One person, a whole house

The dining room seats six. This morning, breakfast is being eaten standing up in the kitchen, beside a toaster that needs emptying. Through the open door, sunlight falls across a table polished for a visit nobody has arranged. You admire the light, take another bite and remain where you are. Apparently, sitting down requires guests.

Living alone in a house arranged for a different stage of life can involve a surprising amount of obedience. There is the place where the television went when it arrived. There is the room you eat in at Christmas. There is a chair with an excellent view of the garden, which you pass on the way to a chair with an excellent view of the washing machine. None of these arrangements was intended to be permanent. They have simply outlasted the discussion.

The dining room is particularly difficult to argue with. It looks finished. The chairs match, the curtains hang well and the sideboard contains crockery for a quantity of people you would now prefer to meet in a restaurant. To put anything ordinary on the table feels like beginning a mess. A jigsaw might be acceptable in December. In March, it starts to look as though someone has abandoned the standards.

Yet nobody is coming to inspect. There may be people you love who visit often, and people you love who announce they are visiting shortly before they arrive. They can still have dinner here. It is the long interval between dinners that seems to have been overlooked.

A house can take time to feel right when the number of people in it changes. Some things are comfortable because they are familiar; others are difficult to move for reasons that have nothing to do with their weight. There is no need to sort all that out before breakfast. But the sunny end of the table is available this morning.

So the plate comes through. Then the paper, which opens without knocking anything into the sink. For once, the coffee is within reach of somewhere to put your elbows. You stay at the table long after breakfast, reading a column you would normally abandon halfway through. The kitchen can wait.

Later, you take the paper into the front room. The chair by the window is usually offered to visitors, who always mention the garden. You settle into it and discover what they mean. From the kitchen you mostly see the bins. There is a little table here too, with a view and enough space to leave something unfinished.

By the following weekend, that something is a watercolour. The front window gives you enough light to see the colours you are mixing, and you spread a sheet of paper on the old table. The large landscape you had in mind has become a rather wet pear. You leave it to dry. Upstairs, the bigger painting kit can stay in its cupboard for now; this was quite enough ambition for one afternoon.

It is tempting to regard all this as the start of a vast reorganisation. But heating costs, cleaning and the effort of moving about may make a smaller daily circuit sensible. Today it is simply pleasant to sit by a different window. The room was already beautiful. You’re getting more opportunity to notice.

When someone comes to lunch, you bring the painting through and prop it on the dining-room sideboard. They ask what it is. You explain about the pear. There is a short pause while they consider this, and then you both sit down to eat.