1995
They are unmaking the house. From the door of my shed, I stand and watch the diggers trundle around it: forwards and backwards; claws up, claws down; buckets full, buckets empty.
Drills puncture the walls and bricks that have supported each other for more than a hundred years fall apart.
On and on it goes, day after day. Inside, steel struts brace the structure they want to retain, stop the whole from collapsing.
I watch the work from my shed.
Here is where I’m living now, inside a strange hiatus. The accommodation is primitive. I have an oil lamp for light, an oil stove for cooking and each morning, before the builders arrive, I draw water from an outside tap beside the house, lugging it across the garden in two enamel buckets. Calls of nature are answered between the dunes.
Pr
