Just the Sky Above, the Ground Below and a Single Floor Between

Early on in the whole house selling malarkey, we had to fill in a Fixtures & Fittings Form, listing everything we intended to include in the sale. From the moment that form is passed on to the solicitor, the content listed becomes part of the contract and you begin to live in fear of breaking it, every time I flick the kitchen light switch, I worry that the light might not come on, each time I open a kitchen cabinet door, I worry that it might fall off. I have never worried so much about spilling coffee on the carpet. My wife bursts through into the lounge shouting “the microwave has just exploded” and I think ‘thank goodness it’s not on the list’. I find myself overwhelmed with responsibility.

And I know that you, dear reader, are by now fully aware of how long this whole process takes. You have shown amazing fortitude. I am grateful, not to mention awed, that you have managed to stick around so long. I would love to be able to tell you that your ordeal is drawing to a close, but quite obviously, it is not. The longer it all takes, the further ahead the end seems to lie… and it moves, further and further into the future, beyond settling in, decorating, extending, re-decorating and furnishing. It will, I presume, all end in death. In the meantime, my problem is to find non-house buying tales to tell. Your challenge is to see how far you can stretch your boredom threshold.

I have discovered that this whole moving palaver merely heightens my consciousness of the whole ageing process and, how close to the end of the process I have already slipped. Physically, the body begins to fail, eyesight fades, hearing becomes less acute, the voice becomes progressively weaker (my wife has hardly heard a word I have said for years) and the stubborn intransigence of dodgy knees ensures that I couldn’t relive past glories even if I wanted to. Mentally too, one begins to change. I don’t mean in acuity – although, sadly, that is the case for many – I mean in patience and opinion: an old person cannot possibly have the same viewpoint as a young one. If you can, look back on what you wrote as a teen – I have an unrivalled selection of rejected material to review – and you have to admit that you would not – probably could not – write it now. We, the aged, see the world differently to those who have never had to walk to school through six feet of snow or do a paper-round that spread over three continents. As we get older, the world becomes ever-smaller.

I am made doubly aware of this because we are moving into a bungalow – the last bastion of independence before the care home and eating dinner with a plastic spoon and a bib. Walking slowly down a corridor to the bathroom does not easily equate to a cumulative twenty flights of stairs a day. I fear that we may be driving ourselves into old age, but at the speed things are currently progressing, at least, it is very likely that we will reach dotage before uni-level living.

The couple moving into our house are much younger than us – although nothing like as young as we were when we moved here, brimful of the kind of hope that masks all concern – and the people we are buying from are much older. I guess they would have been about our age when they moved in there. I wonder if they ever believed they would move again? I wonder if they’re currently worried about the toilet not flushing or the conservatory fan falling off the roof. Because I’ve checked, and they’re both on the list…

Belly of the Whale

Well, it came as a bit of a shock, but we’ve sold very quickly and now we have to look for a house to buy with some urgency. I’m sure that neither of us thought that it would happen this soon and we are only just beginning to compute the implications. We have, I think, viewed eight properties over the last couple of days – they have been too expensive, too big, too small, too rundown and too much of a home for wallaby-sized rats – but we are left with one or two ‘contenders’ – nothing is perfect is it? Oddly the pressure I have started to feel is more in terms of getting ready to move out of this house than where we’re going to go to when we’ve done it.

We’ve lived here for forty three years. We bought it when we really couldn’t afford it, but we were young enough (and just the right side of stupid) to take on ‘a project’. At times I thought that the bloody thing was going to kill me, but we slowly got it together. We raised our children here and I think that almost everyone we have ever known has visited it at some time or another. Now we think that the time is right for it to shelter somebody else’s growing tribe. Our buyers (fingers crossed that they remain our buyers) are such; a young family whom I hope will be very happy here – as we have been.

So we have to start sorting through forty three years of assembled ‘stuff’. Mementoes of pre-parenting life; of the blissful days of early-parenthood; the more difficult, but ultimately rewarding days of parenting young adults; of letting them go; of welcoming them back; of greeting new family members and, eventually, our precious grandchildren – all of these have to be sifted through and either saved or abandoned. We are downsizing so the abandoned pile has to be the bigger, we both agree on that… until we get the bin bags out..

