JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: This house holds so many memories... but why did they have to put a bidet in my brother's bedroom?

Published: 20:58, 6 August 2026 | Updated: 20:58, 6 August 2026 I am on the Zoopla property website, staring at a photograph of the house I used to call home. Nothing much changes with Aberdeen’s granite. To see it today is to see it as I first saw it as a toddler in 1970 when we moved there. The crazy-paving front path is exactly as it was. The garden hedge shielding our bay-windowed lounge from the gaze of passers-by is still doing the same job. Up there is my bedroom window, directly above the front door. Behind that glass, a childhood. My one. There used to be a Sanyo radio cassette recorder in that room – a birthday present when I was eight or nine. I’d sit cross-legged on the floor next to it, my fingers hovering over the play and record buttons, as the chart countdown show was broadcast on Radio 1. This room was the scene of the most petulant strop of my childhood years. I ripped a set of drawers out of their chest and flung their contents over the floor. I pinged scrambled egg with a spoon onto the ceiling as I lay sulking on my bed. It was on this bed in this room that, when springtime came, my mother would lay out short trousers for me to wear to school in place of the long ones I had been wearing all winter. The granite of Aberdeen is unchanging Tears were cried in this room and in the upper hall and in the master bedroom and down the stairs into the kitchen as I followed Mum around, begging her to reconsider, telling her I’d be the only one in the class wearing shorts. She never did. And I never was. Well, I had better click through the photographs to see how the old place is looking inside. The pattern on the floor tiling in the porch is instantly recognisable, as it should be to anyone who stared down at it every day for years as they buttoned up their coat. The mahogany newel post at the bottom of the banister still stands – rather magnificently – decades on. I used to place my hand on the exquisitely sculpted orb atop it on every ascent and descent. Yes, we touch our homes’ fixtures and fittings, grounding ourselves in their familiarity. My fingers – larger and gnarlier than they once were – still retain the muscle memory of gripping those rounded doorknobs which, I see from the pictures, are unaltered from my day. But something is off. I distinctly remember there were four bedrooms – my parents’ one, my brother’s one, my one and the one that was let out to a succession of lodgers to help pay the mortgage. Why does this property now come to the market as a three-bedroom home? Come to that, where has the study gone? There definitely used to be one. It was there I did my homework, where my mother – a mature student in the mid-1970s – wrote her essays for her English and Philosophy degree, where my father would proofread them. And it was next door in the dining kitchen that my brother and I were given a thimbleful of champagne each on the day she learned she had gained a first-class honours degree. Two separate rooms. Distinct memories attached to them both. Somebody has knocked the dividing wall down. It is most discombobulating. I venture up the stairs to investigate the disappearance of a bedroom and solve the mystery as soon as I check out the space where my brother used to sleep. A grandiose bathtub sits in the middle of the varnished wood floor, the centrepiece of a spa-like retreat at the back of the house. Bidets can be a useful addition to a home... but in a bedroom? They’ve put in a shower cubicle too – even a bidet. In my brother’s bedroom. What was wrong with the old bathroom? Big enough for Mum to plonk her two young boys into the tub at the same time to save on water, I seem to remember. And we had a perfectly good shower. It was a rubbery thing with a nozzle which attached to the bath tap. Consulting the upstairs floor plan, I note the original bathroom has become an en-suite. It does look pokey in the diagram, right enough. There’s a flat screen TV attached to the wall of the master bedroom, which seems plain weird. In this house, surely, a TV is a big boxy thing that lives in one corner of the lounge and takes two minutes to come on. It has clunky buttons next to the screen for any of the three channels you might choose to watch because, unless you are Elvis Presley, remotes are a thing of the future. Barring the exterior shots, none of these photographs – or the descriptions of them – make any sense to me. Where is my mother’s dressing table? What happened to the grandfather clock in the hall? And what do they mean by calling my beloved ground-floor hidey- hole a ‘closet’? There was only ever one name for it: the cupboard under the stairs. And yet it all makes perfect sense. The changes in my childhood home perfectly mirror the evolution in family living over the last half-century. In the years since I last set foot in the place, we have witnessed the rise of the statement bathroom – a statement so profound it is worth losing a bedroom for. Apparently. We have come to expect en-suites and to lie in our scratchers watching the telly. We want vast kitchens/dining rooms/living hubs and are prepared to smash through to the study next door to get them. Who needs a study anyway? Death to compartmentalisation. Arise open-plan, multi-functional spaces bathed in natural sunlight because there are twice the number of windows and there is one less wall. I click onwards with my mouse through to the lounge. At least it is the same shape. I adored this room, always will. Scene of Christmas mornings, of opening presents, of dinner parties and extended family gatherings. On one such occasion I stood somewhere on this same floor – although there was a carpet on it back then – and bade good night to the high-spirited adults with glasses in their hands. I think I did a party piece – a song or a poem maybe – before bed. Behind me, an aunt leaned forward and whipped my pyjama bottoms down to my ankles. Everyone laughed, probably even me. That was the 1970s for you. In this room, at least, I can explain the absence of the antique mirrored sideboard which sat against the wall opposite the fireplace. A glorious piece of furniture, it was handed down through generations on my mother’s side. It defined the lounge for me. It sits in my ‘posh’ room in Glasgow today, defining it. You may wonder what the owners are asking. It’s priceless, of course. But my family bought it for £6,000 in 1970. Within a decade it was worth nearer £60,000 – the oil boom years. Fast forward to 2013 and it sold again for almost £600,000. Today the asking price is some £150,000 less than that. Aberdeen house prices are in freefall. If it carries on like this, I’ll soon be able to afford my childhood home myself. For now, I’m merely a friendly ghost – haunting it.