poliphilo

The house- abandoned in the middle of its makeover- looks like a newly excavated Pompeiian villa.

But I'm very good at editing out information I don't want to engage with. Mess- what mess?

And I'm hopeless at housework. Some people can just whisk round a room and it looks great; I plod round a room and it looks exactly as it did before.

I wouldn't know where to start.

I dream of living in a vast, white, minimalist apartment: Gleaming wood floors, no ornaments, furniture from the Bauhaus, a single late-period Picasso on the wall, windows looking out from a great height over a rainy northern city...

I put this apartment into a story once and the first thing my heroine did- being a surrogate for me- was to cover the floor with an enormous toy train set, complete with houses and bridges and hundreds of little people.