It’s where?

Ooh, how exciting. We might be about to buy a house! Well, possibly. With a few caveats. When you’re 40-something, everything seems to be tinged with doubt.  What’ll happen when we’re in our fifties I find myself wondering…….it could take years to make a decision.   Hopefully we’ll have actually moved by then.

The Village. If only we could see it from the house....

 

 So lots of misgivings, last minute doubts…the stone-age slow-speed broadband, for one thing. The lack of civic amenities within a 3 mile radius, no public sewerage, and even no Tesco Express…yes yes I know we decried all that, but when you actually see the house standing there, in all it’s rustic isolation, well it’s quite another thing….

Not us. But I get the feeling it could be...

We did wonder whether it might occasionally get snowed in during the winter…so we thought, during that cold, snowy snap, that we might drive up and find out the answer.  Which, we discovered (but not in a nice way) is yes. We didn’t even get as far as the house. As soon as the minor unclassified C road started it’s gentle downhill inclination, so did we. One tap on the break and we slid gracefully into the hedge, never to get out again. Thankfully, a passing couple in their Pajero took one look at us and nipped back to the farm for a tow bar, the darlings. It later turns out they’ll be our neighbours if we move in, handy – huh?) I’ll never slate 4 x 4 owners again (unless they’re not from round ‘ere…)

 The other thing. Oh yes, Of course, what gives the house it’s lovely views is the fact that it’s teetering precariously on a 15 ft hillock. It wasn’t teetering when we first looked at but that was before the snow and ice came…it’s like having an infinity pool, only made from brambles…..

 Oh and the drainage. (Yer shit goes into a field. Who’s field, we know not).

 And the borehole, fed by natural springwater! (And pumped into your house by a complex system of filters, tanks and a frost protection heater…..) All this lot takes up a shedful in the garden.  And I was hoping to put my bike in there….

Knowing me, knowing you, ah ha!

Back a month or so, Fox & Sons in Axminster had advertised ‘a hidden gem’, empty and with no onward chain, in a lovely rural location. It sounded good so I arranged a viewing.

The village looked nice, and the directions – turn right into an unmarked lane and drive over a stream – were relatively accurate (I got there but with about 2 inches to spare either side of the car wheels, a sheer drop to the stream below).

A hidden gem. Apparently.

 The house was uninspiring to look at, and obviously uninhabited, but the bright and breezy agent, barely out of her teens, was waiting to show me round. Or would have had she been able to get in. The door was jammed stuck and she just couldn’t get it open.

 

Well, having driven all the way there and taken time out of my busy schedule, I wasn’t about to be deterred by a small matter of a sticking door. And bless the girl, she was a waif who might have been blown down by a strong gust of wind, so I smashed the door open with my bare fists.

Alright, obviously I didn’t do that but I did ram it with my shoulder and yes, the door did open. OK, somewhat dramatically. And noisily. There may have been some minor collateral damage.

At least seeing the interior did get to prove my suspicions that it was 4-roomed brick box with no hidden gems inside. Nothing that a complete demolition wouldn’t fix, but we’re not quite up to that.  

So obviously I am over-egging the drama of the situation for your entertainment, and I thought no more of the matter. Then a couple of months later I saw another house advertised through the same agent so rang up to arrange a viewing. Here’s a rough transcript of the conversation.

Looks innocent enough.....

Me; “Oh, hi there, you’ve got a property for sale that I’m interested in, can I arrange a viewing?

Fox & Sons: “Yes, sure. What’s your name please?”

Me: “Oh, it’s Alice Meacham, I am actually registered -

Fox & Sons: “Oh yes, Alice Meacham. Yes, we know who you are, yes, you’re definitely on our system”

Me: “Really? That’s odd, I’ve only ever see 1 or 2 properties with you” (laughs nervously, and somewhat incredulously)

Fox & Sons: (suppressed laughter) “Well, we certainly know your name!”.

Me: “Gosh, I’m not sure how to take that. So how come you know my name so well?”

