My Californian Castle | 17th April 2011 | 10:41 PDT

Reenactment of my escape also, that's not my house

I needed to escape the house.

Which is nice (the house, not the escape) – it's in a great location 3 minutes to a park (strip of grass with sculptures on it it next to a main road) 10 minutes to the beach down the bluff (a green cliff) via a load of stairs.

The house itself is a ground floor apartment an is spacious... If it weren't for all the consumable debris everywhere, this house is simply full of crap memories. To be fair to my landlady (very friendly, easy going, chatty and scatty) did say she hates holding onto things and that most of this stuff that has been exploded all over the house was her daughter's who was coming back in June to take it or chuck it. Just a few months of swimming through the apartment then.

The rest of the apartment is pretty much how you'd expect an apartment to look like after 15 years of living with minimal upkeep, kitchen is kept clean but its organisation can only be described as... Perturbed. It's a walk in wardrobe that you throw things into that happens to house a fridge and cooker.

Bathroom's good, again messy with a thousand chemicals, lotions, and some other things, typically a bathroom and it does the job. It's also yellow! - yeah, it used to white (I imagine/not hoping)

My bedroom/sanctuary is big, tidy, the hub of calm in the house. Recently painted white, new bed, I feel like a king, especially as the landlady sleeps on a sofa in her room with a shit load of shit everywhere and as you'd expect a water feature in the middle of the room in the form of a dirty bucket of liquid.

It's not as bad as I described it, it's loved, homely, looked after as much as it can be and a very sociable house. My only gripe with it (other than the mess)is the lack of communal space as landlady's son (not met him yet) has set up base in the front room next to the front door, so everything is kept within your room, but the room has TV, wi-fi etc. so can escape from it all without any hassles.

My sanctuary from one end

My sanctuary from the other end
UPDATE: The house has now been cleaned and is indeed spacious, landlady's son is friendly and the communal area is the kitchen and landlady's room so no gripes any more!

Composed: Starbucks, 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica

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