My Apartment

In his comment to my post on our concierge's passive-aggressive notes, Inexplicable Device commented that I am the only person he knows who lives in a place with a concierge. All I can say is he's obviously mixing with the wrong sort of people, but his comment has pushed me into writing a post about my flat.
When my poor old ginger tom cat eventually kicked the bucket I sold the two-bed terrace house I had lived in in Bearwood for fifteen years and bought this instead. I had bought the house originally to be near my mother, so what I spelled for me was the way I used to arrange my life around what she wanted rather than what I wanted, and it was actually quite a large house, so energy bills were escalating ridiculously, and I was getting to the point where heating and looking after it were becoming crippling to me.
I hadn't planned on living in the Chinese Quarter (in true witch style I walked past the building I was originaly aiming for the other day and noticed that it has developed an alarming stepped crack in the back wall - gulp), and this flat had actually been on the market for a year when I looked at it. I genuinely can't think why because there really isn't anything wrong with it, except that the previous owner decided to be difficult so I had to exceed his difficultness. When I looked round it just felt like home and I went for it.
The flat is on the second floor - convenient if the lift breaks or I have to jump out in a fire - and looks inwards on a courtyard. It therefore doesn't really have a view, but it means that despite the flat being in a noisy social area of the city centre, it feels secluded and in fact I had to sleep with the radio on to start off with because it was too quiet.
It is a keyworker flat, so it is built into the lease that it must always be sold at a certain proportion of the market value and only to certain classes of workers, which has left me in a very good financial position. In fact my largest outgoing is the ground rent and service charge which isn't that much. I hadn't sussed that because the flat is the size of a shoe box with low ceilings and good insulation it is ridiculously cheap to heat and light: people think it is very expensive to live in the city centre but my bills are lower than they ever were in the suburbs.
In energetic terms the area I live in is surprisingly much calmer than it ought to be. I do vaguely remember what stood here before this building was built - it was a random collection of the sort of industrial buildings which replaced the slum houses when people originally moved out of the city centre. Originally of course, this area was merely fields near the manor house, so it doesn't have the long energy imprint which some areas have. The warren of back-to-back 'courts' which were here until relatively recently must have been a nightmare of conflcting emotions and desperation, and in fact I found from Kelly's directories that very near here the only really long-term business was a pawn brokers. Change is rather the motif, and in fact I recently found an aerial photo from the 1960s and the only pre-war buildings still standing on it are two pubs and the shops which are now a National Trust museum. When you step out into the street the ethos is very much a frendly. busy, one, with the only difference from the usual Birmingham mix being that there is a preponderance of Chinese businesses.
As soon as I moved in I redecorated the whole place in a style which it pleases me to call 'fortune teller's tent'. Not for me the porridge shades in vogue at the moment; I like solid colours, ethnic stuff, and I like my atmosphere dark and mysterious. The electrician asked if I had been a great traveller, and while I hadn't the heart to tell him I'm the world's worst traveller because I get bored and restless on long journeys, I had to explain that the world came to me.
Despite it being so cheap people still think I'm living in the lap of luxury when they visit (as indeed I am, because it's the poshest place I've lived in my life). People are really taken with the slate tiles in the bathroom - and the black grout in between is much lower maintenance than white grout. The flat does have one of my personal indicators of luxury, a separate lighting circuit in the living room, so that when you flick the switch at the door the lamps come on and you don't have to go round and turn them on individually. The fact that these use the old style round-pin plugs would have given my dad much amusement, that I may have a dishwasher but I've still got round-pin plugs.
I don't really like the laminate floors, but elected to cover them with kilims from Ikea rather than have them ripped out. One of my little decorating things is that I hate gloss paint - again this is a thing which would give my mother the screaming abjabs - and I prefer to paint the woodward in the same matt pain I use for the walls and coat it in matt varnish - it makes the ceilings look higher.
Despite its cheapness people do comment that it's very posh to be living in the city centre. And of course there are times on some days, when one is looking out into the compound, drinking a sundowner, that one could wish the cries of the natives being restless were a little further removed.