Fox & Sons: “You must have one of those names that’s just known around the office!” (More suppressed hilarity)

Me: (feeling increasingly paranoid) “Erm, right. Well, could you send me details of the property then?”

Fox & Sons: “Yes of course, they’ll go out to you today” (giggles openly, and continually)

Me: “OK thanks. I think. (Desperately thrashing around for flashback. Did I have an unfortunately aligned piece of clothing? A bogey hanging from my nose?)

Look, is it to do with me breaking down the door on that place in Whitford?”

Fox & Sons: (helpless laughter, then pulls herself together as if suddenly finding a way out) “Oh, Yes. Yes, if we ever need a burglar round here, we know who to call!”

Me: (unsatisfied, I’m being fobbed off here) “Well, OK, um, I look forward to getting the details then. Thanks. Bye”

Fox and Sons: “Yes, they’ll go out today then, thanks, bye (peels of uninhibited raucous laughter before I put the phone down).

If you’ve ever seen ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ with the hotel receptionist played by Sally Phillips, you’ll know how I felt. Fortunately the house they sent me was crap, so I didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of a viewing.

Come the revolution….

So, I’ve been thinking about what estate agents do and just how useful they are. I’m so grateful to them for letting me know that all their available property is on Rightmove.co.uk, I surely am. I just know that when I come to sell again, I’ll happily part with a few thousand pounds so that they can send our property details to buyers looking for a 2 bedroom flat in Lanarkshire…..

Oh give me a home….

So, where were we. Oh yes, trying to buy a house. Well, nothing’s ever easy is it…. For a few thousand dollars more, we might have our dream home. OK, quite a few thousand dollars more actually. But as it is we are (or more accurately I am) obsessively scouring the pages of Rightmove.co.uk on a nightly, if not hourly, basis. Thus bringing the term, ‘property porn’ into sharp focus.

Consequently I’m developing a refined strain of obsessive compulsive disorder. Go on, ask me anything about house buying. I’ll “dual aspect” you and give you a right good “utility area”.  And for your information “conveniently located” always means the house faces onto a major trunk road. Anyway, the long and short of it is, we’re nearing the end of our astronomically expensive six-month let, with still no home in sight.

That’s not to say we haven’t seen some nice houses, and even put in some offers…unfortunately not the kind of offer that’ll do nicely sir. Just the sort of offer that has estate agents gravely informing you that ‘it just doesn’t quite hit the mark’ they fall of their chairs in helpless laughter.

The Old Kings Arms, the Middle of Nowhere, Devon, UK

There was the Old Kings Arms, a really nice former village pub out in the wilds of Smeatharpe. Obviously you’ve never heard of it (unless you were at an illegal rave in 1994), it’s very rural, quite remote, in the middle of the Blackdown Hills (they’re in Devon, stoopid). With no school, no local shop or even a church, and now of course no village inn.

But, Smeatharpe was also home to a former US military airbase with it’s heyday during the Second World War, now disused and returned to farmland. This house used to be the drinking haunt for airmen during the war, which fell into disuse after the war once they’d returned to the States, and as the local village population waned.

Same house, different angle. And different era.....60 years ago.

Anyhow, while it was a great house with an interesting history, the location was really quite desolate and windswept.

I couldn’t help but imagine living there, on a cold dark stormy winter’s night. With the wind howling outside. Waking at midnight to hear the chatter of voices downstairs, and the chink of glasses, only for it to suddenly stop as I tiptoe down the stairs….oooohhh!  All from one viewing too. Anyhow it wasn’t to be so I can rest easy at night….

So, house-hunting aside, I’ve recently made my choral debut singing Handel’s Messiah (badly) at the Sidmouth Advent Concert…Having listened to the video recording done by Keith at the back of the hall, I note we sound, on occasion, so breathtakingly out of tune that I’m only showing you the best bit here (which includes the hired-in pro soloists).

One Big Angel. May gatecrashes Alex's playgroup nativity....

Of course, it was all covered by our local press, which is so local that in the same week May was also papped in the Nativity play.

