I’ve written recently about how much of a wrench it was to leave my old life in Cambridge. However as much as I valued that life I never felt entirely uncomfortable with where I was living, much as as my clear sense of what ‘home’ looked like created a problem in the 2010s in a shared life with the person who was then my life partner. The ten years (!!) I spent in Coventry left me with a vivid awareness of how we can linger on in situations which don’t nourish us because they are comfortable and reassuring. But it was striking to see these photos of my old house in Coventry (2008-2015) because I’m sad to realise how much I prefer this to the house in north Manchester I’m currently living in, as well as how close yet so far my house in Cambridge was from provoking the same reaction in me. This is the house in which I wrote my PhD, five papers on asexuality studies and Social Media for Academics. It was not always a happy place to live but it was consistently a creative place:
Mark Carrigan 