A little preamble
I have committed myself to recommence rambling. For now, I shall leave the situation hanging a little longer in the wilds of South America (as I look back on all I have produced, I see that there are a number of untied threads to attend to… one day). I won’t forget – honest. I know I did not quite get as far as my brush with cannibalism, in Montevideo, but I will. Promise.
However, for now, I have decided to write some light-hearted essays on significant things in life. Well, that is, significant events in my life which have been the cause for jollity, a furrowed brow, a little tragedy, and so on and so forth. The things that stand up to a bit of retelling for the amusement, interest and disgust of others. These things aren’t entirely ubiquitous, of course, as nothing is, but hopefully some elements will resonate with the experiences of the readership (if anyone is still hanging on for this Blog – I may, by now, be screaming into the void, but at least writing it keeps my mind active, as Covid keeps me indoors).
So – this moving house business, then? It happens a lot, and is often cited as one of the worst events of adult life – right up there with divorce. Although, of course, unless one is very, very unfortunate one probably moves house more times than one is divorced. Since I turned 18, and reached Man’s Estate (a relevant term, I suppose), I have, by my calculation, moved home on 11 occasions. At present rate, then, about once every 2.6 years. That will sound a lot, I think, but from 18-22 I was an undergraduate student, so it was an annual job, and this affects the average a bit. As a buyer, I have bought and moved into six homes, in a period of 20 years. That still feels like a lot; but some of the moves have been dictated by my job, resultant income, or the opportunity to sell at a good price and move to a place that is a) better/nice and b) cheaper, in relative terms. For completeness – I have only been divorced once thus far, and it was shamefully easy, and not as eye-wateringly an expensive business as is the case with more acrimonious uncouplings. I don’t really deal much in acrimony. If I pass out of this life never having ‘lawyered up’ it will only be a good thing (with every apology to all Lawyers – I hear only good things about you).
How I do I compare, then? In addition, what is everyone else up to? Are we all glued to Zoopla, Rightmove and all other sources of property information and temptation? Easy answer – yes. Once we get on the housing ladder, it becomes an idle piece of speculation to continually check on prices and what housing stock is available and, undoubtedly, this prompts sales and purchases. Also, factor-in the gruesome spectre of death, and its knock-on effects. And the dream we are sold (at least in the UK – in many other locations a life of renting is much more then norm) of home ownership and the long march to riches means an inevitable rush to first-time-buying at the first available opportunity.
Even just the most cursory Google, though, reveals a Zoopla survey from three years ago that leads to the conclusion that ‘we’ move once every 23 years. And the figure has in fact grown, substantially, over the last three decades – as much as six times, to my knock-me-down-with-a-feather surprise.
How? Maybe everyone starts out the same, but then finds, for one reason or another the place where they want to be, and just lives there? Do we get too set in our ways? Older, tired and fearful of the process, cost and the ramifications of a house move? My Mum and Dad have lived in the same house for 44 years, this year, and have only moved (as a financial transaction) three times since 1968. So, they are sitting on a 17.6(ish) average, which, if they are spared a few more years, will get up close to that figure of 23. We (SWK and I) moved last year (I’ll get to that, later) and even if I live to be 100 (signs are pointing to unlikely), my own average would only get to just a bit over 12.
Now, alright.. I know a sample size of me, my wife and my parents is not a lot to go on, but it does raise a few questions. How can a survey tell us that our periods of occupation are stretching out, without transactions slowing down, particularly? After all – there were 5.34 million sales in 2019, just before we all had to head for home and stay inside. Easy answer, of course – in the 2011 Census, 1,570,228 people in England and Wales said they had a second address in England and Wales outside the local authority of their primary residence. Put simply, a lot of the UK housing market is about speculation, rather than accommodation. Another little bit of Googling shows us that as much as a TRILLION POUNDS of property is tied-up in homes owned in multiples. Landlords. Overseas buyers (or Oligarch Drug Barons, depending on the papers you read). People speculating on more property, instead of modern pensions, which have become so much more expensive. Investing in bricks and mortar remains the best-hedged bet out there, and it is tremendously popular.
