Where have I been? I’ve been selling a house. That’s where I’ve been.
This house
It’s been a hell of a ride. After needing a document from me which delayed everything, exchange on Mum’s house was delayed from the Wednesday until the Friday. On the Friday the people at the bottom of the chain, the ones who had put the most pressure on everyone else to hurry the fuck up, suddenly decided they needed an indemnity over something over their sale and there was an argument as to who paid. We tried again the following Tuesday, still to no avail at which point, I believe, their estate agent volunteered to pay for the indemnity to get things moving.
So on the Wednesday morning, as we set off for France, a week after we were supposed to have done it, we tried again. This time the same buyers wanted assurances from their seller that an oven had been removed. Assurances were given. Then they asked for a safety certification. A plumber was called, the certification provided and it was sent. Then they asked that the gas line be capped.
Moral: try asking for everything you need at once. The plumber who did the certification could have capped the sodding pipe at the same time or, indeed, done all three when he removed the oven.
Once again no joy. Our vendor rang up to apologise and as I stood admiring the last part of a 15th century abbey standing on a street in Epernay he told me what he’d discovered. He’d been very diligent trying to find out what the fuck was going on and that is how I discovered all that. Apparently another difficulty the two at the bottom of the chain were having was that relations between them had soured so much they were only able to speak via solicitors, which did rather protract their conversations.
This is all as reported to our buyers so take it with a pinch of salt but clearly it was fraught. I was delighted to be able to leave things our vendors wanted for them. The people selling that flat to the first vendor are probably, as we speak, removing all the loo rolls, the light bulbs and curtains and anything else that’s not actually nailed down … or possibly, if I go off at a tangent here, they could go one worse … my son is no longer McMini. He is 16 and every bit the font of horrific knowledge you expect the average 16 year old boy to be. Today, he introduced me to a horrific concept called the Upper Decker.
An Upper Decker is when you poo in the cistern, for example, when you come to vacate a property that you rented from a particularly unpleasant and demanding landlord, etc … (I’m learning so many things about youth culture from my son). Personally I suspect nothing on God’s earth justifies the horror of an Upper Decker but because we are vile the McOthers and I have been making a lot of jokes about how an Upper Decker may well be on the cards for the people moving into that property because they were the ones who pressured us most over the probate thing and then, having pressured us to move fast, they are the ones who held the process up for a week while they bitched and bickered over things they’d have a small eternity to sort out.
I’d just like to cover my arse by saying I’m sure it’s not but it didn’t stop us speculating and giggling irreverently about it.
The other worrying part about trying to exchange was that I have a very ADHD brother who lives a vibrant and full life to the point where he does as much as I would normally do in a week’s holiday in one day (often one morning) and … well … he gets absorbed in what he’s doing so he doesn’t always answer his phone and he is not the most organised of people, indeed, I often wonder if, outside his profession, he could organise a burp in a carbonated drinks factory. He doesn’t answer his phone much … or at all to be honest. And he has no answerphone. The whole thing was dependent on the lawyers getting hold of him each day to confirm that he was as happy to exchange and this, for me, was the toe curling, nerve wracking, the-stress-of-this-is-going-to-cause-my-untimely-death part of it.
This morning, we tried again. It was the last chance as our vendor was worried they would have to renegotiate their mortgage if it failed. I wasn’t holding my breath and wasn’t sure they’d get hold of my brother, I rang my sis in law who got onto my niece who told my brother to turn his phone on. Strangely, a few seconds after that he said he was around waiting for the call and all was well. A few hours later I was gobsmacked to discover we were over the line. We have exchanged on Mum and Dad’s house.
Except it’s more than Mum and Dad’s house. Yes, it’s not my house. It’s not the house I chose, but it’s where I grew up. They bought it in 1972 when I was 4. We moved in in 1974 when I was 6. It’s been in the family 52 years and the family, or part of it, has been living there for 50 of them.
I’m 56 and it’s been in my life for 52 of those years. In short, it’s been part of my life.
For all my life.
How does if feel?
I’m not sure.
I’m on the road right now. When I heard the news I sat down on a carpark wall in Mersault and cried. Half of me was desperate to sell, desperate for exchange, desperate for closure, to move on. The other half of me, the half that grew up in that house, in Sussex, loves that house and doesn’t want to let it go and was desperate to hang on. Perhaps if we’d inherited any money at all I might have. But we have £700 left and that’s of £100,000 my brother and I put in to pay Mum’s care fees about this time last year.
It’s like I’ve slipped the moorings of the first half of my life and I am drifting gently away from the quay, into the current to take me away from safety, from all I know, to who knows where …
It’s … weird.
But people are with me. People I love. It’s going to be OK.
I couldn’t find a picture of a ship and a quay so this picture of a hot air balloon I took tonight will have to do
The thing that’s strange is that the further away from my parents’ deaths I get, the more I want them back. Except I don’t because at the end they were suffering or, in Mum’s case, about to. But as I drift away from the quay that was the first part of my life and the figures standing there get smaller and smaller, I begin to remember them as they were before they became ill. In the wine shops in Epernay, I was looking at some widget and suddenly thought it would be a great present for my Mum. It’s a different feeling when you move from the realisation that she wouldn’t know what it’s for anymore, to thinking that she’d love it but that she wouldn’t want it because she’s dead.
My lovely cyber friend Jim Webster once said to me that when they die and all the pain and the sadness is gone you do get them back. And I suppose this is what’s happening. I have been missing the people my parents were for years. The difference is that for most of that time they were still alive. Now they are both dead, it’s easier to remember them when they were still the glorious, larger-than-life personalities they were.
I love Sussex. I love the downs. I don’t want to leave. But in some ways I have been privileged to be there, drink in the views, the sea the Sussexness of it all once a week, every week, for 10 years when I wouldn’t normally have done so. Were my parents healthy, those weekly lunches wouldn’t have been de rigeur.
Yes, I’d have loved to spend a week at the house I grew up in with the McOthers visiting all the roman sites in Sussex, or Arundel Castle … or Goodwood Festival of Speed. Or taking the McOthers to see the Victory at Portsmouth, which is brilliant. But the beds there are horrific, so we never did. Maybe we will do that one day, from a base in a decent hotel. There’s stuff there I’d love to share with the McOthers because I know they’d love it.
Later, maybe.
So how does it feel? Bittersweet. I guess am standing on the brink of the rest of my life. I dunno where it’s going to go. But there are people with me, so with any luck it’ll be fun.