Home Alone

It’s hard to believe that it’s been four weeks since I started house-sitting in Croydon. It’s a roomy 2-story townhouse. For me, who has all my life been surrounded by siblings, nieces and nephews, relatives near or far, it’s very difficult to be on my own in an empty house. It’s made worse because I work at home. I don’t have workplace friends. There were days when I didn’t see anybody or talk to anybody at all. That’s fine every once in a while, but when it’s on a regular basis on a long period of time, you’d get a bit of cabin fever. So whenever I found I’ve left something at my apartment, I pretended to grumble but then I happily went back to visit the apartment.

The first two weeks I couldn’t sleep soundly. I kept hearing creaks and sqeaks and thumps and I worried that somebody was trying to break in. Then one day while I was mopping the floor, the mop fell and made a loud noise. I thought, if I lean that mop stick on the door, like the old-wives-tale of using a broom to repell burglar, that would make a nice alarm system. But then, there are three doors and three windows downstairs. Which one do I booby-trap? All? Every night? That’s ridiculuous. I wish I were MacGyver. I went upstairs to my room to look for inspiration. A chair, a desk, a bed, a lamp post. Useless. But hey, the chair, the bed, the door. The bed, the chair, the door. That might work! I wedged the chair between the door and the bed. Nobody could enter without waking me up (theoretically) unless they enter from the window. But since the room is on the second floor, it’s rather unlikely (I hope). That night I slept like a baby for the first time in two weeks.