Personally speaking, I couldn’t be doing with a second home. I’d like the money instead, so I didn’t have to work, and could spend my time procrastinating over unwritten Blog articles. It just feels like too much responsibility. Too much to worry about. Too many apps on your phone, showing the view from doorbell-mounted cameras, allowing you to shoo away ne’er-do-wells from your ‘other place’ in Taunton. Nah, not for me, but we do know a lot of people do it, and seemingly without turning a hair. Ever watched Homes Under The Hammer, and dropped your cup of coffee when some children tell Dion Dublin that they have a ‘portfolio of 50 properties’? Wow. Transported to such an Empire to preside over, I would, quite literally, never sleep again.
There is a very common cycle. It’s not one that is followed by everyone, far from it (more than a third of us do not own the home we live in). BUT, very generally, we live in a family home, we leave a family home and rent shared property from what I am going to call The Specularti (all 1.57 million of them), and then, at some point or another, we find a way to buy, and we enter those statistics I have glossed over so lazily, above.
Now, what this does is generate the daily process and the need for moving house. This, as we shall see, comes in many and varied forms, and is what my reminiscences will centre on. It does not necessarily mean Solicitors, Estate Agents and long dark nights of the soul. No, people move overnight, and in a very informal way. People move into cash-paid accommodation, off the books. I once knew a man who moved from York to Sheffield in a Robin Reliant, with the single front wheel falling off at the conclusion of the final trip between homes. A typical early-life move will be one we make in our 20’s from one rental situation to another. When I was that age, my friends seemed to mover every other week, and on a number of occasions I was roped in. Why? Because I owned a Skoda Favorit, and had, at that stage, an on-off relationship with working life.
One of those friends – a chap I shall call James, because that is his name, needed a hand moving out of a flat above a Post Office. These being my younger and more dissolute days, I had spent some rather lively evenings in that flat.. and some rather ‘laid back’ ones, too. The exit route was via some rather steep stairs, down which I had fallen, a few weeks earlier, in a state of ‘advanced relaxation’. That fall left me with two simultaneously sprained ankles, and for a few days, I was parading ‘round like Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.
On this occasion, for reasons that remain unclear to me, I reached for the door-knocker chez James, dressed in a pair of cream-coloured trousers (as part of my ensemble). This sartorial decision was to pay me off quite badly, and only a few minutes later. James is a handful of years older than me and so, at around the 30 mark, and moving in with a grown-up woman (still Mrs James, all these later, by the way), he could lay claim to one or two possessions beyond the standard clothes/CDs which most of us could lay hands on. One of these was an elderly, and quite heavy, fridge. He assured me that he had spent some considerable time defrosting the white (more yellow-y, in truth) goods, and that we were all set to push off to Love Nest #1 (I assisted the couple with two more moves, in the foothills of their life together – I imagine others step in, now we are all getting on a bit).
When moving large things down stairs, I tend to ask to go first. I have no idea why this is the case, and I suspect there is no definitive logic I can cite to support it being the safest end of the operation, any more than being the back end of this particular pantomime cow would be. But, there we are – I was driving, and I got my wish. And, for the first half of the descent, matters were going swimmingly. Until there came a little gurgle from within the workings of our burden, and a slick of rusty meltwater issued forth across my hands. My grip was lost. I dropped my end, and tumbled backwards to the bottom of the stairs. Again. Then, in much the same way an anvil hits Wily Coyote on the head, some time after he has already fallen to the bottom of a cliff, the fridge moved into top gear (over a really quite short course, showing an unexpected turn of speed, for its age) and slammed into me as a I lay groaning at the foot of the stairs.
Obviously all of this hurt, quite a bit, but I was happily uninjured and able to rise back to my feet and conclude the job. The only downside was that the fridge had landed at such an angle as to disgorge the rest of its mud-coloured payload all over the front of my cream trousers. So it was, then, that I spent much of the rest of the afternoon (a sunny day, as I recall – perhaps that explains my optimistic wardrobe?) wandering around the outskirts of South Cambridge looking like a man who’d had an elaborate and doubly incontinent accident all down himself. Frankly, it was one of those days where you just crack on, brazen it out, and fire the strides straight into the bin when you get home – as I did.
I have suffered misadventure on other formative home-moving occasions, but really the property world began properly to bite rather harder a few years on from the fridge incident, when I got involved in buying and selling.
