After a good eight years living in a ground floor flat, I once again find myself living in the servants’ quarters at the top of an old house, and so my thoughts have been turning to the pros and cons of having stairs. To reminisce a little, I have had many top floor flats over the years and loved them, for the most part. I had a dream flat as a student in Leicester (where almost everyone I knew was living in pokey little terraced houses) above a card shop on the high street. The flat had a sweeping staircase inside, taking you up to the attic bedrooms. The flat itself was accessed via a wrought iron spiral staircase on the outside, Manhattan-style (or so I imagined to myself at the time). From our kitchen window we told the time (and temperature) by the Leicester Mercury digital tower some miles away. In the summer we put chairs by the windows and leaned out, watching people shopping below while we played records on repeat. Another top floor flat gave me a view of the London Eye from a precarious sort-of-balcony that I feared party guests would fall from.

In many ways though, my ground-floor flat with little garden out the back came as a relief after years of lugging everything up and down four flights. But now I am once again up high, and noticing the pleasures and restrictions it places on one. Advantages as far as I see it are these:

– Fewer spiders. I’m no biologist but it seems from my observations that spiders can’t be arsed climbing too high, and prefer to creep in from the garden and settle down rather than take the stairs.

– The cat and myself must surely be loosing weight. I have placed the cat bed, litter tray and food on different floors to encourage extra activity – on both sides.

– The light and the views, of course. Every time I walk up the stairs inside the flat I feel the light increasing and a feeling of joy leaps up next to me. Fu’real.

The disadvantages are not to be sniffed at, however. The main one I notice is recycling. When you can just bung everything out the front door into a big bin it’s easy not to notice how much waste your daily life produces. Now I have to carry everything down 4 flights of stairs and to the nearest carpark recycling bins (yes, no doorstep recycling boxes in Margate folks) I really notice. I’ve even started making purchasing decisions in the supermarket on the basis of how much extra packaging things have.

It reminds me of being on the island, when I took a photo of all the wood I needed each day to get the stove to make three pots of coffee. Seeing everything you consume piled up next to you is sobering, whether you’re shopping at Aldi or snapping dead twigs. Stairs – an exercise in mindfulness.