages on A4 paper to my friend Alison Barlow who lived across the lane. We could see each other’s bedroom and if we wrote big enough we could have a right good chat. Mum caught me once and was so pissed off because I was supposed to be thinking about my behaviour as a punishment in my room but I was laughing and not thinking at all. The shower room was grotty and as I look at it now I see the fault in Dads work. Really awful. It crossed my mind that if I was able to buy the house I would rip out everything he had done, so I would probably never come into this house again because that would be exactly what the next occupier would do. I would never be able to take out Dads work. My thoughts got interrupted here by the agent who was chatting in my ear about how he couldn’t figure out why the stairs were the wrong way. I pretended I had just had a thought and explained how the shower room was probably the former landing. I think he thought I was a genius. At least I gave something back after wasting his time pretending that I was a potential buyer. In the garage was one of the old kitchen units. Really old from ‘day one’ three or four kitchens back from the one that’s there now. It was amazing to see it. I remembered how dad would not throw anything away in case it came in handy. It’s a family joke. Best of all it had a little sticker on it which said ‘Pickfords do not remove’ placed there in 1884 when we moved to Leicester. So silly how that is still there and tells a little story all on its own. On the way out at the end of our appointment I caught sight of the backwards 31 through the porch and my heart flipped. I don’t know why it’s just home.