I have posted nothing on here for the last 4 months. I have been totally pre-occupied with moving house. This is an activity that I would not recommend to anyone. It is stressful and expensive. It is not my intention to move ever again except if I am carted away to a care home — not an enticing prospect. I have lived in Crawley in West Sussex for 48 years and in the same house for 35 years. When I first went to the town in 1964, it was an exciting place to be. Many people were appreciative life in one of the new towns built to rehouse Londoners who had been bombed out in WWII or had lived through the Depression in ungodly slums. Many mistakes were made in planning the new towns but there were still many things they got right. The towns were run by the Commission for the New Towns — a benevolent dictatorship that generally did a good job until they were abolished by the Iron Lady. I went to Crawley to work for what was then The APV Co Ltd. — a family business that had grown into a fair-sized international organisation as engineers for the Dairy, Brewing and Process Industries. When I started working I had nowhere to live and for a few week I stayed in the staff club, Jordans, an 18th century converted barn and house that was Grade II listed and had very low ceilings - picture above. Then I moved into lodgings in the box room of a 1950s semi. Then I had a bed-sit in a large detached house near the gold club. My landlady was a lovely woman who lived alone except for one or two lodgers who boosted her income a bit and provided some company . She was in her mid-seventies then and must now have been long dead.
The Commission for the New Towns had a policy of allowing "key" workers to jump the housing queue and after a year or two I was able to get a single bedroom maisonette and I lived there until I bought my house in 1977. Now I have left there and moved back to my home county of Lancashire in a house about 2.5 miles from where I was born. I will tell you about the move in my next blog.
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