And out late night shopping with Father Christmas (well, not actually shopping with him, obviously…)

Did this sweet come out of your beard?

And just so you know it’s not just us but pretty much everyone we know features in the local rag from one week to another. It’s all very League of Gentlemen, but in a nice way.

Early Retirement

Our temporary residency in a cul-de-sac full of retired folk is obviously rubbing off. On Friday I found myself signing up to a watercolour course. Now Alice has just informed me that she’s joined the choral society. I expect the next time that we go for a picnic, we’ll be parked in a layby, sitting in fold-up chairs next to the car.

Strange lights in the sky…..

In the dark dark night...(acutally it's not. It's last Monday morning but you get the idea)

Keith’s away for the weekend, and I’m on my own with the kids. They’re tucked up in bed and I’m hunkered down warbling along to Last Night of the Proms. I’m momentarily swept up in a wave of patriotic warmth (gone as soon as the telly’s off), but by 11.30 I’m locking up the house ready for bed. I glance out of the back door at the treelined hill above, silhouetted against a dark but star-lit night sky.

A red light appears, hovering above Salcombe Hill, about a half a mile in from the coast.  You often see coastguard helicopters so I give it only a glance before heading back in. But then I realised there’s no engine sound. It’s a beautiful, quiet, windless night. A bit like that scene in Close Encounters. So I look up again, and a second light appears up over the brow, hovering. Then a third, and a fourth. They’re travelling slowly across the horizon.

OK it DIDN'T look like this alright?

One after the other, they keep coming. Each one following after the other, softly glowing reddish orange lights against the blue-black sky. A trail of lights. And (as I later explain to the Police Officer) there seems to be a purpose, a direction – they’re travelling slowly out to sea, but there’s absolute silence. Nothing to indicate how these…..well, whatever they are, are powered.

I run through the possibilities; there’s an army base nearby at Exmouth, perhaps there’s some nightime helicopter exercise. Maybe it’s that thing about sound travelling more slowly than light. A whole lot more slowly. But surely there’s not that many helicopters in the whole of the West Country? Perhaps a bunch of hardcore parascenders wearing headlamps (it’s so extreme, doing it in the pitch black, man…….)

..and definately not this

At least 20 or 30 go by, but then finally they’re gone. I’m absolutely bowled over. My brain cannot make sense of what I’ve seen. I feel somehow disappointed, deflated. I consider booting up my PC and Googling ‘red lights in sky Sidmouth’, then I remember it takes about 25 minutes for my machine to start up so I don’t bother.

Instead I go to Plan B and call the police (remember I’m on my own here and I recently saw that Spielberg version of War of the Worlds). For a moment, as I pick up the phone, I get a fleeting glimpse of the batty old lady I’m destined to become.  No, no one else has reported this incident. They ask lots of probing questions – direction and speed of travel, approximate altitude, duration of event – but nothing, I’m grateful to note, about me personally.

They then conclude that they don’t know what it is either. But they kindly offer to get back to me when they do. Which is about 30 minutes later, at Midnight, when I’ve just dropped off into a troubled sleep.

They’ve been in touch with Portland Coastguard,and the mystery is solved. Apparently it’s Chinese Lanterns, I’m informed by the long-suffering but jovial policeman on the other end of the phone. Ah yes, that would be it then. Very sorry to have troubled you. No problem, goodnight then.

...see? Oh, they're car lights. Sorry.

I remember sitting on Brighton Beach late one night for some funky festival event. It was all the usual stuff – fire-eating, juggling, mad drug-fuelled dread-heads speaking in tongues, that sort of thing. But then someone let off these lovely flame lit paper parachutes that rose gently up into the sky and floated away. So you see, when I lived in the city, I’d take it for granted that someone was sending up paper lanterns. Now that I’ve gone hillbilly, it gets mistaken for unexplained phenomenon.

Witch’s Brew

“Twixt the Commons” is how certain imaginative estate agents referred to the district between Tooting and Wandsworth when I lived around there. Needless to say, the bucolic idyll that this conjures up is rather far from the grimy truth of SW12. Recently Alice and I received house details describing a “Charming grade II listed cottage, currently used as a wildlife sanctuary”.

