Notes from Home: Albert Hill on the enduring role of home in daily life
Hear stories of
life in isolation from members of our team in our series Notes from Home. Here, The Modern House co-founder
Albert Hill shares what he’s learning to appreciate at home during life under
lockdown.
Albert Hill: What was once only a docking station, a place to recharge before heading out once again into the clatter of the wider world, now must meet new needs. With schools and workplaces wound down, high streets in hibernation and coffee shops no longer serving lattes, the home has had to absorb a wealth of activities that used to be performed elsewhere.
The anxiety
that our homes would be woefully ill-equipped, becoming a nightmarish merger of
under-funded school, cramped office and restaurant serving just beans and pasta
(with no loo roll in the toilets) is understandable. Yet that isn’t quite what
has come to pass. We realise that actually, in their own quiet way, our homes
have been successfully multi-functioning for years (or rather for centuries).
It’s where we’ve always cooked, read, played with the kids and even sat on the
sofa sending work emails. These are simple, human things that we’ve done
without labouring under the labels of ‘distance learning’ or ‘remote working’.
Now that we
have the time and energy to revel in more meaningful relationships with our
home what emerges are not its deficiencies but its quotidian delights. The
light that filters through the trees, casting evening shadows on the wall, for
instance, or the snugness of the armchair that you have never before spent so
much time in. As the outside world melts away, so does much of the noise, the
one-upmanship, the aspiring to something other and you are left living with
what you have. And as you look around your raft, the lifeboat on this turbulent
sea, you see that it’s actually rather pleasant and perhaps, even, previously a
little underappreciated.
Your home also
seems to be enjoying quality time spent with you. Those Monstera Deliciosa,
majestic plants that are native to the tropical forests of Mexico but have been
cramped in the corner of your living room, are finally getting repotted into
something more befitting of their majesty. Those windows, smeared with the thin
grime of the city, have had their faces wiped. Those cupboards, guiltily
harbouring out-of-date paperwork and unworn clothes have been released of their
heavy burden (or at least had their pain recognised). Those pictures on the
wall that you’ve never really got on with have finally been stood down from
duty.
In these
unusual times, the concept of value has also been reappraised. As society
desperately needs, for instance, the previously disregarded roles of fruit
pickers, delivery drivers and deep cleaners (and not so much the sports stars,
celebrities and CEOs), so too do we look at our homes and think again about
everything there. We forget what we paid for something, or what magazine we saw
it in, those things that seemed so important then but seem an anachronism now,
and look at our world in a more honest light. It’s the way the colour catches
your eye, the texture of the table when you touch it, the memories that certain
bits of furniture evoke. It’s these things that become more important as they
exist not in the context of the convoluted systems of the outside world that
you drag in the door with you every time you return home but instead in the
slower, smaller world that you find yourself in now.
Those who have
a garden can’t believe their luck – their own tiny slice of our vast natural
world – and those who don’t still relish their encounters with the wild world
where they can. Herbs grown on the sill above the sink, crocuses pushing
through cracks in the pavement and (as seen on a colleague’s social media
account today) one of London’s wild green parakeets feasting on a red apple.
That’s not to
say that there aren’t discomforts that emerge from a life of semi-confinement
and virus avoidance. Discomforts both small, like the sting of hand sanitizer
on already-cracked hands, and more enormous (where do we start) but for many
they have come with the flowering of many previously hidden pleasures. An
increasingly common refrain that we hear, this time in the words of a Chinese
schoolteacher recently read online is “I will miss it when we go back to the
fast-paced speed of the ‘real world’”.
Some people, of
course, will be bearing the full brunt of what this pandemic really means
either by being in the grip of, or on the front line of fighting, Covid-19.
Many will be experiencing symptoms, both severe and mild, and for them the home
will also be a sanatorium. In today’s world we are not so used to confronting
serious illness at home – this happens in hospitals, much like the majority of
births and deaths. Yet perhaps this period is also going to remind us that our
marriage to our home is one that will thrive in sickness and in health.
The
expectation, however, is that the majority of us will emerge from this period,
this katabasis, physically unscathed and yet psychologically changed forever.
We will also have a new-found love and understanding of the home that bore us
through it. It will probably be emptier of stuff and yet far fuller of meaning.
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