Inside the Fortress of Solitude

The main thing I will miss when we move to our new house is having a loft.

Casa Sicily is built on three stories – with a bedroom, bathroom and small “store” on the top floor inside the roof. This, it seems, is a fairly common trick developers use these days to build bigger, more expensive houses on a smaller “footprint” of land.

As we prepare to move next month, I have been spending a bit of time in the loft digging through strata of junk like a geologist of our lives. The deeper I go, the older the stuff I find and (in general) the less Elvira or I remember ever having owned it. I confidently expect to find a fully-preserved dinosaur skeleton right at the back.

Or if not a dinosaur then a rat.

I never mentioned the rat on here, did I?

No, too bloody right I didn’t. I was trying to sell a house – I’m not a complete idiot.

Last winter, we got a rat. How did we know it was a rat and not a mouse? Well, considering their respective body sizes, no mouse could have survived pooing out what we discovered in the loft.

And unfortunately also in the kitchen, where it chewed through the top of a cupboard to nibble on the contents of the fruitbowl and boxes of breakfast cereal.

So we got the council ratcatcher in, who left little boxes of poison around, which the rat studiously ignored to continue on his merry destructive way. Every so often we’d hear him scuttling about in the ceiling.

Eventually, we got rid of him by pure dumb luck – the ratcatcher pointed out some holes in the exterior of the house whereby it appeared to have been getting in. I poured a load of gravel down one of them, and we never heard it again. Thankfully, it seems I trapped it outside rather than inside.

We did have a mouse die up there once. It liquefied and seeped through Roger Jr’s bedroom ceiling. I scraped it off while standing on my head then painted over it. 

But as I now clear out the loft, digging my way through the “rat shit era” back to happier times, I come to feel a great sadness that our new house won’t have such a manly fortress of solitude above it.

Yes, while the other Sicilies have all stuck their heads up into the loft (Elvira, I should point out, refers to it as a “false roof” – which gives makes it seem much more secretive than it really is), I am the only one who has ever made the desperate scramble from the top of the ladder through the hatch. It is my domain.

In practice, that means there are areas of intense orderliness alongside – and frequently beneath – regions of chaos. It is as good a map of my brain as you are likely to find without actually vivisecting me.

However, what I will miss most is the incredible physical workout a trip into the loft provides.

1. During the summer, it is insanely hot. Sauna hot – and the atmosphere of fibreglass and wood dust stirred up by moving anything is wonderfully exfoliating.
2. While you are up there, getting around involves some of the most demanding Pilates-style gymnastics I have ever had to perform. Diagonal wooden beams, unboarded floors, water pipes and two – yes two – TV aerials force one to manoeuvre with the deliberation, care and prehensile feet of a Slow Loris. Otherwise, you end up taking a heavy blow to the head or spine or impaling yourself in a location where nobody else can get to you.
3. Taking all this into consideration, attempting to extract heavy boxes and other articles between these obstacles without falling through the ceiling – and then to lower them down onto the landing without flattening the inevitable toddler mucking around with the ladder below – is a feat that never fails to reduce me to a state of total physical exhaustion.

Yes, I will miss the loft. But I will have a garage instead...