We had a housewarming party yesterday. Best to do it straight after moving, we thought, so people will come with low expectations and won’t be shocked by bare rooms furnished mainly with moving boxes!

It was a great success in many ways. We had invited both friends and family, but also people from the neighbourhood: all houses that we can see from ours, and a few more. A lot of them came, and all turned out to be very nice people. (Perhaps the less nice ones decided not to come?) For some of our neighbours, this was the first time they met each other. We were quite pleased to have arranged this, and we’ll probably try to find a reason to repeat this next summer, or some other time of the year.

There are children in almost all houses in all four directions (we live on a corner), so Ingrid will have a lot of friends to play with. That’s not always been the case, we heard: there’s been a distinct generation shift in the area over the last decade or so, with older people moving out and young families moving in. A few are still holding out – a lovely couple in their 80s came by, and apparently there’s a lady in her 90s in one of the houses across the street (too old, unfortunately, to join us for the party).

We also got to hear some of the history of this house. We’d already met the previous owners, of course, and knew roughly what kind of people they were (not much into gardening, for one thing). They haven’t left much of a mark on the house or the garden. The owner before them was the author and instigator of the extension, built in 1970s. We now know that the guy had a taxi firm, and that his reason for building the extension was that he wanted to add a double garage to the house. But he couldn’t build just a sunken garage, so he was obliged to put something on top of it. Which explains the seeming lack of interest in the interior plan for that part of the house – it was an afterthought! For some reason, possibly economic, he also did much of the building work himself, which explains the somewhat cheap look and the uneven execution.