Limbo – Getting On

It’s been a bad day. I have come this close to supporting a crippled donkey, within a whisker of accepting my free Parker Pen for simply enquiring; I was no more than a flat mobile phone battery away from being the owner of my very own fuss-free cremation. Where my mind is usually engaged in detailed navel-gazing, I now find it staring into the middle distance. When the muse leaves me – and it has at this moment proper buggered off – I somehow find myself gawping at daytime repeats of ‘The Detective Story that Time Forgot’ on a TV channel that should – if there is any justice in this world – have viewing figures that hover near the lower end of single-digits. This is the life of a disconcerted sixty-five year old whiling away his days whilst staring at a feint-lined sheet of A4, blank but for a single pencil word that could well be ‘wibble’, with not one further word or concept between his ears.

This almost entirely virginal sheet of paper has been staring me in the face for three days now. It’s not usual. In my life, clean slates are despoiled by something in the order of 600 – 1,000 words every single day, even if, when strung together they make no sense at all, like a random page from ‘Ulysses’, a news interview with Donald Trump or ‘Timon of Athens’. Even when my head is empty, I find a way to fill paper.

Of course, in reality my head is not entirely empty: it is occupied elsewhere. Whilst action is minimal with regards to the house move, possibilities are broiling. There is currently no chance that we will move before Christmas, yet simultaneously there is a distinct possibility of moving before the weekend. We are bouncing around like a bunch of pixels in a 1970’s video game. Our lives are packed into boxes where they may, or may not, remain for weeks. We cannot get a removal company, but we can get a large van in which we may be able to ferry ourselves back and forth like some kind of political hot potato. Fortunately distances are small and one of our daughters has a reasonably empty garage that we can use as a mid-way staging post. Should the move happen, it will be a high pressure day and I fear I will stagger through it with the appearance from afar of Norman Wisdom on a runaway horse.

More likely, of course, is that it will not go ahead and we will spend Christmas in a houseful of boxes, none of which come gift-wrapped: no tree, no tinsel, no twinkling lights. Christmas, like a drunken Humpty Dumpty, has fallen between two stools and if we try to pick it up, we will just end up with sticky fingers. This is a strange kind of limbo with panic woven through it and in response my brain, never the most reliable of units, has slipped into neutral and despite revving beyond sake limits, is doing so to no effect whatsoever. I am a spinning top, aware that if I slow down I will topple over, so I spin on, getting absolutely nowhere but remaining somehow upright; sucking in orphaned bears, free biros and frill-free cremations as I go.

Wibble…

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)