From my Substack diary of Sunday, 14th. June 2026

I like my home, but I do not love it. I have two sitting rooms – or reception rooms to use the estate agent jargon. I don’t actually call them sitting rooms, other than the smaller of the two and even then only for the purposes of this diary. It is an old-fashioned term, a bit like a withdrawing room, which over time became shortened to drawing room. Who has a drawing room these days?

I have long known that because I like to listen to music, watch movies, read books, entertain friends and write essays, blog posts and stories, I need a number of rooms. A study, a cinema room and a music/bar room would be ideal. That may seem extravagant, and it probably is. However, we all enjoy different lifestyles, and I suspect that a great many people would be happy with the more usual living room and a dining room, although even then it is not uncommon to hear of a ‘spare’ bedroom being used as a study or home office. So I suppose I am not so different after all. They have three rooms and that would suit me also. The fact that I live alone seems to put people off, but that is a story for another day.

So, I have a room which I use for reading, listening to music and conversation – with no TV distraction. It is home for all my books, records, CD’s and hi-fi. It is not ideal for two reasons. Firstly, it should also be my study, but there is no space for a desk and all my photography kit. Secondly, it is right next to my neighbours living room, something I am conscious of every time I want to play an LP. I do not want to be thought of as a ‘noisy neighbour’.

The larger of the two rooms is essentially a cinema room. It is far from ideal as the only wall against which I can place the screen – along with the cinema amp, 4K player and Apple TV – faces an expanse of windows and French doors. At this time of year, all I can see on the screen, right up to 10 o’clock in the evening, is a reflection of the garden. One wall has an ugly ‘fireplace’ with a gas fire that might as well be fake for all the use it is – two square metres of real estate wasted that would otherwise be an ideal location for a cinema system. In other respects the cinema/living room is very pleasant. Of course, I get to enjoy movies far more in the winter than in the summer, which I have learned to live with.

I have learned in recent years that it is not the overall size of the home that is important but its layout. I could quite happily live in a home that is two-thirds the size of this one, but which has a more appropriate and flexible internal layout. I am a big fan of ‘open plan’, where space becomes multi-purpose. But finding such a place in the rental sector, which is inherently deeply conservative, is nigh-on impossible. If only there were such things as imaginative landlords and imaginative estate agents. Actually, I suspect there are – I just haven’t found them yet.