60W Separation Anxiety Light, £399

So: the kitchen wall is soon to be pulled down. This weekend, Ian will be removing an Experimental Chunk: I find this more exciting than Christmas. I find dental surgery more exciting than Christmas, so it is more accurate to write that I find the Experimental Chunk more exciting then Esme finds Christmas.

The kitchen wall is also the bathroom wall. The back half of our basement is divided into kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom will move: the wall will come down, and the kitchen will double in size.

The bathroom is moving to Ian's bicycle workshop. The workshop has moved to make way for it, otherwise one would get pranged in the uncomfortables by power tools while trying to shower.

Ian's workshop has moved to the shed, at the end of the garden, where he can make all the noise he wants, without me shouting ARRGH! FUCKING BICYCLES five feet away. One day, we will tear down the shed and replace it with a bigger one, with room beside the workbench for a little wood stove and an armchair, so that we can hide in there from our teenage children or they can hide in there from us.

For the moment, we have a little empty room at the front of the house: a bathroom-in-waiting, which fills with sunshine at around 5pm.

It is nice, having a bare, empty, room attached to the house: somewhere to go and think clearly. Esme likes it in there. I just like looking at it. I wish we could always have the luxury of a little empty light-filled room, but I wish we had a big kitchen more.

Now that we know the kitchen/bathroom wall is doomed, now that we have spent weeks planning how the kitchen will look without it, weeks imagining a larger space, more cupboards, more light, that kitchen/bathroom wall seems really intrusive. When you eat at the little flip-up table in the kitchen, you feel the wall is leaning in on you, going Oh hello. Don't mind me. What are you eating? MmmMMMmm. Can I have some? What is this wall doing in our kitchen? Ian says it reminds him of that scene in Brazil with the desk that goes through the wall shared by two offices.

After the last post I wrote, I defaced our kitchen wall with thick black paint. One element I particularly love about the anarchy of a work-in-progress house is the liberty to scrawl on condemned walls.

I painted the outline of the massive, dark, bleak, aesthesticle light, just to see what 52 cm of oppression looks like in relation to Everything Else. I painted it in a spot that will one day translate as hanging over the new kitchen table, except that the actual middle of the kitchen table will be 30cm east of that picture, on the other side of the wall.

It is pretty big. I have since conceded that although I love it, it will probably not work in the kitchen. I wonder what my soul finds so innately comforting about the idea of sitting under a squat, ominous, giant fig of matt black metal. I can't answer that one.

Inside it, in less enthusiastic pencil, I drew the outline of the smaller, black, 50% less oppressive aesthesticle.

Then I imagined Ian's voice in my head, pouting that I didn't draw HIS idea on the wall.

So I drew his idea on the wall.

Ian was very pleased when he arrived home, and added lasers to it.

Over dinner that night, in the shadow of the looming, doomed, Oh hello, don't mind me kitchen wall, we invented the Separation Anxiety Light: a white ceramic light moulded to resemble a basket of kittens, with glowing halogen lights for spooky eyes, that plays We've Only Just Begun by the Carpenters when you get near it, and that cries and screams when you try to leave it. I wish we had a workshop big enough to make such a thing.

Here is something else from inside my brain:

This is Martha Graham Barbie. I spawned her last night with liquid eyeliner and old nylons, and she throws parties that Tutu Barbie will never be cool enough to even hear about.

Here is Ian, waiting for me to stop dicking about with Martha Graham Barbie so that he can turn off the light and dream of 60-watt kittens.

Right. More coffee.