the old way in

The good thing about going in to work on a Sunday morning is that there's very little traffic, and so when one's stopped at lights, it's easy to wind down the window and take uninterrupted pictures.  The bad thing about going in to work on a Sunday morning ... I still, very many mornings, take the old route down Hoover Street, though in a perverse way, then track a way to work that isn't identical to the one that I usually followed when I lived there ... This is just at the top of Hoover: down the road is our old house, now looking as though it could very much do with some care and attention, at least to its foliage - the plants (where they haven't actually been ripped out) are looking sadly desiccated, and the inhabitant is, herself, a mystery.  Is she, indeed, living there?  Why are the curtains - upstairs and down - always drawn, no matter what time of the day it is?  It's just a year since we were sprucing this up in all kinds of ways to put it on the market, so I take its shabbiness personally - we loved that house, and it doesn't look loved at all, any more.  Why, therefore, I persist in driving past it in some kind of ghoulish voyeurism is a slight mystery to me ...