Him Indoors: My home is like a girlfriend - and I'm cheating on her

I feel like I've committed an infidelity. Not that I've ever committed an infidelity, I'm assuming this is what infidelity feels like. Do you think the house knows it's for sale? Can it tell? When I walk around brushing this architrave or leaning against that wall or mopping the new linoleum in the hall-stroke-kitchen, does it all shrink away from me going: "Don't touch me! Don't ever touch me again!"?

All that's been put into her. It must look pretty cynical now. Like fattening the family animal up in order to eat it. And there has been much fattening, much attention, much care, much work, much (what's the word?) love. Can you really love a house? Should you?

But we've been through so much together. And as every portrait is a self- portrait so doing up a house results in doing up yourself. You bond, you blend.

Look: this stud wall that went up between the living-room and the dining- room. What had been knocked out for modern living was put back, in the name of modern living. Yes, you have served us well, stud wall. You've kept the children well away from me, and kept me well away from the children. You've allowed us all to shut ourselves away and look up unsuitable sites on the computer. You have concealed and quietened. Thank you wall.

Here too, in the living-room, a gas fire. Cosy little sofas facing each other across a fire that you can turn on. And the walls painted that posh colour we started to see a decade or so ago: Eating-Room Red. And they are covered with framed prints and a number of voluptuous nudes also in eating-room red. The fire waves away, the walls glow dully, the nudes stretch themselves and Bach's secular cantatas play on the modern device in a way that makes us feel cultured, cultiv- ated, civilised, nurtured by our past. Oh, tainted love.

The little bedroom at the back, it used to be the bathroom. I made you! I created you! The single bed was specially built three inches narrower than normal to fit in between the chimney breast and the window. Ah yes, that project took three years to bring to a conclusion. Now I have a little corner to hide in that I never had before.

They're everywhere, these add-ons, these extensions, these renovations. The bathroom with its slipper bath. The gas fire in the front bedroom. The summerhouse at the bottom of the garden. The boat, ah the boat with the electric motor, the boat that takes us ambling up the lazy, vole-thronged canal to the Thames. The deck that gets the last of the summer sun. The house, the house, it's not only where we live, it's what we are.

Now there are people coming through your doors and halls to see whether they want you or not. And I, a fallen creature now, am grieving for the end of you... You've got me. Possessed me. I have been possessed. My foun- dations, my spiritual, or at least psychological foundations have become contaminated with bricks and dust and soft furnishings. I'm a cyborg, half the spirit of God's great breath, half Victorian semi! I have become half of everything I've ever hated! But do I have the courage, the ambition, the surgical strength to tear out half my foundations? Possibly. I think it depends on the money. n

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