I found it very comforting as well as visually enriching to live in a space that had been curated with such a keen sense of aesthetic awareness. Texture, colour and angles had all been drawn upon to create a modernist temple. As I lay in "our" bed, which was swathed in pale grey sheets and duvet cover, my eyes were held by echoes of other shades of grey. By each side of the bed was a clever shelf: it was as if the dates/doors of an Advent calendar had been flipped down from the wall, creating two bedside tables in a rich pink colour. The bathroom had also been dipped in the same rich pink; it coated the walls, picture frame and bathroom cabinet, extending through the glass shower room. Two African masks and a traditional African sculpture were perched upon their DVD cabinet.
Days before we exchanged homes, we had traded e-mails. The slightly nervous tone of their notes reassured me. Their hesitation revealed a degree of wariness about the journey that echoed my own. They told me about the planned appearance of their friend Bruno to "welcome" us to their home. But if Bruno had considered, on his friends' behalf, that our hair was too wild or perhaps too straight, or that our attire had revealed too many clashing colours for us to dwell in their aesthetic utopia, quite what he would have done? When he came to "say goodbye" on our departure, was he checking if our stay had contaminated the apartment with a British level of hygiene or, even worse, our British sense of style?
We ordinarily think of kindness as a quality of warm-heartedness or generosity with a sprinkling of altruism thrown in. With our generosity being reciprocated, mutual gain is clearly inherent in trading homes, so there is little of the latter involved. Yet if we take on board [Adam Phillips] and [Barbara -Taylor]'s interpretation, the act of kindness also involves susceptibility. We mingle our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others. It was this mix of interdependence and vulnerability that I felt most acutely as I embarked upon the exchange. It wasn't potential physical damage or theft that I felt I was most exposed to. It was more that I was laying bare the intimacy of my life, embodied in my possessions, for these complete strangers to taste.
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