Sunday, December 25, 2016

The little cabin


I've been reading Jill Homer's books and dreaming of Alaskan wilderness, life on the bike and out of a bivi bag and every time I put the book down I have to return to my own drudging life of city scapes, life in an engineering office and from a stone-fronted terraced house with a draughty loft and a minor stream running through the basement.

I just started to read 'Arctic Glass'. Page 2 on the kindle recounts a return home from work to their 'little one-room cabin' and I look around me and finally feel like I am lucky to live here. Not because I have 6 rooms (if you count the drafty loft and a the basement with its trickle) but because this is my one room cabin. To have more than this we would need to work harder, gamble more on loans, pay more interest and do / spend less time / money on bikes.

Our 6 rooms - living, kitchen, bed, spare (just big enough for a single bed and a clothes horse), loft and basement mean that the only people who visit are hardy or close family and therefore the only people who understand our overflowing home of bikes, muddy fell shoes, excessive outdoor gear and wetsuits hanging from every corner of those spare rooms. And Sheffield is our perfect city. It provides our jobs and gives us somewhere serviced from which to access the Peak. It is our basecamp.

The only thing I'd change? Our noisy neighbour but really, he's a dickhead less than 1 in 20 days of the year.

And so the trudgery continues of working to support the cabin, gradually, very gradually turning it into somewhere more cosy and less cruddy - give or take a few damp spots - as, after 4 years of being here we finally get around to 'sorting the house out'.

Note to visitors: it's still going to be a hovel by your standards

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