This may or may not be a true story. I wrote it mainly for the amusement of my best mate, who is suffering from a particularly nasty disease, so she doesn't get out too much. It makes her laugh, so maybe it will do the same for you.
I’ve been trying to buy a house in Ireland for over six months now. You would have thought with the Celtic Tiger loosing it’s teeth and the property market being in something of a slump (note understatement) that this shouldn’t be too difficult an undertaking. The money is there, so all I have to do is find a suitable property, make an offer and settle down with a pint to watch the sunset over the Atlantic….. I wish!
Having spent a while trawling the internet for the perfect (or even remotely adequate) property in a particular area of the Western seaboard, himself and myself rolled up, fresh off the Holyhead ferry last winter. We had only a few days so we planned to pack in as much as possible. Our first appointment was to see a ‘great opportunity’ in the form of a tin roofed cowshed halfway up a mountain. Fair enough, the seller had made a start on it and from the outside, in the pale winter sun it looked pretty enough. We were soon joined by a startlingly short individual in a startlingly large car (draw your own conclusions) who proceeded to display utter disinterest in both us and the property. The unspoken but unmistakable message ‘it’s a shithole’ hung in the air.
One up, one down, no plumbing or electricity, in the middle of a bog with a shed 20 yards from the ‘house’ serving as the toilet. Ok… so maybe I could have done a bit more research (always be suspicious if the estate agent doesn’t post any interior pictures, it means you don’t want to know) but they wanted HOW MUCH for it????
Moving swiftly along… The agent in question offered no suggestions and made no inquiries about what I was after, disappearing rapidly in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes, anxious no doubt to return to the land where mobiles work.
Himself and myself shrugged and moved on. I wondered if I should have made more of my assets (not the feminine sort, God forbid!) Only slightly deterred we fuelled up with coffee in the nearest town and went in search of further and hopefully more obliging estate agents.
This turned out to be an interesting and instructive venture, and a harbinger of things to come.
With the utterance of the phrase ‘cash buyer’ the next estate agent welcomed us like long lost family. In all fairness to him, he asked all the right questions, was polite and realistic, but sadly had nothing suitable on his books. He did give us directions to a house which he thought might be about to come on the market with him and urged us to keep in touch, advising us that the advertised price on many houses expressed the triumph of optimism over experience.
Taking the opportunity (another ‘great’ one?) we visited another establishment in the town. Despite the fact I was born and bred in Ireland, I have developed an English accent over the past 20 years, although most native English spot me for a Paddy straightaway. Himself is an old colonial…need I say more? Consequently, as soon as I opened my mouth I dropped neatly into the ‘idiot tourist’category. On learning of the price range I was interested in, which was very much the lower end of the market, I was treated to an extra dash of contempt by the resident administrative dragon. We indicated a couple of properties and were brusquely informed that we ‘didn’t want that, it has a lot of problems’, with no further information forthcoming. Eventually a small handful of places were singled out. When I queried the suitability of one of them, the dragon barked ‘what do you want, jam on it?’. Duly chastised we were dispatched with a junior and very helpful member of staff to view an old farmhouse.
Now I know the area well enough, but there are gaps in that knowledge and as we rattled and bounced down the potholes we entered one of these gaps. The house was typical of it’s kind, 2.5 up, 2.5 down with much made of the crumbling stone outbuilding and disintegrating barn. Once upon a time, someone in the West had the bright idea of planting a screen of conifers to act as a windbreak against the perpetual, flesh and building scouring southwesterlies. All fine and fair enough, but after many years of growth and infrequent pruning there is a plague of these dark, leggy, louring giants about the countryside. Shades of the Brothers Grimm meets ‘Deliverance”?
I would like to say that I was undeterred and pressed on, imagining how the place might look with a bit of landscaping and a few coats of paint. Well I pressed on anyway. In through the sagging porch, which it appeared also served as a kitchen, into the old kitchen, still equipped with a rusting gas heater and a votive of the sacred heart, perpetual flame still burning. Into the surgical appliance pink living room, with it’s pervasive smell of damp, up to the wooden clad bedrooms with sloping floors (no, it’s the ceilings which are supposed to slope…). I really did try to see the potential and appreciate the knockdown price. Then I opened the under the stairs cupboard and was confronted at eye level by a perfectly articulated skeleton of a mouse – trapped in a spider’s web. Mercifully I’m not arachnophobic, but how big must the bloody spider have been???? Further discreet enquiries revealed that the area in question is regarded locally as bandit country.
With a sheaf of details littering the back seat we headed off into the inevitable driving rain and approaching dusk. Being short of time we decided to drive by the ‘might soon be on the market’ prospect. Darkness, driving rain and thrashing branches are certainly not the ideal circumstances in which to view a house.. There was a pattern emerging as we passed quaint, beautifully renovated holiday homes and palatial new builds, one of damp desolate, semi derelict farmhouses, vastly overpriced.
Our final stop en route back to the ferry was a rather attractive little cottage, fully renovated, but on a busy fork in the road. On exploring the garden it turned out to be mainly moss, cunningly concealing…bog. Actually, if it’s situation had been better it might have been a goer, but we never even made it inside.
