The rise and rise of the lodgeoisie

I blame Faulkner. Spiky pieces of the past have been perforating the present all week. I find myself with leisure and boom! - nostalgia, displacement, sentiment.

Last week, I walked down Lodge St in Glebe to have a beer at the Nag's Head with my colleagues. Ten years ago, I lived next door to the Nag's in a house that tumbled into a tiny concrete garden held together by a dodgy picket fence. Every night at midnight, we heard 'New York, New York' blaring closing time at the pub. The Lodge was a great house, the definitive student dive: cheap, derelict, and proximate to coffee, beer and uni. It was full of milk-crates, cable spools and sagging furniture; for a housewarming present, we were given a pilfered Telstra tent to set up in the backyard. Several hippyish murals were painted on the walls which were also decorated with many cabalistic spirals of spaghetti. Soirees thrived. All of our electrical goods were supplied by Ernie the Fridge Man. We lost a few fuses as a result. Mice lived in the compost heap and many cockroaches in the kitchen. We were used as a training ground for apprentice pest-controllers and didn't get paid. My sister wouldn't walk on the carpet barefoot.

The precarious physiognomy of the house complemented all of this perfectly. Few angles of the building sat at right angles to each other. It was inevitable though that the Lodge would get an injection of real-estate Botox. I had a notion that it was on the market, confirmed when I saw this sign.

Gone, shambolic coincidence of crumbling bricks! Hello, new fence and honey-polished boards and skylights and tasteful plants on the verandah and heritage colours and structural security! Can't fight progress, etc., etc.