I wonder how many different houses I’ve lived in? There were the two while I was growing up in Cambridge – a newly built ground floor flat and then a maybe turn of the century semi-detached, then a split level bungalow in Weston-super-Mare (it was built on the side of a hill and had three steps up to the bedrooms) I headed north to Manchester to go to the Polytechnic and life became a series of rented bedsits, so-called flats, shared houses, until a friend bought his own house and me and a couple of others moved in to help with the rent.
I moved to London, and a shared room in a house – I only lasted about six months there for various reasons, before I headed back to Manchester. A friend and I bought a flat together where I lived for a couple of years, then I bought my own place in Oldham. It was a semi-detached house, and perfectly okay, but it was a very unhappy time of my life, and after about five years I moved again, still in Oldham, but to a lovely , brand-new bungalow. Not only was this bungalow lovely, but it was lucky. I’d only been there a year or so when this chap I barely knew asked me out on a date, and within a year we were married, within another year we had a child, and eighteen months later, another! Good fortune indeed!
For various reasons we decided to leave the lovely bungalow and move back to Weston-super-Mare – in fact to a small village right next to it called Uphill. We moved into my late father’s bungalow, before the good fairy waved her magic wand and we were able to buy the house of our dreams which accommodated our family better. And we have been here very happily ever since! Children have now left home and we are here, settled in our home. And so that’s how many – well, roughly how many, places I’ve lived!
If you want to learn more about the house I lived in in Manchester, read the blog of my friend and blogger Andrew Simpson, who still lives there: https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/ – look in the index for ‘The story of a house’.
Lois Elsden 