Charming Grade II listed cottage. Pity it's not the one we actually saw...

While we were fondly imagining Rolf Harris popping in for tea, I recalled the “Twixt the Commons” misnomer and smelt a rat, so to speak. To be fair, on the phone the next day, the agent did warn us to take a nose peg and be prepared for a goat in the bedroom. We decided it had to be worth a look anyway, given the “potential” (You see, these Estate Agent euphemisms are really starting to trip off the tongue…)

We prepared ourselves as suggested, if not with nose pegs, then mentally at least. We re-calibrated our house-hunting expectations from “Start a New Life with a Grand Design in a Country Location, Location, Location” to “How Clean is Your Animal Hospital”. With hindsight, we should have just gone with the nose pegs.

As soon as the front door opened, the miasma of cat pee almost knocked us to the floor and believe me, the floor would not have been a good place to be, given the dubious assortment of animal detritus littering it. Thankfully Alice did most of the talking, because I was discovering, in a very physical sense, the meaning of choking on a smell. From that moment on I have little memory of the house itself, just very odd images which play in my head like a bizarre splicing of some weird Czechoslovakian surrealist film and “Through the Keyhole”.

So, “Who lives in a house like this?” Well, there was the dotty, but rather sweet owner. She had long straggly white hair and a baggy old CND jumper. A few hundred years ago she’d have been accused of witchcraft.

In August 2009 two house hunters dissapeared in a cottage near the A30...

Four weeks later, their blog was found...

In fact, as she showed us around, we  began to notice various items of magical paraphernalia. Not broomsticks and cauldrons or anything, but there was a certificate from the “Order of Isis” and some self-help spell books. I suppose witchcraft has moved on.

 

For all her eccentricity though, she was an intelligent, caring woman whom fate had not treated kindly. A combination of misfortune and family tragedy had landed her with a huge debt on a crumbling property that she couldn’t afford to keep and had little hope of selling. Her way of coping was to care for strays – which brings us on to the other residents: One stinky dog, two mangy crows, three threadbare pigeons…  In one room I noticed a remarkably realistic doorstop carved like a tortoise – which turned out to be a tortoise. In another, the tensile strength of spider’s silk was proven by the fact that it was pretty much all that was holding the rotten sash window in place. The goat, at least, had moved on.

Oh and cats. Lots and lots of cats. I couldn’t tell if it was the same ones doing circuits of the house, or if they were all different. In the end I asked how many she had… Eighteen!  My God, Eighteen cats! And I’m allergic to cats! I suppose I’d have been able to tell them apart more easily if my eyes hadn’t been watering so profusely.

Aaachooo!

Finally, the tour ended in the kitchen. I use the word “kitchen” in the loosest sense. What I mean is “fly-infested midden”. So far I’ve only listed the inhabitants of the house that were visible to the naked eye. In the kitchen I realised that we must also be in the company of millions of microscopic horrors, seething in the unwashed dishes. I was starting to itch. Is that a symptom of E-Coli? Cat number eighteen didn’t seem to mind though – it was curled up asleep in a saucepan. The owner offered us a cup of tea, which we politely declined. We needed to leave. After all, I’m allergic to cats.

Country Ways

Oh, we’ve been so naughty haven’t we? It’s just that, well what with all the visitors, the rain, the unpacked cardboard boxes, the muddy carpets, red wine spillages, mounting garden havoc, screaming children…you know how it is.  Summer holidays.

And of course there’s the pressure to deliver consistently witty, entertaining banter.  Any hopes I might’ve had about writing humorous columns for a living are right out the window,  since I can’t even deliver one paragraph a month, let alone 3 a week. 

Anyway, ’spect you’ve all gone off and given up on us, haven’t you?  Swanning around having fun with your fancy friends and your nice sunny south east weather. Off to the latest cultural events, street performances, happening parties…well, we have events here in Sidford too you know.

I'll have 5,000 plastic ducks, please....