The whole thing, frankly, is bonkers. Utter lunacy. Anyone will tell you it is, but it has remained the same process for decades, presumably because no one has the energy to demystify the thing, and too many people make money out of it. Whatever the case may be, the whole thing relies on maintaining formidable levels of trust with people you have (most likely) never met, and setting out to spend a lot of money through a whole series of people who are rarely guaranteed to be doing what you expect them to be doing. It begins with a bizarre game of poker, when it comes to finding a mutually agreed price. A series of incomprehensible conversations then follow, that leads to attempts to book a whole series of practical services around a date that can stay theoretical up until pretty much 24 hours beforehand. Even in the home straight, the whole thing can collapse horridly, leaving people in dire straits and mightily out of pocket. The only positive about this, of course, is the end result, and the pleasure derived from the establishment of your ‘castle’ that means all the pain you suffered over the preceding weeks and months fades from view quite quickly.
Unless, that is, you move to a Q-style house in the small Fenland town of March, in Cambridgeshire, as I did in 2003 (in the month of March, funnily enough). You honestly believe yourself to be over the line. You hire the van, load the van, clean the old place and set off (on this occasion in convoy with my Mother, bless her) for pastures new. The call comes in. You get the keys from the agent, and turn them in the lock. Then, in short order, you discover the following things:
- A series of yellowing and rusting white goods have been left in situ
- There is no plumbing in place below the plug hole of the kitchen sink
- The wiring for your oven has been removed from the wall
- The airing cupboard in your bedroom contains upwards of 20 bags full of aggregate sand/stones
- The Central Heating system has had the timing system ripped out; and
- The property is in debt to a property management company to the tune of roughly £600
The fury that overtook me on discovering all of this then led me to getting utterly, distractedly lost when attempting to return the van, and saw the day come to an exhausted end with my Mother and me exhaustedly eating lukewarm chips and drinking a wine box in front of the telly. I was reasonably confident I would never move home again.
And yet, after a healthy pause to reflect, I did. I sold that property to a pair of giants, who’d recently retired from the armed forces. Huge people – they towered over me – seemed like a different species, frankly. This deal was struck after a series of administrative foul-ups, including a young woman withdrawing her offer at the last moment (I actually called her to plead her to see sense “Ahh dunnow, are just downt trust it mate” she said – having never met me before in her life). This means I then had to go into bat with the property developer at the other end who was working on a flat I was buying. He (we had met a few times) turned out to be the Town Shyster, and he used it as an opportunity to up his price, going into a Bank Holiday. That exchange got very heated indeed – strong opinions were shared – I seem to recall bringing his parentage into question, which was perhaps a bit strong. I was relieved and surprised when I got my money back.
So after a hiatus, the Giants came up with the goods, and we were all set. I was moving to a cottage in a small market town, half-an-hour away, next to the railway line (handy for work, characterful, stairs of a quite lively elevation). Oddly enough, this property stands next door to the cottage my Sister now owns. Funny old world, eh? Lots of happy memories of that gaff. Got married for the first time, whilst living there.
The day of the exchange/completion on the purchase was not without incident. We stood, my family and I, amongst the near-as-dammit-empty ‘old house’ when my phone range. Estate Agent. Good stuff, I thought – this will be them releasing the keys early.
No. This was them calling me, in halting tones, to tell me a lorry had reversed into the side of the property I was about to take ownership of. Happens all the time, of course. Nothing to worry about, take it in your stride, etc. In truth, I could have wept. It was one of those situations, though, where things just seem to be so irredeemably fucked that you may as well press on in the hope that things will not get radically worse. One plus was that I was buying from a competent and relaxed lady (also Forces – in terms of being trained to kill, I was the weak link in this particular chain) who informed everyone she ‘knew a bloke called Taff’ who would apparently be able to ‘sort it’. In for a penny, in for £120,000, I reasoned. We loaded up the last bits, and rolled across the Fens. My trusty Solicitor was having kittens, up in her office in Blackpool.
