This was meant to be a long weekend. I didn’t find out till late last week that I wasn’t actually working this Monday so I had nothing sensational planned but I had hoped to go for a ride and get in a bit of training for next month. Get the lardy old arse match fit but it has rained continuously all day and for most of the weekend. Im so fed up with this country.
The other downer is that this house sale doesnt look like it will come through. The survey has identified damp issues. I haven’t yet seen the full report so I don’t yet know how much of the situation is salvageable but I am inclined to walk away from this one. That’s a lot of money down the pan in terms of the survey but better to walk away now than have headaches in the future. Anyway it was starting to look it might interfere with my little jaunt abroad.
I’ve been moaning about estate agents and how they are more interested in trying to sell mortgage products…you think you are dealing with one person and that they have got the point until they go out of the office for the day and someone else tries to go through all their clients “to see if you are still looking…” I suspect they have targets numbers of telephone calls to make. Anyway one little hopeful called me – I don’t know who she was as I normally speak to Mark at that particular outfit: I told her that I was no longer looking and that I was now in the process of a purchase. ‘Oh’ she said, then rallying perkily she said ‘…and are you sorted for a mortgage?’
I wonder, did she think I was going through a house purchase with that little point overlooked just waiting for her to call me. I don’t know how I held back from telling her to go fukkerself. There is such an air of desperation about this selling of financial products. Much like the little adolescents in places like Comet and Curry who are so desparate to sell you extended warranty products.
The fact is, as I learnt from my days in the insurance world, that they often make more profit from the commission on these warranties than they do on the products themselves. And ironically, according to a Radio 4 programme last week many lenders are only selling their cheapest products direct and leaving out the intermediaries.
Well this is a glum post but I don’t much fancy going the rounds of house hunting again, the rain etc. On the plus, it is a shorter week and even better is that next week is even shorter. I have a garden party next Sunday in London and I have the following Monday and Tuesday off. Probably rain again.
If I sound like Marvin the paranoid Android, then perhaps it is because I have been listening to audio books whilst driving. You can pick up the cassettes quite cheap in charity shops and I revisited the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. Dated a bit really. And last week I listened to DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. I really enjoyed being able to do that in about two hours without having to wade through Lawrence’s turgid and interminable prose. I don’t think that I’d be giving too much of the plot away to say that nothing much happens at all except people being miserable. Bit like Eastenders without the shouting and the fun.
Its now 1:20am on Tuesday morning and it is still drizzling and I am starting to think about Australia for Christmas. There are relatives out there that ought to start being worried.
At last after a month and over twenty viewings I found a house that ticked most of the boxes. Put in a silly offer and was accepted. Well I say it was a silly offer but I researched the market quite carefully – you can get all the house sale prices in the country from the internet. I think it was a reasonable price for the condition and the market but it was a lot lower than the asking price but the asking price is always way over the odds anyway. The agent thinks I got a bargain but I suppose he would say that…
That’s the easy bit sorted. Now comes an agonising wait for the lawyers to slowly do their thing. The moon will have moved a little further from the earth, and North America and Europe will have been pushed just a little further apart before this saga comes to a happy end. And all the while the threat of being gazumped.
So I’m not going to tempt fate by going into too much detail but in short its a reasonable sized three bed victorian semi in need of a complete overhaul. Nothing in the way of period detail unfortunately. But it does have good access down the side for the bike and it does have a ludicrously large garden. Its only the width of the house but about a hundred feet long. It looks stupid – like a grass corridor.
The downside is that this is very likely to interfere with trip to Europe but I bought a flexi ticket so I can always reschedule that.
On the subject of the bike, I’ve been spending a lot of time and money on it to get it match fit for its jaunt in June. I just spent nearly six hundred on a major service and overhaul. I also got quoted about £140 for a new seat which got torn over winter. I went to John Lewis and bought a metre of upholstery vinyl for £10. I’ve used only half and re-covered the seat and it looks as good as new. And only a fiver. Boy am I pleased at the saving. And I’m not even properly Scottish.
It’s the May bank holiday and it is bright and very warm. But it has been, until very recently, April
which has meant April showers and lots of them. I guess it must be summer because the rape is in full swing. Rape, for those who don’t know is a modern cash crop that has swamped the English countryside in the last few years. It’s grown for its oil-bearing seed. It is the colour of a
yellow highlighter pen and smells like stale saliva. It is the bane of hayfever sufferers and even if you don’t suffer allergies the relentless stink makes you feel sick.
Life is a bit of a holding pattern at the moment. Just work work work. I don’t seem to have much of a life just now. But, I keep telling myself, this is just temporary till I find a place to buy and in the meantime I am just squirrelling away deposit money. I’ve looked at quite a few houses and though I have seen a couple I rather like they all fall just short of my exacting standards and refined aesthetic sensibilities. I need to up the ante on this as I am getting impatient. Its not helped that I am held back next week being short of transport. Attempts to buy a new bike have been fruitless and I have decided to stick with the current beast until the end of the year even though I have had it now for 10 years and two days. It is off to Europe at the end of next month and is at the dealers having a service that will cost more than it is insured for. Still that is an accountant’s way of looking at it; as far as I am concerned it is just running cost and pretty cheap at that when all is said and done. I’m no longer running a car and this is saving me a fortune which all goes toward saving for the homestead.
Dreaming about Europe is about all that is keeping me going at the moment. The ferry has been booked for ages and like last year I am sailing overnight from Harwich to Rotterdam. I cannot wait – the ferry trip alone is great. Suuuuchh a difference from the chav express from Dover to Calais. The worry on that two hour horror on the high seas is that the friction between the nylon carpets and the wall to wall nylon shell suits will cause a massive spontaneous combustion with the whole lot going up like a Californian haystack. Instead I’m gonna get my own little en-suite cabin and a civilised sleep before setting off refreshed and breakfasted at seven in the morning for a whole-day high speed slog down to the Black Forest. Then I am hacking straight down through Switzerland to spend the night at the foot of the Matterhorn. After that I will just pootle along through Italy and Austria, possibly taking in the Czech republic before meandering back to Holland.
I’ve been poring over a large map of the Alps putting stickers where the guide book suggests riches to see if some sort of natural route emerges but so far none. But I have discovered that there are lots of old mines and ice caves and museums and such that interest me – its amazing how much of our own cultural archetypes come from this area through the folk tales collected by ethnographers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and also via Disney and all the children’s books we grew up with. I might make this a bit of a theme.
And finally, and for no other reason than to gratuously fill up space with another picture lets remind ourselves why I am doing this: This is a shot at the end of the Val de Sol overlooking Cles in the Italian Alps.
It may be a sunny bank holiday for some folk but I unfortunately have work to go to.
Ciao
