As I walked around the back of the house, I saw the bins first. Both were tipped over, rubbish everywhere. A trail of messy clues that would no doubt lead to a very happy perpetrator. The upturned table, the gas cooker on the back lawn, tins of beans crushed by a sizeable jaw, the toilet door off its hinges and the toilet itself covered in mud. The final clue left no shadow of doubt – a hole in the side of the food cupboard in the shape of Tina the pig.
I first laid eyes on this house 10 months ago. I found it during one of many daydreaming sessions, scrolling through a real estate website, imagining all the different lives I could live in all the different homes. Sometimes, I searched “coastal”, other times “apartment”, but mostly I searched “rural”. In every search there was one consistent filter: “river”.
