One year of home sweet home already

It has been a year since we got in our apartment. Home sweet home, and all that. At some point, we thought about moving, but finally we decided to stay here for another year. I never felt quite right about the many places I visited when I started lookking. And, more importantly, we love this flat, we always felt comfortable in it and it is the cloest thing we ever had to a home since we got married. So it was only logical to me that we celebrate us moving in. Any reason is good enough excuse to celebrate for me. I am, after all, a man of rituals and habits.

Same time last year, I was working (yes, that feels like a long time ago, doesn't it?) for big money (even longer after typing that) and we had spent almost a month in bed and breakfasts. It took us ages to find our "home", we had seen a lot of flats and this one was the last of the bunch. It was love at first sight, we wanted it right away, even though we found it at the end of November and it was only available two weeks later. Anyway, it was nice, it was clean, it was in a quiet place, it looked and felt liveable, we wanted it, we decided to go for it. But it ended up quite difficult to get. Some documents got lost in the mail, the estate agents sent it to our previous address in another town, we had to send and receive papers twice, it took me ages to get references from my employers, those two weeks were a nightmare. That's another reason why we decided not to move: we did not want to go through the whole ordeal again. Not any time soon anyway. We felt we had suffered enough. In the end, however, we got the flat. I appreciated dearly the first night I slept here, especially since it was after a long day at work and an even longer time bleeding money for greedy bed and breakfast owners. The first night here, we ate wine and cheese, something simple that did not require any cooking and was easy to find. My provided the cheese and baguette, I provided the wine. I bought then one white wine, as she prefers it to red wine, and some mousseux (sparkling wine) in a small bottle, just for the kick. In the end, we only drank a bit of the mousseux and kept the other wine for another occasion. It was a very modest but very appreciated housewarming party. In French, we say pendre la crémaillère, which I always found appropriate.

This year, my wife was recovering from a hangover, the first in a few years (that is so not like her to have one drink too many), so I did not buy as much wine, as I knew I would have to drink it all by myself. I bought a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau, which I greatly appreciated. Especially since we bought Asda cheeses that were mostly disgusting (and, as you can see on the picture, of a sickly orange colour). We bought the cheeses for the chopping board and knife that were coming with them, but still, I had to drown the taste with wine. I also had some pâté, which was quite good, even though my vegetarian wife tried to make me feel guilty about it. But it was so much better than the cheese. So the celebration was not as solemn as I thought it would be, probably because tonight was just another Sunday, the pain and ordeal we went through to get here is now just a souvenir. Still, it was worth this modest remembrance dinner.