WE’RE house-sitting for Christmas and New Year: a house we do not know and a family who are friends of friends. They have headed to the sun for two weeks and have two cats to be fed and watered. We needed a base in London: a perfect solution. It’s a huge old pile in north London, an extended family’s home, loved and littered with the accumulated clutter of decades.
They left it just as they live in it. At first, it felt strange sleeping in a bed with photos of other people’s parents on the dressing table and drawers full of their underwear and mugs full of their toothbrushes in the bathroom. But then it started to feel normal, like being part of a dynasty you have just discovered. And curiously, over Christmas our little family started to fit in and follow the same patterns and habits of our adopted home. We played the games in their cupboards: the Pictionary with no dice and a broken timer. We got our turkey from their butcher, and cooked it slowly in the old Aga. We learnt which lamps had dodgy switches and how the shower flooded, and which stairs creaked loudly when you came to bed late.
We found ourselves staring at the pictures on the wall, the mantelpiece crammed with ornaments from past holidays, the loos with the framed certificates and awards, piecing together a portrait of their lives. In a house full of books, we curled up on sofas and read, carefully returning the yellowing novels to their exact spots. I found myself talking on the phone to an elderly aunt as if she was my own, who rang to ask after the cats, before eccentrically sending them a Yuletide message. And then, on Christmas Eve, we raided a pile of DVDs under the TV and watched The Lives of Others – it seemed appropriate.
And I thought, how amazing to trust us, strangers met only once, to allow us access to a home with all their worldly belongings, and know that we would keep them safe. Last night, we sat in the large kitchen with one of the few additions we have made, as part of our own traditional Christmas ritual, a jigsaw from the National Gallery – Rousseau’s Tiger in a Tropical Storm. Its 1000 pieces impossible to piece together, and the incomplete picture left on the pine table for them to finish, will, we hope, be the only evidence remaining to show, briefly, how we have occupied their lives…