There’s a sidebar, by the way. The conveyancing lark. In theory, you can do it yourself (one of my friends threatened to do this, but was convinced, in the end, that it might not be terribly wise to lob up £5123056827 for something that, in the end, it turned out you didn’t legally own). It is practical to do it by correspondence, though. No real or special need to go into Solicitors firms and get charged for meetings, although I have done. Therefore, if the thing is to be played out like ‘chess by post’ used to be, then you may as well engage a competent firm in a part of the country where they can get away with charging a bit less. Saved a few quid that way. Of course, the gap in the market that this exploited has meant the arrival of ‘online conveyancing firms’ – the rough of equivalent of a legal call centre. This I have done once, and I would advise caution to anyone else considering it. Getting anyone to commit to working on your file for any period of time is near enough impossible. Convincing a firm of that sort that the practical implications of your move are of actual, real-world importance is near enough impossible, unless you really start losing it on e-mail or phone. I’ve done that too. Under Lockdown 1.0, last year. They are likely to move you from one ‘expert file handler’ to another without telling you, and to hire and fire people at a moment’s notice. I cannot imagine how miserable it is to take your law degree, and go and work on a commission basis for one of those ‘hot house’ firms. We got through it, in the end, but not without breaking a number of rules, and a couple of laws, as you will see in the concluding stanza of this property poem.
Anyway, back to 2004. We rolled up at what I was hoping would not be a pile of bricks. The reality of the situation was not as alarming as one had imagined during the journey. An exterior garden wall had taken the brunt of a reversing HGV. Not ideal, no, but by the time we got there, the soon-to-be-former owner was on site, with the aforementioned ‘Taff’. They explained what needed to be done, how much it would cost, and when it could be done. It wasn’t quite a business of spitting on our palms and shaking hands, but I did take a brown envelope stuffed with £20 notes, and agreed Taff could have them when the work was done. I called my Solicitor and told her to do the deal. With some incredulity, she agreed. I soon owned another property. And for all his eccentricities, Taff turned out to be something of a decent handyman. He converted my ‘lower meadow’ at the end of the exceptionally long garden, into a small car park.
The nail in the coffin of that particular day came with a family injury. No falling fridges this time. Rather a falling Father. My Father. He was so pleased that the working day was over that he jumped from the rear of the van whilst still holding on to the side, where the controls for the tail-lift were to be found. As a result, he shredded the palm of his right hand. That was less than ideal – not just because of the resultant pain and gouting claret, but because: a) where the bloody hell are your plasters, on the day you move house? And b) Dad was due to play the organ at my Cousin’s wedding the following day. He did, using the fingertips of the resultant claw – imagine the Bride arrived to something fairly heavy in the bass clef.
Moving to Sheffield was comparatively easy, although we did have to rent for a while, which I resented, rather, whilst we waited for a sale to be arrived at. Selling an empty place turned out to be pretty easy. Living in a rented flat? I was less keen on that, particularly when the owner tried to sell it out from under us.
Moving out of Sheffield? Bit more stressful, as it had to be done on the back of the end of my marriage to Sarah the First, and to align with getting myself up to speed with a new job in a city an hour away. Trademark amicability mean that was all okay, if a bit hurried. However, my Solicitor had retired, and the new bloke was a cautious divorcee with a red nose and a line in not trusting anyone. Wanted to tie the whole thing up in knots. He was impervious to my legendary sense of humour. Indeed, he ordered me up to Blackpool on a cold winter morning to sign some stuff. I still remember him gravely telling me that the new place ( a three-storey town house, which I want on to live in for 8.5 years – kitchen and living room on the first floor) was sited on the grounds of a former mine (Hucknall Colliery – Lower Pit). This, he told me, meant I had to read a Mines Report and sign my understanding that there were flooded open shafts within 200 metres of the foundations of my new home.
“No problem”, I quipped. “If it drops down a bit, the kitchen will open onto the back garden!”
Not a flicker from the bloke. Still, he did the business, and life went on, as life is wont to do.
All of which brings us to 2020. The year we stayed at home. Or, in our case, moved home.
This was, of course, the cause of considerable stress. However, as I said some pages back, this stress is quicker in the vanishing than it is in the creation. As I sit here now, finishing off these tales from the vaults of my life, I reflect on the fact we are very lucky to live where we are. Rural, quiet, but also with all that we need only a metaphorical stone’s throw away. Ideal for dog owners – outside space where food and flowers grow. Anterooms for my wife’s incredible store of the ephemera of her working and creative life. A study which looks out over our woodpile and on to the big countryside skies beyond. A conservatory, soon to gain a new roof, where Summer sun gathers, and seedlings will soon start their journey through the growing season. It is marvellous.
