Do you want to live in your house now? With Kirstin & Feel

The first thing I want you to do is: Keep an open mind, OK?

Have you both got open minds? You look filled with dread! Don’t worry. We’ve spent all your money. Don’t worry. We’ve spent all the money you could borrow, and then some more money. Don’t worry you signed all the correct forms. Don’t worry. Are you sure you have open minds?  

-       I really hope they have open minds, for your sake Kirstin!

-       Thanks, Feel, I hope so too. They look a little bit like they want to kill me, but I feel confident I can turn that around

The second thing I want to tell you is - All the doors of your house open at the bottom now.

Yes – exactly, you have just smashed your face into the door, don’t worry. You probably won’t do that again, and the other reason not to worry is that you have signed all the correct forms.

-       Thank goodness for the correct forms, Kirstin!

-       Too fucking right, Feel, otherwise we’d be down the Old Bailey, and I don’t mean the pub.

-       What’s a pub? Oh man, life is dry since we finished filming.

-       Tell me about it Feel. I’ve been drinking the meths I use to clean my vape.

See, split in half so the bottom opens, but not necessarily the top. Yes, I call it the upside-down horse door. Why have I done this? I have done this because from the second I met you, and I saw your budget, I have been thinking about giving you what you want. Not you so much, Lottie, but definitely you, Daniel, I want to give you everything I can give you.

-       Careful, Kirstin. Lottie looks like she’s going to be sick.

-       Nothing to worry about, Feel. I have spiked her tea with ground up Silver Haze. She won’t care about anything in about five minutes.

Please please come inside, we have spent the entire budget. Come inside, we have gone wildly over the whole budget, just for you, and this is what we have decided to do. Now, please do come into this room, and sit down on this chair. Do you like the chair? It’s made from the hands of cowboys. Their actual hands – coated in the resin produced by an ant cube. Do you know what an ant cube is, Lottie? Well look it up!

Daniel, sit in the hands of these cowboys, who were so poor they had to be dismembered for your comfort – I am joking, they are of course simply moulded from the shapes of the hands of cowboys. Although, many many cowboys in Wales and parts of England are now struggling to find work. Lending the shape of their hands is sometimes all they can do to make a bit of cash for saddle soap and donkey oats.

Any way – never mind the cowboys of England and Wales! What is this Country File? I want you to look carefully at this mural on the wall – Feel and I painted this wall with our bodies. I coated Feel and myself in paint and we rolled against your wall. Do you like it? This is my genitalia here, and here, and here again!

And look, all the way up here! That’s right, Feel did a handstand to achieve this one. You can touch the wall. I am not ashamed. Neither of us are ashamed of anything we have done in this house.

The colour here is Leaf Wood. The colour here is Satin Praline. The colour here is Honk Monk.

I’ve gone wild with colour. Come into this room now, and discover something else, yes, you have to open both the top and the bottom of every single door in this house. The upside-down horse door – it’s a beautiful invention, and you’re going to see why very soon.

-       I can tell that Daniel and Lottie are wondering why I have filled their house with upside down horse doors – I don’t want them to think the entire budget went on this and expensive paint flavours - so I’m giving them a sweet glimpse of the Kitchen area.

-       I hope it’s something special, Kirstin, because both of them look utterly horrified and poor.

Come this way – don’t be shy you two! What’s wrong with you, Lottie? Don’t be angry. Come on, come this way. Now, look out of this window. Can you see it? That’s right I have sold your car! I have sold your car and your caravan to pay for – wait for it – THIS CURTAIN.

The curtain is made from the sewn hair of all the nuns in Warwickshire. Oh – it is a holy room. And your car was bought by Phil, the brother of our sound technician. There he goes, he is driving away now in your car.

Cars are for twats any way, Daniel! You know what I always say - don’t have a car, have nun hair curtains, that’s my philosophy. Although, obviously, I have both. And a monk’s back rug.  

This way to the kitchen. So, this is the kitchen. We paid a local rat catcher to perform a lecture about the phenomenon of the rat king in this room – it cost £6k. He spoke for 45 minutes, he described how their tails become mutated and clummonged together, and he showed us slides of the suspected markings of a rat-king that he discovered under the kitchen extension of a well-known documentary maker.

