Homeless Sweet Homeless

So I have now been homeless for a week. I am by no means on the streets, staying in a combination of with friends and in B&Bs. But I technically do not have a roof over my head, and certainly do not have a room of my own, in the Virginia Woolf sense of the word. While I move from place to place each night, Bish is residing in a cattery in Edgeware, and my stuff resides in storage in Hangar Lane.

This move has underlined the fact that I have far too much baggage – both literal and emotional. Despite dejunking twelve bin bags full of stuff to the charity shop in the course of the move, I have still managed to fill a 20-foot square storage cage with a load of crap. Once I find a place to move to, and take my stuff out of storage, some careful sorting needs to be done to reduce that amount.

I did manage to sell all my furniture with the exception of the pink ottoman I’ve had since I was little. My sofa went to a young couple who were moving to Brighton to start a new life together. My chest of drawers, bought from the IKEA bargain basement at Wembley last October were delivered to a woman in Ealing. My bed and bedside table went to a couple, one half of which was a totally hot kiwi builder who put a smile on my face when he came to collect it with his friend, only for him to tell me that he did in fact want the bedside table I was selling with the bed, the one his girlfriend had declined, and I had to empty all my unmentionables into a plastic bag as he stood there watching me. I’m still not sure if I was happier to have such a hottie in my bedroom (it’s been a while) or if I’m more hugely embarrassed about the contents of my bedside table being on display to aforementioned hottie…

As I continue my search for places to live, I find myself considering places way over budget (and that was my budget before I reduced it), rooms shared with young Australian guys (I think I’m really too old to be sharing a room with anyone other than a lover) and rooms with single beds (I might as well become a nun). London has an abundance of rooms available, but finding something suitable seems on a par with locating the Loch Ness Monster. I’m contacting many people with cats in the hope they’ll allow another, but most of them won’t.

Advice from loved ones has been to consider rehoming Bish. The desperateness of the situations cries for drastic action, and I am the first to admit that my life would be much easier if I didn’t have him. However, part of me is angry that I have to even consider such a thing. Is it really so impossible to find somewhere to live with a cat? An article in the Independent online from October 2012, with a quote from the Cats Protection that “Since the UK recession, we have received many more requests from people to take in their cats, with owners saying they are losing their jobs, their homes, or moving into rented accommodation,” (read the full article here http://www.independent.co.uk/property/house-and-home/pets/news/cruel-for-cats-hard-times-for-humans-lead-to-an-epidemic-of-stray-pets-8209886.html.)

I have had Bish for almost 14 years. He outlasted my ex-husband, who was the one who found him for me back in 2000 when I was looking for some feline company shortly after buying my first home at the age of 21. While I do feel like he could have a better home with someone else, my heart wrenches at the thought that he could go somewhere much worse. He is an old boy now, and I can’t bear the thought of him ending up somewhere he is unloved.

I don’t know what will happen in the future. Right now, to me, it feels hopeless. I will be 36 next month, and while it’s not good to wish your life away, I wish it was 40, because maybe then this whole thirty-something crisis would be over, and I would be settled. When I set up this blog in January 2012, the title of 33andlostinlife just seemed so apt. Two and a half years later, and I feel even more lost. I don’t know which direction my life is going, and it just seems to get worse. I have received other advice: to leave London and move up North. But I don’t think that is the answer. Right now I don’t have any answers though, and I can’t trust myself to make the right choices.

I feel like my inner directional compass is skewed. Like Sarah in the film, Labyrinth, who is offered the choice of two doors, one which leads to the Goblin King’s castle and the other to, dumdumduuuuum Certain Death. She is told by the Four Guards that she must solve a riddle in order to proceed, and that two of the guards always tell the truth, and the other two always lie. As she uses her logic to ask a question which will give her the answer to which door she should take to the Goblin King’s castle, she smugly pushes open the door and announces, “I think I’m getting smarter!”. Promptly she falls down a shaft and into another puzzle, her goal seemingly getting further and further away.

So the moral of this blog: no matter how bad things get, they can always get much worse. But as long as you can quote cheesy 80s movies which involve David Bowie in tight leggings, well life can’t be all that bad, can it?

“Yes, but is it possible to put a cat flap in one of these doors…?”