What old walls hold

Vanessa and I live in a French Château.

Ok. Here's the actual truth of it... We occupy the back corner of someone else’s château. We rent it, we don’t own it. The central heating doesn’t really work, so in November the warmest room in the house is still the car. But... it is a total dream to live there. So before you picture me, at 8pm in a smoking jacket, dismissing the under-butler for under-polishing my teapot, thank you, we already bear a sufficient weight of imposter syndrome between us, to sink the Royal Navy.

However, even living in just a third of a very old, rented house is an education in how places remember. Vanessa and I both believe that old walls hold things. Not ghosts, exactly, or the metaphysical ether of the departed, but almost certainly some kind of residue. Energy, perhaps. The accumulated spiritual voltage of everyone who came before us and spent their days doing the same ordinary things in the same ordinary rooms.

You might, like both of us, have experienced the feelings of house energy. "It felt weird"... "I could just sense something"...

I sometimes wonder whether what we now call intuition is simply a very old kind of intelligence that we have gradually trained ourselves not to trust. The Romans had a name for the feeling that a place could possess: genius loci, “the spirit of place”. Much later, the Hungarian chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi put it rather neatly in his book The Tacit Dimension: “we can know more than we can tell.” His point was that we often recognise or understand something before we can explain quite how we know it.

I like that idea. We walk into a room and know, almost immediately, whether it feels welcoming, uneasy, peaceful or has the energy of a grisly crime scene, often before we can say why. Perhaps the senses have already clocked the light, the smell, the proportions, the acoustics, the worn surfaces and a thousand other tiny clues before the conscious mind has had time to convene a meeting. Or they haven't yet got around to moving the murder victim...

Anyway, we call it atmosphere. Instinct. Energy.

I am willing to bet our ancestors had it in spades. We, on the other hand, seem to have become rather good at talking ourselves out of what we feel, or demanding some kind of evidential proof of previous life before we trust it.

And perhaps that is why old houses are so compelling, because they offer the paperwork. The feeling is there, but so are the physical traces. Stone steps worn into smooth hollows by three hundred foot-years of the same journey to the same door. The mille-feuilles of painted wallpapers that have lined and re-lined every Napoleonic wall since Napoleon himself. The rubbed edge of our bannisters. The slight dip in a floorboard where people have stood, turned, waited and passed through for generations. An old house keeps the shape of its habits, long after the people who made them have gone.

So yeah...there is a particular vanity in almost-pretending we own an old château. We don’t. Not yet. I already told you that. But I’m not sure the actual owners do either, in any meaningful, spiritual sense.

You see, I think an old house has usually outlived too many people to take ownership terribly seriously. We are all just current tenants on a very long lease, most of our fellow signatories being dead, and the house, which has seen off far grander occupants than us, knows it. There is something rather humbling about that.

In a modern house it is quite easy to imagine the place starts with you. You chose the kitchen, moved the bidet, painted the bedroom ceiling, replaced the floor and spent too much time with your head cocked to one side, deciding whether the downstairs loo should be cosmic sage or mystic beige. An old house refuses that conceit. Someone got there first. In fact, several dozen someones probably did.

And they leave evidence. Blocked doorways and bricked up windows. Epic fireplaces that now house a large jar of dried grass and fir-cones. The year 1787 scratched into an oak beam was somebody's small, defiant way of saying: "I existed. I was here. Don’t let me disappear".

The temptation, especially when "renovating", is to tidy it all away. Blend it, straighten it. Skim it. Sand it. Scrub the old thing so much that it just gives up being old. But perfection can be strangely forgetful. Sometimes the crack is the story, the worn step is the archive, and the creaky hinge is the only signature someone ever left behind.

Vanessa understands this better than anyone. Her whole interior design craft is really the rearrangement of memory; which wall the photographs go on, which heirloom chair faces which window, what gets kept and what is allowed to go. I tend to look at a wall and think, "wall". She sees proportion, scale, light, sightlines, history and a host of other things that I wouldn't notice with a telescope.

But one thing I have learned from watching her work is that the best interiors rarely erase what came before. They negotiate with it. You keep the old floor where you can. You let a stone wall remain slightly crooked. You leave the chair as is, rather than replace or renovate. You hang the new picture beside the old one and invite them to chat. A room becomes interesting when time is permitted to remain visible.

Perhaps that is why most immaculate interiors can feel so oddly vacant. They contain beautiful things, expensive things, perfectly positioned things, but no evidence of souls passing through. People who put their feet on the sofa, dropped a glass of sherry, or argued over dinner. Homes acquire their character through use. Through repetition. Through the tiny habits nobody thinks important at the time.

All of it is important. We imagine memory is made up of the big things; birthdays, holidays, weddings, journeys, deaths. But often what comes back most vividly, is the completely insignificant detail. That mug. That coat. That hand reaching for the light.

Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” He was being uncharacteristically modest. Our buildings also remember us, although perhaps not in the way we would like. They don’t retain names and dates and neat little biographies. They hold traces. Wear. Pressure. Repetition. Small physical proofs that somebody was here and kept coming back to the same place often enough to leave a mark.

Occasionally I wonder what the Château will remember of us. Probably nothing very grand. A screw hole where I moved a picture three times from sheer fatigue. A repaired latch. A faint mark on the floorboards where some piece of furniture proved too heavy for the pair of us. There may be some evidence of Vito in there too, if houses keep such things. I hope the next tenant finds some spiritual fluff.

Because perhaps that is all old walls really hold. Not ghosts, exactly, but proof of occupation. The evidence that life happened there. Someone came through this door every morning. Someone stood at this window waiting. Someone lit this fire. Someone reached for the light. Names disappear, portraits fade, furniture moves on, and nobody remembers who chose the wallpaper. But it's under there somewhere...

And perhaps that is enough. We shape our buildings, certainly, but if we are lucky, we leave them with just enough of ourselves that, long after we have moved on, somebody else might pause at a worn step, a curious hole in the wall or a badly repaired latch and think,

I wonder who did that?

On Platform 13, wholeness isn’t found - it’s remembered. Because loss is loss, worthiness is universal, and no one is alone. We are all in this together.