It’s admirable, how well this home is kept. Yes, you heard, bit of a celebrity. No, I’ve not watched any either, but in the office they say she was a demon with the duster. 

You’ll have noticed already with your shoes off, the depth of the carpet here, where your toes in winter will sink into the slate-diamond grey shag and keep you from remembering the rubber-soled slippers kicked deep under the bed on Thursday mornings, when you’ve heard the trundle of rubbish trucks entering the estate crunching on the not-quite-gritted tarmac and so quickly gathered the offending sacks, moving from carpet to doorstep and forcing you to maybe pad upstairs, compost bag still in hand, heavy, sodden with coffee grounds and slimy with the remnants of a bag of bistro salad, getting on your knees to tease the slippers out from under the bed, bag spending too long over that rich fur, moisture gathering at the weight of its bulge, precipitously close to dripping. Or the carpet might have you so fooled that you rush outside in the frost, abandoning all thought of shoes, so nurtured have you been by the carpet, that you slide on the strangely frictionless front garden, being as it is bricked up for extra parking, and the rough soles of your feet are too frictionless, softened by the comfort you’ve moved into.

Downstairs WC, just along here, toilet bowl wiped several times each day. Yes, wiped. Three times, at least. No, inside. Toilet brushes are ineffective, aren’t they, when you have hard water and a family digesting three fibre-rich meals daily? Not a tap of limescale on these thrones, the porcelain as pure as it was when Victoria Plum dropped it off. Here, give me a hand with the lid. See that floating bulb? Pristine. I’d never show that in another property, but nothing shines as the inner workings of Mrs G’s downstairs tank. Value added.

Now, you must remember that this part of the hallway, and all up the stairs, oop, let me shut that there, are the most traversed areas of the home. The lushness of these carpets are nothing to the less frequented parts of the home. If I could just bring you to the guest bedroom, rarely explored, even by the in-laws and school friends that stayed here, eager at they would be to get cracking on the day, a sort of attitude that occurred by osmosis, spending bright moments in this space. If you were to take off your socks and place yourself over there, far from the bed, not near the door, in the northeast corner away from the window, and feel for your toes and heels and the knife-edge of your feet, back and forth, breathing slowly and letting yourself sink into that carpet, pressing down to meet your high arches, the thick weave coming up all around to smother and blunt the bone of the blade of each foot, more so the right at first because that’s where you rest your weight and then soon the tendrils would start to brush the knob, the knuckle of your ankle, filling the interior dimple as you slipped deeper and deeper, the length and width of each foot paving the way for the rest of your legs, pulling past your slick calves and the knob of each knee, pausing as your thighs encourage it to crank wider, the inverted pear slowly starting to allow you to be sucked in, held in warmth, until the great sticking point of your hips try to bury themselves in the weave of the carpet, puffed up like the feathers of so many birds, slate-grey pigeons, whose amethyst and emerald collars have always been there, waiting to be admired, the deeper you go, the smaller, softer, warmer the feathers become, pulled into his fluff, you’ll find yourself also sucked into the heat of meeting skin, the silken soft chicken skin of your bingo wings mirrored by the undulating heat of the carpet’s base, nesting into the soft flesh of mother, supple and hotter than you could have ever imagined, the heat of protection of illness of tear-burnt cheeks, fat and muscle underneath with such give that by the time your breath has met the frame, you see no way of pushing out again, of leaving this chance for preservation, of exiting the deep pile carpet in the corner of the guest bedroom, needing to face the pain and crush of birth to return to a world where care and industriousness is value not added and three bedrooms is three bedrooms is three bedrooms no matter the limescale chipped from the tap or the blood sweat and tears I’ll just leave here absorbing into the carpet as I leave you a moment to think over the offer.