Today’s the start of my fifth year at the castle, and that means it’s now the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left home. I love being here, so it’s strange to remember how reluctant I was to move out of my original lair back in 2011.

Living there had got really difficult, but for a long time I stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. Instead, I chose to live in just one room because I couldn’t make it up the stairs to my bedroom without help.

Being unable to manage the three flights of external stairs meant that once inside my flat I was stranded. With little or no support my life felt increasingly limited. There were many distressing moments that I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time. For example I got stuck on the floor, unable to get myself up, many more times than I ever told anyone about.

By contrast, living at the castle has given me a quality of life and a level of independence that I thought I’d lost forever.

You may be wondering where this sudden outpouring of love for the castle has come from. It was triggered by what I did when I woke up yesterday. I opened my blind and ticced:

“Morning trees, you pillars of predictability.”
“Happy New Year trellis, right angled wonder.”
“Good work brick-work.”
“You’re still lamp-post even after all this time.”
“Greetings my gutsy guttering.”

I found this spontaneous appreciation for the things that make up the view from my bedroom window both funny and moving.

Before writing this I looked back nostalgically at posts I’d written previously about what I can see from my window and found that it was almost exactly four years ago that I first wrote about this and described the surreal ticced conversations I’d been having with the trees and the lamp-post.

There have been lots of changes in my life over the last few months and at times some of these have been challenging. So it was good to be reminded that some things remain constant and that big changes can lead to positive outcomes.