How to live floorlessly.

“What needs doing then, lads?”

That room isn't quite an icon to me, yet. My own room, many Bridgestone spins away and which I share with the most messy and clumsy “wife” in the world, has seen so many deep cleans and give ups and accidents and covered spills and religious notes pinned to the walls and scuffs and weird collections started on unbalanced surfaces that it cannot now be changed from having had us live here. It is no longer a cave with our stuff in, but a little home carved out as a direct result of our activities. A tiny home, the size of a key cutting shop, that houses two people, two businesses, five guitars, a million feet of fabric, a mannequin, an industrial sewing machine, about five-hundred books, about two-hundred DVDs and games, my hair, and several years worth of crusted, narcotic-infused sweat.

It's also got a garden. Full of weeds.

I look around in the morning and see this place as “my house how I have it” – a symbol of two lives in the twenty-first century – rather than as a problem that needs to be fixed because the gold on the door handle has corroded, or because that un-binned empty box of luxury chocolates is hindering the passage of my hand as it reaches over faded-brown bed sheet stains for a similarly tinged shin-kicker.

Trewin's room, however, where all still has a touch of clinical purpose about it (moreso than my cave, anyway), likely for his sanity, manages to infuse any given memory I have with that feeling of “other place” – not a sense of homeliness or even familiar workliness. All this despite the number of meetings, drinkings, listenings, and other debaucherous rebellions against sensibleness that have gone on up there that should make it feel like an old friend.

Sofa bed piled with cushions, some of us perched on fold-out chairs with rusting hinges, paint peeling, and padding long since disintegrated by the sweat of a thousand arses. The twinned smells of stale white butts and yesterdays M&S yellow-sticker-reduced Platchula Bean Salad with Cuban Roasted Pecan Tudenza Leaf Puree and Fresh Chombo-Style Kale and Distilled-Water-Fed Quinoa Passata fill the room. The food looks like a half-arsed rockery and sits half on the floor and half in its plastic bowl. Trewin will occasionally turn from his computer to pick up the bowl, lick the congealed butter-death off the fork, and tuck in again. It must be good.

“We need to get the pre-mix of the album off.”

“Yeah, and we need to buy some gear.”

“I don't have any of the stuff I need.” says Seryn.

“When's the next gig?”

“We need to book a practice.”

“Are we having a tech-rehearsal, later?”

Jeb's in the next room, his clicking mouse sounding like the desperate pleas of a soldier who, upon finding himself stranded in a gutted comms room, wishes he'd paid attention when his unit was learning morse code rather than copying off Neville and sneaking a peek at a cigarette card of Rita Hayworth.

“How are those videos coming along?”

“Oh...yeah...I'm just...it's just rendering.”

“Oh, and we need to get some publicity photos done.”

“Oh God, yeah.”

“Who wants a tea?”

And everybody oooooooohs and says oh, yes please – and relaxes as someone goes and boils the kettle before drying it off and putting water in it. It was stormy outside while all this was going on, so it was just right. It was dark grey at midday, the windows were streaming with rain, and I'd just had some soup and a cigarette. We all felt like cats in front of fireplaces. Droopy eyed and comfortable.

“So [yawn] that's a list of what we need to do, right?”

“Right.”

“Great, that's that done. So, have I shown you this video yet of a neon-painted deer riding a powerboat engine attached to a human skeleton?”

“No!”

Chomp.

TBC