During the lecture, the rat catcher let us stroke several rats before he froze them in nitro-glycerine, which he said they didn’t mind and would thaw out completely unharmed at the next lecture of Clarke Gorge’s house of dreams next week.

And then we had olives, Kettle chips and some hot martinis. Have you had hot martinis? They are delicious. I recommend a hot martini every day in the bath if you can. Although you can’t because I threw your bath away and replaced it with this horn, do you see? The horn coils around and around and inside it is a crab made of simulated gold. The crab excretes bubbles, but only if you’re lonely. The crab excretes conditioner but only if you’re eating well.

Do you like the way this room has an extreme breeze around the feet and ankles? I have one word for you: Upside down horse holes. That’s right, all the upside-down horse holes on all the doors are there for this exact reason.

Daniel, you said you wanted to have a room that your whole family could come and visit you in, and you could entertain your friends? Well, this is the room you can sit in and imagine them all here.

-       Looks like you’ve got your work cut out here, Kirstin. Daniel looks like he has no sensation in his skin!

-       Don’t worry, Feel. I have one more trick up my sleeve. I’m going to slap his legs so that he can feel the intensely cold whipping air around his ankles.

Daniel, I am sorry I am whipping your legs but it has to be done. Woah – look at me slapping your legs! Woah, Lottie, look at me slapping the back of Daniel’s legs! He seems to like it – I would make a note of this one, Lottie. His legs are really engorged now, and ready to experience the effect of all those upside down horse holes.

Daniel, sit down again. Do you remember when you met Dino, our production assistant, and Dinelli, our researcher? They took you to a café, do you remember? They took you to a café and they let you order whatever you want, and then they would put it on expenses? Do you remember? And you ordered eggs royal, didn’t you Lottie? And Daniel, you ordered a gütte busterre – which is a rare-breed breakfast, is that right? You ordered ostrich and crocodile bacon, and emu neck bacon, and salamander rashers and secret puddings. Do you remember?

It was worth more than an entire day’s pay for both Dino and Dinelli, who have since left the show after a dispute about expenses. Do you recall? Well, in between your mouthfuls of hollandaise and lima tongue bacon, Daniel you told our team about your brother.

My brother is far away, you said. You ate so much alligator bacon that you were hallucinating somewhat, and you slumped in your café chair and reminisced about a time you went to the field near your old house. The field had the remnants of an abbey in it, and the remnants of a church, and the remnants of a graveyard. You went there with your brother because you had to break the bad news to him that you were leaving, and would not be able to come home for a long time. You did all the things you used to do when you were kids. You ran down the hill so your heart burnt with the strain. You climbed the abbey walls, and slid on your ass down the slopes. You took a piss on the banks of the brook while your brother nervously looked around for passers-by.

And you used to sit on the top of the hill and stare down and wonder what your brother was going to say when he found out that you had taken a job in a city far away. And you felt the wind on your face and you drank hot cider from a can, and then you crunched a flat surface into the can, pierced it with a pin from one of your badges to make a small cluster of holes, and then – according to your café interview – you sprinkled the singed edges of some hash onto the collection of hole. Then you hot canned the last of your hash.

You miss your brother a great deal, especially now because, even though you completed your work in double time, and returned home six months early, your brother was gone. And when he went, he went even further away, didn’t he? Where did he go? We never found out. You were highly nonspecific by this point in your café interview, in which you consumed such a quantity of backskin-a-fox-and-neck as ‘bacon’, that our malnourished researchers could not figure out if your brother had died or moved to Connecticut, USA.

You miss his olive skin. You miss his giant smile. You miss his extensive factual knowledge about the sciences and the arts.

And that’s why we built you this room. Sit here, Daniel. Can you feel it?

-       I’m not sure he can feel it, Kirstin! He looks like he regrets everything that’s happened in the last year or so of his life.