There’s the Sidbury Farmer’s Fayre, Honiton ‘Hot Pennies’ day (children trying to catch over-heated coins - great!) and not forgetting the Sidmouth International Folk Festival ….(amiable types dressed in rags and bells carrying personalised pewter tankards).  And for some reason,  ‘Duck Derbys’ on the numerous east Devon rivers are a regular feature of summer here.  

Pst...HOLD the duck...oh. Too late.

 

 

For the kids, there’s a ‘duck and spoon’ race before the main event starts. Here’s a picture of Alex from the local paper, just before the duck dropped off his spoon.  All the other local kids just knew to hold onto the duck while they ran…..

 

 

 

 Anyway, the events diary gets more bizarre as the year goes on. You’ve heard of the cheese-rolling some where up north haven’t you? Well here they like to add an element of danger. So they take a beer barrel, fill it with combustible material (tar), then set fire to it. Then they lift the flaming barrel onto their shoulders, and run at full pelt towards any unsuspecting bystanders. This all takes place in the village square in Ottery St Mary which would normally hold around 50 people comfortably, but on the night of the famous tar-barrel rolling, nearly 20,000 thousand risk-addicted people are squeezed in.  You get the picture.  It’s terrifying. St John’s Ambulance has to draft in reserves….

Ottery tar barrels (they're nuts!)

When I was living here as a teenager my friend Wendy down the road got asked to do the ‘ladies’ barrels – apparently a great honour.  It still meant that she dressed up in a fire-retardant donkey jacket, hoiked a flaming barrel onto her shoulders and ran screaming like a viking into the crowd. I’m not sure who was maimed that day as I was watching from the safety of the pub…

 

But enough of all that excitement. As I’m sure you all know, it’s normally peeing down with rain here anyway. Back to reality and September 2009, and you may well be wondering why we haven’t got off our backsides and found a proper place to live in.

Well to be quite frank we’re afraid to go out since our last viewing….more on that from Keith shortly.

————————————————————————————–

Fog

Somewhere on the A35, between Bridport and Lyme Regis, there’s a warning sign:

Danger. Area prone to fog.

Now that I’ve lived here a week, I realise that the area in question is the West Country.

- Keith

It’s that bloke from the telly

Is that Ray Mears?

Saturday: Fossil hunting at Charmouth. We’re sitting on a picnic bench outside the beach cafe, fuelling-up on rock cakes – the closest I come to anything fossilised all day. Alice leans over and mumbles furtively, “I’m sure that guy opposite us is from the telly.” Now, you need to understand that this is from the woman who claims to have regularly seen Nick Cave in the children’s section of Brighton Library, so I took it with a pinch of salt. He does look familiar though… Still best not to bother him while he’s trying to enjoy a day out with his family…
“Sorry to bother you but you look familiar…”
Ah. That’s broken the ice then Alice. He smiles and raises his sunglasses indulgently. I suppose this happens to him a lot. There’s an expectant pause while he waits for us to recognise him… Nope. No idea who he is. The bloke off Coast maybe? The pregnant pause is about to turn into an embarrassing silence so I feel like I should say something.
“Erm, Coast?”
“Are you a presenter?” chimes in Alice.
“Well, sort of. I’m not really a presenter. I’m an adventurer – I film my expeditions. I did one with a team of sled dogs in Siberia, and camels in the desert.”
We chat about his trips and about the ‘armchair adventurer’ genre on telly. He’s really nice: Friendly, intelligent, interesting. The sort of person there should be more of on TV.
I think we would both like to be his friends. We manage to resist the urge to blurt out that we work in telly too. Sort of. A bit. And at least we haven’t name-dropped or put-our-foot-in-it in any way.

“Of course, it was Benedict Allen who really raised the viewer’s interest in this kind of thing.” Suggests Alice.

He politely ignores this and soon we go our seperate ways. We have a growing, uneasy feeling that somehow we’ve fumbled it. “I think that was Benedict Allen” says Alice. At home I find Benedict Allen’s website. Ah. That’s him all right. There he is with the camels. And look, there are the sled dogs…