Regular readers may remember me mentioning the house I and my family lived in between 1983 and '87, before moving back to our previous abode, the one in which I now reside today. A friend of my brother stayed in the spare room of that other house for around 9 months or so before getting a place of his own, and my brother moved into a flat after around 3 years, leaving just myself, my parents and the dog in a house that was far too big for us. Then, by a fortuitous quirk of fate, our former home became available so we returned to it after 4 years and 3 months away.
It had been madness to move to that other house from the start, as I was 24, going on 25, and my brother was 28, going on 29; did our parents think we were going to live with them forever? Interestingly, a few years ago, I found a letter from the council, which revealed that my parents had already started looking for another house only a year after moving into the new one. Anyway, while still in that other house, I eventually 'inherited' both rooms that had once been occupied by my brother and his pal, meaning I had 3 rooms to myself on the upper floor.
In the middle room, the open doorway looked out onto a vertically-long mirror on the hall wall opposite, reflecting part of the interior of the room, which looked remarkably similar to the layout of my bedroom in our previous (and now my present) home when I was in the hallway and looking through the open door. In our new home I'd lie on my spare bed (my main one was in one of the adjoining rooms), gazing at the reflection, and pretend that I was looking into my old room as it afforded me some pleasing feelings of nostalgia.
However, before I continue, let me first explain something so that you can fully envision the picture I'm trying to paint in the paragraphs directly following the one below.
Nowadays I sometimes use my bathroom as a kind of 'workshop' whenever I'm repairing old comics or giving them a slight colour touch to restore their visual appearance. I'll sit on the toilet seat (with the lid down) and with a board across my knees, and apply my restoration skills to whatever comic requires my attention. The reason for this is because the bathroom window is on the left side of the seat, and the natural daylight which streams through usually compensates for my slight colour-blindness by enabling me to better match whatever colours need touching up (oo-er, missus) and/or applying Chinese archival repair tape.
Obviously, because I'm not in there using the facilities for their usual purpose, I don't bother closing the bathroom door, which means that I can look out across the hall landing at my room on the other side. When my bedroom door is also open, it looks like the reflection in the mirror of my former room in the previous house, though in this instance I'm looking at the actual original view, not a reversed image of it. Incidentally, the mirror nowadays hangs on the hall wall downstairs, where it was originally situated before we flitted in 1983 and then relocated it upstairs across from what became a spare room for me.
Anyway, I just thought it odd that what was previously a reflection of a former 'reality' is now once again the reality itself, and when I remember this, I'm reflecting on what was at one time a mere reflection. In that other house I missed my old room, and now, in this house, I miss the reflection that resembled it - even though I'm reunited with the original. Surely there's some kind of irony or significance inherent in the situation, though perhaps I should have spared you the tedious detail of my reminiscence? I'm sure you'll tell me - either in a comment or by an all-pervading lack of any response at all.
Admit it - you don't get this kind of deep, psychological introspective nonsense pondering of such trivial matters on other blog sites, do you? What do you mean, "Thank goodness for that!"?
