Found a house on Purplebricks tonight and it's only around eight hundred thousand pounds. It's in Bodmin, a four-hour drive west from London and it looks like a pretty place. I could be invisible anywhere, truth be told, as long as I know where to get things like..wait, nevermind. Watch batteries, vacuum belts and kids' snowsuits used to be the triple-threat, once I knew where to buy those things in a new city I had it all figured out.
Now there's Amazon and forty other online places and the internet so it's not so hard to find what I need.
This is a four-bedroom rural two-story with greenhouses and a sunroom and a kitchen with a very big aga stove and it looks bright and quiet and peaceful. It looks nice. No imposing historical architecture, no glaring modern twists, just a slightly shabby and light-filled home that is cheap, probably because of the location. It might be a little too invisible and so I will resume my search. I still think if I'm going to do this is should be an island so I can literally as well as metaphorically cut myself off from the world proper, misanthrope as I am, and live out my days knitting by the sea, death metal in my headphones, heartbreak in my bones.
The Devil hovers, hungry as if for a bone, soaked by the blood of the past, baptized by the rain at present, unsure of a certain future. If I show him this house he'll just buy it and keep it, just in case. He's done that before. So I won't say too much about it and I'll come back to it in a few weeks and decide then.