My room

I have found a room. Entirely predictably, my patience with house-hunting amounted to something infinitesimally greater than non-existent. The first place I saw was pleasingly cheap but was (despite factoring in housing-cultural-relativism) a total dive. I mean, the wiring went THROUGH the bedroom window. Mmmm, that delightful ‘sleeping outdoors’ sensation, in the middle of a sub-zero Syrian winter. The second place I saw was actually reasonable and my brain started firing instructions at me: TAKE THIS PLACE! TAKE IT AT ONCE! But it was way over my budget; it was already taken; in fact I’d had to wake up the tenant (not to mention his wife and child) in the middle of the night to see it. Sigh sigh sigh.

So, when I saw a room with lots of ‘potential’ in a charming old-school Arab house with rooms around a courtyard (like the house I was born in!), I was actually reasonably decisive about the whole thing. Once I’d taken out the ‘torture chamber chic’ light-bulb (a merciless white glare) and put in a rug and few bits of nice cloth things the room actually looked kind of alright. Anyway, step 1 is out of the way...