Just Looking

I very seldom open windows onto my day-to-day existence because I realise that inducing abject boredom in the reader is not something to which any writer should aspire.  My aim is perhaps to engender a small iota of recognition somewhere in the dark recesses in the mind of my readers, not to render them senseless, so my ramblings here are normally rather more general than specific: small splashes of colour on the broadest of canvases; the parts of the story that Michelangelo would almost certainly have emulsioned over.  Today however, I am about to stray into the personal when I tell you that we have started to look around other peoples’ houses – not, I feel I should stress, as some kind of nefarious new hobby, but because it is likely that, in the fullness of time, we will attempt to set up camp in one of them.  We have decided that the time is right to leave our home of forty plus years and settle somewhere slightly smaller.  To that end we also have to invite other people to troop through our own little nest.

The first surprise to me is that the downsizing I always imagined would place a wedge of cash into my back pocket is actually set to siphon all of the folding stuff from the front ones at an alarming rate.  The knowledge that a single storey three-bed bungalow is so much more costly than a four-bed two storey house is quite alarming, as is the realisation that, for my wife, downsizing does not necessarily equate to moving into something that is in any way smaller than what we currently inhabit.  I was relishing the challenge of excising all manner of extraneous crud from my life only to find that she is looking for a big enough loft/garage combo to accommodate it all.  It is of little consequence if I am honest, we will compromise as we always do and I will throw out half a dozen pairs of old pants, a threadbare dartboard and a second favourite coffee mug (chipped) and she… will let me.

The real problem arises in the very act of showing people around our current home.  To date we have had only very pleasant people – the kind that we would be happy to sell it to (and it is alarming to discover how much we actually care about who buys it) – but (and here’s the issue) they are all so bloody transparent when muttering the kind of fuzzy platitudes we all do when placed in such an unnatural situation: when you hate the colour of a wall or carpet, but you are being shown it by the very person who chose it.  ‘It’s lovely,’ comes out of their mouths whilst the brain can be heard calculating the cost of painting it all over.  And we are visiting other peoples’ homes and doing the self-same thing ourselves when hiding a ‘Why on earth have you done that?’ behind a conversation about how much light comes through a window (Seriously?  Why else would it be there?) but for some reason, the rational part of the brain that tells you that there is no conceivable reason why anyone interested in buying your house would automatically share your taste in colour, is trammelled over by the bit that shouts ‘How bloody dare they?’  This is my house and any criticism, open, implied or even completely imagined, is an affront.  ‘If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.  Bugger off!’

I may have to work on my sales patter…

There’s things I want
There’s things I think I want
There’s things I’ve had
There’s things I want to have…  Just Looking – Stereophonics (Kelly Jones / Richard Mark Jones / Stuart Cable)