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Pub Life

It's got nothing to do with your Vorsprung Durch Technik you know (one for the teenagers, there).

We've been in here a month now, and it's safe to say my life is considerably different to how it once was. Before moving in, my biggest worry about living above the shop was that it would be impossible to delineate where work ends and home life starts. This has been the case to an extent, but I've been pleased to discover that it cuts both ways.

What I had feared was that work would take over my life, that I'd be unable to resist just popping downstairs and clearing "just a couple of prep jobs, I won't be ten minutes". I will admit, this has happened, but the reverse is also true, being able to pop upstairs and say goodnight before the kids go to bed is worth the price of admission alone. Likewise finishing service this evening and being able to pop upstairs and have dinner and a glass of wine with Mrs Coastalblog before going back down to supervise the kitchen close-down is something I'd never have been able to do before.

In a way I think I'm able to draw a line because I'm back of house. My excellent manager front of house, Aimie, is effectively the face of the business, people don't really expect to see me, so there's no need for me to be out and about once I'm done in the kitchen, I climb the fire escape to the flat and that's me.

So my main worry was, as it turns out, nothing to worry about. This is not to say it's all been plain sailing. It's a 200 year old building, and it's disconcerting living somewhere where there isn't a single flat floor. Put it this way, you wouldn't be able to play marbles anywhere, there's about a foot drop from the back of the living room to the front, and our bedroom and the kitchen both pitch towards the corners of the building, leaving you with the slightly bewildering sensation of walking uphill just to get out of bed.

There's a long corridor down the middle of the flat, long enough for an energetic seven year old, of which we have one, to get a good speed up, and the ancient floorboards are one by one giving up in shock, I do rather get the sense of a building being surprised to be lived in. The flip side of this, of course, is that the boys, particularly the littlest, breathe life into the building. In Black Dogs, Ian McEwen writes of children being the most effective way of banishing ghosts and claiming ownership of a place, as they quickly adapt, settle in, stake claims for territory. Well, plenty of people have told me the pub's haunted (including a spectacularly drunk Derek Acorah, remind me to tell you the story sometime), but the resident spirits seem to be keeping a low profile in the face of the boys living out loud.

Most of all, it feels like I'm working out a new way to live, which is quite exciting, I can feel myself changing in ways I thought I was done with. I'm still unsure as to how it'll pan out, but I'm having a lot of fun finding out.

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