The joys of a virtual peek through the keyhole
After eight weeks in a top-floor flat, I am possessed by the green-eyed monster. I am wildly, flourishingly, dementedly jealous of anyone with even the smallest, parchedest patch of outdoor space. Reading reports over the bank holiday weekend that one billionaire (Canadian) had sold his London townhouse to another billionaire (Russian) for £15million sparked the immediate, envious thought: bet they’ve got a garden.
The house was sold on the strength of a virtual tour. No poking in cupboards, no embarrassed inspection of the downstairs loo.
Naturally, (nosily), I went straight on the Beauchamp Estates website for a good goggle at the house. Apart from the fabulous showers – bigger than my kitchen – the house is blander than a dentist’s waiting room. Every monster sofa and leopard-print stool is separated by a barren tundra of tufted white carpet. Made me positively fond of my peeling wallpaper and ratty seagrass.
Still, nothing beats a spot of snooping. One of the small pleasures of lockdown has been Zooming through the keyhole. All those colleagues, made uniform by office hot desks, are now revealed in conference-call glory seated in front of bookshelves, airing racks, Venus Fly Traps and fluorescent tubes of light art spelling out a hopeful, hollow “Home Sweet Home”.
On Instagram I’ve become obsessed by the Welsh dresser in the kitchen of a modern art curator. “Oh,” I note, enlarging the screen for a better ferret, “the Ravilious mug is missing this morning.” Meanwhile, I am troubled by national PE teacher Joe Wicks’s spotless, soulless sitting room. Most of all: his empty mantelshelf. Get that man a pair of china King Charles spaniels!
I have hardly missed the theatre, the ballet, the cinema, but I do miss National Trust and English Heritage houses. The weekend pilgrimage to bothy, cottage or Martello tower. The sacred ritual of tea and cake and groundfloor gander. From the Bloomsbury Set’s Charleston in Sussex to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, from modernist architect Erno Goldfinger’s 2 Willow Road in Hampstead to TE Lawrence’s Clouds Hill in Dorset, this country is blessed with an embarrassment of homely riches.
A room of one’s own? I’m sick of mine. Time for a roam round someone else’s.
When historians come
to write of these “unprecedented” times what keepsake boxes will there be to rummage? Will scholars scroll through ancient Insta feeds and wonder how banana bread became such a potent amulet against the plague? Will archaeologists unearth the foundations of a thousand chicken coops, beehives and desperate office garden sheds? If my post is anything to go by – cards from my Mum, Marigold gloves from ebay – there won’t be many lockdown letters for future archivists to rifle.
Extracts from letters written to the poet Philip Larkin by Monica Jones, his on-again, off-again, often-suffering lover, have been revealed by the author and academic John Sutherland. Jones tells Larkin that she refuses to be “an object of pity like a beggar’s sore”. How vividly, woundedly, scornfully she comes to life. What rich meat in letters and diaries; what thin gruel in Twitter threads and Whatsapp chats. As Larkin almost wrote: what will survive of us is… what?