-       Nonsense Feel! He’s experiencing the wind around his ankles. As he lets this happen, he experiences mostly just normal air, and it does get very cold, but – I reckon that at least one in ten of these breezes is the spirit of his brother, rushing around in the form of a dragon of cold air.

-       A dragon of cold air, Kirstin?

-       Oh ye of little faith, Feel.

-       Well, I suppose I do drag-on a bit.

Can you feel it, Daniel? The dragon of your brother’s body. Can you feel that the breeze, thanks to the inverted horseholes, has given your brother some muscle? Yes, he is a dragon with a long thin powerful body. And when the wind flutters, the dragon becomes a flock of ice-cold hallopeters.

-       Kirstin! What are you like? First, it’s dragons, and now halopeters. I thought they had been proven not to even exist.

-       Don’t question me, Feel. Daniel is clearly experiencing something profound. Look at his swollen legs and his ripening feet. He can feel the hairs of his brother’s long undulating body curling around his legs and annoying him the way he used to when they were boys, and the brother would come into the room and copy whatever activity Daniel was engaged in, or steal whatever clothes or ideas Daniel had. If you look closely at Daniel’s face, you can see that he is experiencing the rush of his brother coming into the bedroom return something he had broken and hoped Daniel would not notice. And now, look, you can see that the dragon around his feet is reminiscent of when the brother entered the bedroom in a rage with the intention only of storming straight out again and slamming the door.

Yes, Daniel, do you recall, as you drank the juice of a tropical fruit, and ate the bacon of a wale fin, you said your brother is the reason you can sit there alone all night and not fall into pieces. Or no, you said ball bearings, just a million ball bearings that would fall to the ground and bounce away. And now you can keep all your ball bearings together – now that you have the bottom half of your upside-down horse doors open.

-       Alright, Feel, I can tell you’ve had enough of my ankle-breeze antics. Let’s take Lottie to her private space and see if that will convince you that I am right, and the transformation of this home is the best invention since birch bark bacon bites.

-       If you say so Kirstin!

Lottie, let’s just leave Daniel there to enjoy his brother’s mysterious presence and reminisce about being a young idiot in a bedroom in a town with an abbey in it. You come with me. Here, climb these stairs, they are made from negative space – which cost a fortune! I had to sell several of your eggs. OK, come into this room.

What we all agreed that the problem with this room was that it resembled the stains around the collar of your first husband’s work shirts. The ones he wore to the restaurant, and he was supposed to wear a white shirt, but the shirt was grey, and these tide marks like they were the shore of the saddest, greyest, deadest beach in all of the dead Earth. That was the problem with this room.

And now – look! It’s filled with memory foam. Go in, yes, it will feel as though you are being crushed. And now, now that you are inside the special room, please take the middle finger of your left hand and tap it against the palm of the same hand. Yes, while you are momentarily asleep a few months ago, we paid a surgeon seventy grand to implant a remote control device into your palm.

That’s right, it releases fragrances into the foam. Press once for roses. Press twice for lavender. Press a third time for cut grass. Press yet again for the smell of your first boyfriend’s older brother’s bedroom, and specifically the smell of his clean clean socks and his smooth neck and the muscles between his shoulders and the tops of his arms.

Enjoy this next bit, Lottie, because you are going into low oxygen montage mode. Oh yes, you can see ferns and the bluebells of your childhood. You are alone in a cathedral. You are alone with an officer of the law. You are together with your family underneath a statue of Joan of Arc on her horse.

When we come back, we are going to discover if you will indeed live in this house!

-       I wonder if they are going to sell this house or stay in this house, Feel!

-       To be honest, Kirstin I have stopped caring. You see, I recently found a cluster of spots on my chest, and I’m having doubts about my insurance. I think I am going to write a book about how to become a million-pound estate agent. Then a cookery book spin-off. The cookery book spin off is going to be called ‘The £10k cookies! Things that you can cook that smell nice and will sell your house for more than it would have if it didn’t smell of cooking when your buyers looked around.

-       That’s cool, Feel. I really hope it works out.

-       Thanks Kirstin.

-       No worries. I am going to try growing my own weed again. I’ve bought a heat lamp and a hydroponics kit this time.