Deja vu???

Part sixteen.

I’ve been waiting for the dog’s passport to become valid (which reminds me that mine is due for renewal). While she is hopefully becoming immune to rabies, I have headed Oooop North. 

One of the primary reasons for this is a househunting mission. It seems that in the course of the last couple of years I have become no wiser when it comes to estate agents. Of course I did all the usual stuff, spent hours trawling the internet looking at slightly misleading pictures… How exactly do they make an 8X10 living room  appear to be 16 X 20? Perhaps they have a stock of specially miniaturised furniture?

Of course I am not at all familiar with the area, so I got Himself to drive around a bit and do a recce. The area in which my daughter is most interested is the student area. It appears on first (and second) inspection, to be a human zoo. It is also overpriced and boasts the kind of housing stock that gave Dickensian landlords a bad name.

Further forays to the surrounding areas have proved to be an education… When house hunting in Ireland, it was unnecessary to consider the concept of the ghetto (it makes no difference to the price of your house whether your neighbours are cattle or sheep). This is not so in Leeds. Failing to pay attention to the local demographic could be disastrous.

After our excursions I emailed the various estate agents, who by and large ignored me. I did get the details for a number of properties about twenty miles away (and very attractive they were too), but my criteria of ‘under £XXXk and within walking distance of the university’ seemed to have got lost in the ether.

I did finally manage to speak to one or two individuals, and attempted to explain myself and my ignorance. I thought the simplest way to do this was to say ‘if you wouldn’t want your 19 year old daughter living there, then neither would I’. This strategy met with varying degrees of success. For a start, perhaps I should have mentioned that she is violently asthmatic and horribly sensitive to fungal spores, so a property with moisture pouring down the walls and an exotic pattern of mould on the ceiling (sometimes indistinguishable from the wallpaper) will not be suitable.

Most of the properties which fell within the budget were pretty similar, so really the deciding factor was the neighbourhood. We were shown around one delightful little place. Recently refurbished (this instantly aroused suspicion in Himself), close to all amenities, neighbouring houses looked loved and tended… There was however, a rather peculiar building occupying all of the opposite side of the road. It was a fetching shade of pink and our agent said it was squash courts once upon a time. I noticed that there seemed to be a sauna there now, next to the bingo hall. I ventured that we thought it might be a brothel, but was informed that it was a private club/pub type thing. Further research online later revealed that it was indeed a Gay sauna and meeting place which boasted such amenities as a ‘rim stool’, St Andrews cross (I’m pretty certain this isn’t a flag…) and several porn cinemas catering for all tastes. I continue to treasure my ignorance as to the purpose of the above implements, but it became pretty clear that the activities within made Sodom and Gomorrah look like a kindergarten nativity play.

 I also discovered what a ‘Bear’ was, which cast a new light on the name of the neighbour’s house…’Bear’s Ave’, which I had previously thought to be a rather weak pun on the name of the road….

I can see all this putting a serious crimp in resale values… Moving swiftly on….

And so we kept on looking (much to the disgust of the daughter, who had fallen in love with the above property…). Not that the experience made me at all twitchy or suspicious, but my research into other potential properties became a lot more rigorous… It appears that the large and extremely well secured establishment opposite another house was home to a large number of shell companies, all of whom had the same directors, one of whom had recently been banged up for getting caught by Customs and Excise…. Very strangely indeed, almost every house on that street had been sold on the same date, for the same price…..

To fill in the gaps between going to view houses (when the bloody estate agents can be bothered getting back to me!) I have been assisting with the upkeep of Himself’s manor. As you may be aware, this is not a task for the fainthearted. I began with a little light chainsaw work,

 as Himself has recently invested in a woodburner. He claims this is exclusively for my benefit. Of course it has nothing whatsoever to do with the price of gas and the large number of trees (free fuel) taking over his garden…. This free fuel however, will not be available till next year, in the meantime he is researching suppliers… And buying from B&Q….

Then we did some rendering, which was a little tricky as the wall in question was very effectively screened by many years of unpruned shrubbery, which may be why the render was falling off….

It was at around this point that he received a phone call and buggered off for a weekend’s sailing. It was an astonishing display of spontaneity, as I cannot normally extract him from his rut without several months meticulous planning and a number of cunningly crafted arguments. I usually end up resorting to barefaced blackmail in the end anyway.

With all this uninterrupted time on my hands I butchered the garden and did a phenomenal amount of washing. He complained about the amount of electricity used.

We then set to clearing and insulating the loft. This may sound straightforward. In fact it meant grovelling on your belly, face down in the sooty remains of the industrial revolution, with fibreglass insulation circa 1960 inveigling it’s way into every crevice. The bunny suits and masks made us look like mutant ducks.... 

It seems we cleared about a ton of rubble from up there, which might go some way to explaining why the ceilings are bowing, and in one case collapsing???

We toddled off to pick up some insulation and somehow managed to jam nine large rolls into the back of my little van.. Well, almost. Due to a slight misunderstanding (I was more or less lying under the van at the time, trying to prevent the last roll from falling out as I closed the door) I failed to notice that Himself hadn’t extracted his hand from further up. So I swiftly banged the door shut… He roared, he hopped, he swore. He kicked the offending roll of insulation before going on to repeat the performance several times. We were beginning to acquire an audience and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the CCTV turns up on YouTube! It probably didn’t help that I couldn’t hide my laughter…..

I bought him an extremely large PLAIN rug, so I don’t have to look at his horrible carpet anymore and re arranged the living room furniture so it no longer resembles an old folk’s home down on it’s luck… He has been extremely reserved in his appreciation of this. I also bought him a special box for putting all his stray socks in, and tidied the landing so it is less of an obstacle course. You don’t have to turn sideways in order to enter the office now. He is complaining that he has bought all the beer this week and was obliged to pay for lunch because the card machine was down.

In the interests of health, safety and sanity I have booked a ferry.