Tyrwhitt, Tressillian & Breakspears
After months of endless deliberation, visitation and cogitation, the home is starting to look real. The walls have been burnished with fresh paint. The floors scrubbed. The kitchen has acquired the necessary clutter of a man that feeds off a variety of carefully chosen nourishment. After four weeks, I’m coming to recognise the various quirks and oddities that time, in its slow unravelling, reveals to the new inhabitant of every home.
Running has furthered the acclimatisation. Street names are starting to stick. At the mid-point of my run, when my paces transform into fully charged strides, I cut across a darkened pit of mulch and set towards the overhanging branches that line the outer fringe of the fields, after which I begin to trace an outline of the tree bark that lies next to the bright blue bin, as if toppled during battle – just beyond all this, I remember that sweeping left-hander past the sign for Montague, writ large in faded black type, the postcode nestled in red in the corner. And soon after, a slew of others – Tyrwhitt, Tressillian, Breakspears – a trio I think of fondly for their originality, which in turn has given me a small sense of identity in an otherwise unfamiliar place. Should I ever have to defend my turf, these honourable gentlemen (for that is how I now think of them in a world of Smiths, Bennetts, Johnsons and Davies), would be sure to leap to my defence, with a sharpness of tongue that only men with such surnames could possess.
I’ve learned the curvature of the pavement I turn to during the final straight, raised and exposed, crackled by the uprooting of the nearby trees – each ridge cradling a nest of autumnal dirge. It’s here that I know I am amongst my last few steps, the pace winds down to a slather, a quick check at the iPod watch, a finger slide across plastic pauses the notes in my ears. I’m here, I think to myself panting. And for a split second I see what I saw the first time I walked up the path towards the grand black door – when what struck me most was the building’s height and it’s gleaming yellowstone brick. A home not a house and that peculiar feeling of being able to call something – beyond a mere book, bike or strained pair of trousers – one’s very own.
