I’m moving out of Ye Olde Lodge in two weeks and the prospect of leaving is making me miserable. I’ve been there for four and a half years now, and it’s the longest I’ve ever stayed in a house since I was 17 years old. So, I’m now going to tell you why Ye Olde Lodge (YOL) is the most important building in Brunswick.

The first reason is that it’s located at No. 1 Sydney Road making it the first house you see driving into Brunswick if you arrive via Royal Parade. Yes, it’s that place on the corner with the clocks that don’t work and yes, it looks a little bit like a half-way house for more discerning vagrants. But no, it used to be a hotel in its heyday and when you open the huge front door you can smell about five different dinners cooking at once. That’s not a reference to it being a hotel but at any time of the day you can actually smell five meals being cooked at once. The government calls it high density living. I call it living up somebody’s arsehole.

However, arseholes aside, the walls are thick, so once you’re inside your flat, the smells dissipate and all you can hear are the trams clanking down Sydney Road or the urgent throttle of a local Bandido racing towards another MENSA meeting. Is it a mere coincidence that the rise of bikie crime in Australia has occurred concurrently with the popularity of Sons of Anarchy?  Anyway, I digress.

At YOL, I live across the hall from the weirdo of the building; let’s call him Dan because that’s his name. On Sundays, Dan climbs into the roof and can sometimes be heard raking around above my flat doing something. I don’t know what he does up there but I hope he’s been having fun. Dan once gave me a six-pack of Asahi because I complained about the noise of his renovations. He genuinely thinks he’s bought me after that act of benevolence, and every time I see him on the tram he nods at me like those six beers changed my life.

Then there’s the lad downstairs, who always calls me ‘neighbour’. Last summer we argued about him using my parking space. I was drunk at the time and told him that if he parked in it again I’d smash in his car’s windows with a baseball bat. He took this seriously and called the police. When the police called me, I told them that my ‘neighbour’ had urinated in one of the plant pots out the front of the building. By Monday morning the plant pots were gone.

The woman who lives right next door to me is Janice, and she’s in love with Blake Carrington from Dynasty. We’re friends and are now the longest standing residents of YOL and she’ll be sad to see me go because she hates Dan and has never received a six-pack of Asahi from him. Instead, Dan has spent a long time in her roof being single. There was talk of Dan having a girlfriend but I suspect the closest thing he has to a girlfriend is a pork chop, in a tumbler.

Dirti Cunti is the building’s body corporate. My top tip to anyone reading this is to never, ever employ these people to look after anything. Getting these so called property managers to take any form of responsibility is like asking Jack the Ripper to work as a temp in a remotely located brothel and asking him to promise not to brutally murder any of the employees.

But dysfunction aside and the odd call from the cops, I love this old building. It’s been a good home to me, Callum Scott, and many of my boisterous guests. It was in this building that I had a remarkable alcoholic delusion. Two friends came round and found me leaning against the toilet door having an argument with my girlfriend, who they assumed had locked herself in the toilet because I was being a nightmare. They coaxed me away from the door with more beer and I sat drinking with them at my kitchen table, occasionally going back to the toilet door to shout something, until I eventually passed out in an ashtray. As they walked down the stairs they passed my girlfriend returning from the supermarket with much needed supplies, and to their credit said ‘hello’ like nothing had happened.

Anyway, there is something incredibly spiritual about a home you love. The very walls seem to imbue a sense of harmony that’s impossible to articulate. In a real home, everything is perfect, even the things that don’t work and, really, that’s the whole point of building a home in the first place. I’ve lived in places that didn’t feel like a home and the knock on effect to the rest of my life was palpable to everyone, especially me. When I don’t have a home, part of my brain ceases to function properly.

When I have a home everything makes sense because I have somewhere to go when everything doesn’t make sense. I think of all the long days I’ve had over the last four and a half years and how getting home at the end of one of those days was better than anything else I could imagine. Opening the door, smelling my home and placing my keys in the little plate by the door. Simple pleasures, the kind of routines that work on me like functional therapy. I hope everybody experiences this at least once in their life because after that you won’t settle for anything less, and nor should you.

So, goodbye Ye Olde Lodge. Sometimes life was stormy and tempestuous but you were always there for me, and most of the time life was perfect because I knew you were there, on the corner of Sydney Road and Park Street. A loveable collection of bricks with a generous soul…

…and the broken clocks who only told the right time twice a day, which was good enough for me.