CHICORY KEYS
       
       2026-04-13
       
       Towards the end of last week we picked up the keys to the Chicory House. (The
       house isn't actually called that, of course. That's our nickname for it, on
       account of it being a substitute for the real thing.) We've now officially
       moved in to the place we'll be calling home for the next six months or so,
       while we wait for our Actual House to be repaired following our catastrophic
       flood in February. (The flood was exactly two months ago today, which makes
       today "F-Day plus 60". We've spent most of the intervening time hopping from
       AirBnB to AirBnB.)
       As part of my efforts to travel light, I use a pretty small wallet - a lump of
       carbon fibre about the size of a deck of cards (As somebody who often carries
       a deck of cards, this is a pretty-convenient size to me!) that contains my ID,
       bank cards, and - in pocket at the back - my essential keys. Typically that's
       my front door key and my bike lock key.
       
   IMG Minimalist carbon fibre wallet, balanced on two fingertips, with parts of a Halifax Mastercard credit card showing from behind an elasticated band.
       
       And so when I received my front door key to the Chicory House, I had to
       decide: where does this key belong?
       The obvious answer would have been to remove the front door key for my actual
       home from its special place within my wallet and replace it with the Chicory
       House's front door key. That's the one I'll need most-often for the
       foreseeable future, right? My regular front door key can move to the
       supplementary hook, on a ring, and/or be removed entirely and taken with me
       only when I need to visit my uninhabitable home.
       But that's not what I did.
       
   IMG Reverse side of my wallet showing my regular house key folded-out from its special spot, and the Chicory House key attached to the hook.
       
       This made sense as an instinctive move: it's where I'd clip on the key to any
       of the half-dozen or so AirBnBs I've lived in for the last couple of months,
       after all! But for a house I'm going to live in for half a year or more it
       doesn't seem so rational.
       But I haven't put it back. I think I'm keeping it this way. My regular key
       gets to keep its special spot because it represents the lost status quo and
       the aspiration to return. Sure, it's less-practical for me to keep it there,
       but its position is symbolic, not sensible.
       Swapping the two over would feel like giving in: like caving to the
       inevitability of us being out of our home for an extended period. Keeping the
       key where it is means that every time I put my hand in my pocket I'm reminded
       that the current arrangement is temporary; things will go back to normal. And
       that's nice. (That said, the Chicory House is way better than most of the
       AirBnB's we've been living in, and I'm especially loving being able to sleep
       on my own familiar mattress again! While I wouldn't want to live here forever
       like I'd be happy to in the place we've called home since 2020, it'll
       certainly suffice for the immediate future. A stepping-stone back towards the
       lives we'd built before.)
       
       LINKS
       
  HTML Explanation of Chicory Coffee, by way of explanation of the name we've given to the Chicory House
  HTML My blog post from F-Day plus 3, featuring pictures and video of the flood damage
   DIR My 2023 blog post about travelling light and first introducing my wallet
  HTML My 2020 blog post about moving to our current home