First time we looked at it, I was less than convinced, as it was hallmarked, all around us, as having been a family home for 40 years. It was soaked in the exciting history of other people, and I couldn’t see how it could change. But then, in our world, that’s not my department. Happily, I married a genius on that front – one of those people who can mentally strip a space of its current veneer, and calculate how it will be. So it was, then, that on 23rd December 2019, a deal was struck. I had (some) faith.
Then pesky old Covid threatened to spoil it. Estate Agent locked down. Solicitor (first one) was fired by MegaCorp, and then the second was furloughed. It looked like a halt to proceedings was inevitable, but then a loophole emerged. Our House on a Mine Shaft was being purchased by first time buyers. They had just had a baby and their Evil Landlord (there we are again) was booting them out. We had compelling reasons to conclude a short chain, and after some impassioned arguing, things went ahead. The impetus behind this came when a somewhat strident lady knocked on our old front door, one day. She was the maternal Grandmother of the new born. She minced no words in telling me she felt I might hold things up, because of what she had ‘heard’ via the various malfunctioning agencies involved in the process. And here we see, if you just trust people a bit, how our antiquated process can be somewhat circumvented. I was able to pour a little of the old oil on the situation, and assure her that nothing could be further from the truth! Mrs K and I were champing at the bit. I would do all I could, etc.
And that’s what we did. Before everything shut, we went behind the back of all of those making money out of doing comparatively little, and befriended the wonderful couple that used to own this place. They made the overtures (similarly, they were trying to retire and beetle off to a hillside in Wales) and we jumped at their kindness. All of a fortnight later, we were in a van filled with the first of five loads of our stuff, which we secreted in their gaff, whilst they were away. We even had a key! This, in turn, meant we could clear the massive garage next door to our old place which was, shortly thereafter, filled to the gunnels with the possessions of our purchasers.
All of this, of course, could have gone radically wrong. BUT, the show of faith in one another carried the day. Legal nit-picking, game-playing and whatnot continued for another six weeks, in a truly depressing and dispiriting way. Lies were told. Exasperation was strongly hinted at in Official Communications. There was, not to put a finer point on it, endless fucking about. However, the three homes all kept in touch with one another, and we continued to discuss what we wanted and how it would work, entirely on our own terms, and out of earshot of those supposedly doing our bidding. And that blind faith and kindness shown to one another carried the day. We just did not budge. We all told those preparing their bills that we all wanted the same thing, and, in the end, made them do it. I am not trying to be unkind, here. Those folks were sat at their dining room tables and in their kitchens, scratching their heads, trying to make a living for themselves. However, their forty days may prove to be our forty years, if you see what I mean?
No one should enter a home they don’t own, and store stuff in it, uninsured. No one should break lockdown law, and hire a van and move stuff about under said lockdown. No one should offer anyone a bed for the night in a property they don’t yet own, unaccompanied. And no one (and I am looking at my beloved here), on the day when the transaction was finalised, should wait for their husband to drive the van back for the last time, and set about the carpets with a Stanley Knife, before being told they were carpets they now owned.
Patience might be a virtue. But here and there, a spot of impatience is no bad thing either. Particularly when it drives a path through the truly odd system we use for buying and selling houses. Will it ever change? That seems unlikely. Have we had enough of it for now? You bet we have. I will have picked many an apple from the tree in the back garden before the notion of ‘gathering some boxes for the move’ is broached again. I like it here. We both do. It’s imperfectly perfect. And I think that’s probably the key to all this – if you are 18 or 80, really. Find where you want to be, and know where you want to go. Speculate to accumulate if you want to – no one will stop you, but we all have to wake up somewhere, and face the oncoming day. Duck the fridges, wrangle the lawyers, load the vans, try to be good, try to be calm, and do not do it more often than you need to.
It’s worth it in the end.
I’m not sure what that was in the end. Part essay, part fluff, and part reminiscence. It’s not the soaring winds of travel madness – nor is it Stuff About Our Dog. But, a lot happens in a life. Back in 2013, I made a big change in mine, and I have just entered the ninth year of that change. So when we return, I shall hold forth with great humour and some introspection ‘on Running’
Stay safe.
suggzy 