Abandonment issues, part 2; The third or fourth house.

In 1998, we bought our first family computer, on which my father wrote his 1999 book, Uses of Television. 

I suppose I was about eight, and used the computer to play the Babe computer game, which was fantastic, and make endless, horrible place-mats, cards and name-tags using some sort of Disney software that allowed you to cover all these items in different 101 Dalmatians pictures. 

I also used "Notepad" (wasn't allowed to use Word; not sure why) to write some of my first short stories which, if memory serves (it does, freakishly so) included the tale of a girl who lived inside a light bulb, a fairly generic rabbit story, and the various adventures of my many Mary-Sue-type characters of the day. I abandoned all attempts to write fiction soon thereafter. 

The computer room, pictured above, was the other half of the living room, and one of the many reasons why this particular house was and still is my favourite of our many houses between 1989 and 2001. 

1996 to 2000 was spent here, a deceptively lovely terrace overlooking Cardiff Bay, but not on the Cardiff side. It was stairs, horrible blue carpets, rocks and perfect Christmases spent on the floor in this living/computer room. Every house on the terrace had a bay-window at the front, and if you didn't have your Christmas tree and lights up in it by December 1, our neighbour Pauline would ask you why (she also hated the Willow tree you can see in the picture because it blocked our view of the Bay. She poisoned it one summer and it died). 

The room also had an over-the-top wooden fireplace. An ornate carving of five long grooves on either side of it reminded me of claw-marks and I ran my fingers along them almost every day. After we sold the house, it stood empty for a few months, during which this and the wrought-iron fireplace from upstairs were both stolen. I sometimes wonder where they ended up.