Stress – Getting On

Well, it didn’t take too long in the grand scheme of things did it? We have found a house that we are both happy with: me because it needs so little doing to it; my wife because it needs so much. One way or another, should things go to plan, we will be calling it ‘home’ within a few months. Meantime, I have only blind panic and mild hysteria (both mine) to deal with. My world is quite suddenly filled with things to do and overloaded with things that must be done. It is impossible to imagine that the world holds enough paper to accommodate all these forms. Paperwork fills my days whilst my 3am walkabouts are dominated with hows and whatifs. I know people who are happy to move home quite regularly – to be honest, I can’t think of anyone who has done it less than us – they must be mad.

I know what I am like: if I had a sphygmomanometer screwed into my head, I would probably blow its top off: I am The Flying Scotsman without the benefit of sleek good looks, I am the Marianas Trench without the dark mystery of unfathomable depths. I am not built for stress. I am built for chocolate. I am not completely daft – in my own head at least – I have a good idea of what lies ahead: the weeks or months in the run-up to the move; the move itself; the weeks of readjustment to our new surroundings; the months of building work and adjustment of our new surroundings. I labour under no allusions whatsoever that the coming months will be anything but painful. If I wasn’t as old as I am, I would be looking forward to putting it all behind me, but at this age I really can’t afford to just toss time away. There will be islands of joy, however remote, I am sure; there will be time to draw breath and – unless things run dangerously out-of-hand – we have the wherewithal to employ people to do all of the things of which I am not capable (eg almost all of it). For now, we do what we have to do day by day and try not to get too far ahead of ourselves for fear that it all might yet – like a flat-pack kitchen – fall apart. In truth, the new house (dv) was, for our different reasons, the first choice for both of us. We saw it early and every other place was playing catch-up from then on. If we love it as much in a year’s time then we have definitely won. For now, we still have the results of the survey to sweat on, and my wife has ‘concerns’ about a tree in a neighbouring garden – if you know anyone who can tell us if it will grow big enough to throw our garden into permanent shade, if so, how long it will take and whether I am likely to be in an even more permanent shade of darkness before then, please let me know.

I have no intention – even if I had the mental acuity to do so – to turn this blog into some kind of helpful housebuyer’s guide – although, heaven knows, I might give it a go if it would ‘buy’ me a few more readers – and, unless something particularly untoward happens, I will return to the usual drivel just as soon as I manage to get some respite from form-filling duties. My brain is currently numb from lack of sleep and the kind of logistical conundrums that can cause nought but total mental mayhem in the early morning hours. Whenever I try to give the poor thing a few empty minutes in which to regroup its frazzled neurons, it merely coalesces around a million little uncertainties into a single knot of fevered apprehension which blocks all other thought like a bowlful of lard down a plughole and leaves me without a clue of how to break back in.

Next week is a whole new world and I am hoping it will be bathed in sunlight – much like the new garden which, according to the compass on my phone, will not be. Do me a favour, just stick around and watch this space. I really hope I will be with you…

I had to pull myself together, I had to be strong
So I waited for the postman and it wasn’t long… Whole New World – It Bites

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)