Our children are startlingly non-nostalgic and did not want to keep much of what we had kept from their childhoods when they left home, so they are even less likely to want it now. I wonder if this knowledge will make it any less of a wrench when we haul it all down from the attic and tip it into a skip? Probably not.

I’m not at all certain how we will feel going forward: our lives are woven into this house: we built this nest around us like little birds. It will, when the time comes, be difficult to leave, but hopefully we will walk into a new chapter… whilst we are still able to walk.

It’s hard to avoid thinking about mortality at times like this – if I’m honest, it is something you can never successfully turn your back on at my age – because if we live as long in our new home (wherever that may be) as we have here, I will be 109 years old and almost certainly not able to climb trees with the great-grandkids without the assistance of a block and tackle. Unless we get it very wrong – or decrepitude forces arthritic hands – this will be our last home: only the third we have ever shared. And all that we have to do is find it…

That house broke my back
That house I built skinned my knuckles
That house I built picked my pockets
And buckled every joint
It pointed me from youth and any truth I knew
Towards a painted sundown on a break your nose horizon… Belly of the Whale – Guy Garvey

I’m sorry if the title of this piece led you away from where it was actually going, but the song was in my head before I even started to write…

The Chain

In theory it works like this: a young couple want to move from their tiny flat into a 2-bed terrace house; the owners of the 2-bed want to move into a 3-bed semi; the semi owners want a 4-bed detached; the 4-bed owners , whose family have flown the nest, want to downsize into a bungalow before they can come back, and the elderly couple in the bungalow, now finding the garden a little too much to cope with, want to move into a flat. This is the house-buying chain: each link totally reliant on its neighbours, each one as fragile as the next.

The first thing to know is that when buying of selling a property in England nobody is actually committed to anything at all until contracts are exchanged, and this happens at the very end of a lengthy process that usually takes several fraught months. Make all the plans you like baby, somebody is always going to pull out at the very last minute. Panic will kick in on either side of the crumbling link – someone no longer has a house to buy, someone else no longer has a buyer for their house. Somebody will end up panic-buying anything with a roof whilst somebody else is dropping the asking price by daily increments. Two separate chains become a knot and everyone within it is doomed!

It is a commonly held opinion that buying/selling a house and moving home is the most stressful thing that most of us will ever do. I doubt that many of us will ever sit in a roomful of snakes, so it is possible. And when the move is done, well, it doesn’t really stop does it? Now is the time to spot all of the defects you missed before you bought it; this is the time when you notice that a damp patch doesn’t stay painted over forever; this is the time that you notice that the hallway was light and airy only because the front door doesn’t close properly; this is the moment you realise that the sofa doesn’t fit…

Not that we’re in that position yet. We have neither buyer, nor anywhere to buy. We are looking, tentatively, but it is difficult: you either find a buyer whilst you have no idea of where you might go, or you find your dream home and lose it while waiting for someone to buy your own. This is Limbo. Meanwhile, we stalk around ‘maybe’ houses with uncomfortable homeowners who look as though they are waiting for the axe to fall, me looking for somewhere to store my CD’s and books, my wife looking for walls to knock down. We leave full of the positives and wake up the next morning full of the negatives. Sooner or later, I suppose, it will all resolve around us and we will become a link in our own little chain… and woe betide anyone who breaks that one up.

This very evening we have visited ‘a bit of a project’ – two bedrooms (we need three), a small kitchen (we ‘need’ a large kitchen/diner), a low-ceilinged conservatory that would almost certainly ‘have to come down’ in order to build a less Lillipution extension – and having gone through the motions inside we went into the garden which was ‘a good size for us’. I was by now at the ‘had the contact lenses in about an hour too long’ stage, but I made out something moving on the grass. “I think you have a bunny on your lawn” I said, and the owner shooed it away. But it came back defiantly, sedately enough for my poor beleaguered peepers to register that it was, in fact, the biggest bloody rat I have ever seen in my life; the result, apparently, of a next door neighbour keeping chickens. It was the size of a kangaroo.

The ‘project’ is not at the top of our list…

Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise
Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies… The Chain – Fleetwood Mac (Christine McVie / John McVie / Lindsey Buckingham / Mick Fleetwood / Stephanie Nicks)

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)