English Rose Kitchen

The answer to my prayers

Quite what it was that I was doing on December 11 that prevented me from writing the final installment of “All our worldly goods” I don’t recall, but I was prompted to revisit it today by a dream I had last night; a beautiful, glorious dream that we’d finished moving all our stuff into storage ready for the renovation to commence in earnest.

You see, during the five years since that first night spent in a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor I brought in items of furniture and decoration slowly and tastefully, in keeping with the style of the house. At all times I was in control and could make sure it never became too cluttered.

Then I got married.

Now I love Wifey more than anyone or anything, but nothing could prepare me for the astonishing onslaught of STUFF. Each time she went to visit her mother in Maryland she’d bring back huge crates of STUFF and as if that wasn’t enough, frequent visits to Argos ensured that more STUFF conspired to fill any remaining corners. International tat bazar eBay too, has been a prime provider of STUFF.

The last straw was that during 2008 branches of Primark and TK Max (purveyers of VERY CHEAP STUFF) opened in London, ensuring that the final pathways to storage areas are now completely blocked with YET MORE STUFF. Since we can now no longer reach the limited storage space we do have we can’t even use that to store the STUFF that’s blocking it and walking from one end of any given room to the other involves placing ones feet in very precise positions. In fact some cross-room paths can no longer be negitiated without arial movement.

I’ve previously mentioned that a considerable amount of the STUFF comprises shoes and suggested several ways in which their storage problem could be resolved. More practically though (at least in Wifey’s eyes) is the fact that we put down a deposit on some storage space some three weeks ago and, following the wonderful, heavenly dream that I had last night that the flat was as empty as the day I moved in (or rather, the day before Wifey arrived), tomorrow I’m going to start taking some of the accumulated STUFF up there.

Following my musings as to whether Halifax would let their tracker rates go any lower I can now answer “yes”. Pegged as we are at 0.16% below the Band of England rate, we’ve paying 1.84%.

How I still imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

Solicitors are doin’ it for themselves
I walked to the next (correct) corner and located my actual front door, the door that my lawyer had mysteriously informed me that had been stolen from me since I first viewed the flat only weeks before. If anyone wonders why it takes so long to buy your home in England or Wales (the Scots wisely have their own laws on the subject) they need look no further than at the self serving obstacles that lawyers put in your way.

One of the last phone conversations in which my lawyer engaged me – with the clock ticking, naturally – was to ask whether I knew there was a railway line running some 300 yards from my house. I responded by informing him that there was a dotted white line down the middle of the road, and that I was charging him £80 an hour to research the fact. Oddly he didn’t get my point and further padded my bill by exchanging a series of letters (price £50 each) with the vendor’s solicitor regarding the positioning and usage of our rubbish bins (that’ll be garbage cans on t’ other side ot’ pond). You can read more solicitorial lunacy here.

Since I had no landline I took out my mobile and rang the first person I could think of to tell them the news, who happened to be in Sweden where I’d spent the previous week. “It sounds like you’re in a large, empty room”, he said. I put the phone down and looked around. He was right. In all my excitement to move in I’d forgotten that aside from the flat itself I had almost no posessions whatsoever, not even anything to sleep in.

After a call to a dear friend on Portobello Road I acquired a sleeping bag, two mismatched dinner plates and a fork (I still have all of them) which, during a trip to Sainsburys I augmented with a frying pan, two toilet brushes (”TWO toilet brushes?!”, my friend admonished me for my extravagance), a packet of spaghetti, some olive oil and some vegetables. I still have all but the food.

That night I slept on what is now our kitchen floor. One empty room was pretty like much the next and since the vendor had removed all the curtains I had to choose the one with the least direct street lighting.

The final instalment is tomorrow, the 10th anniversary of my moving in.

Some stuff similar to he sort of stuff we might be moving into storage

We put down a deposit on some storage space this week and are now setting about the task of doing an inventory of everything to move into it. It’s illuminating an horrifying in equal parts. I’ll get onto that shortly, but in the meantime it brought to mind the following, which I shall reveal in chapters as I get time to type …

Chapter 1
I moved in 10 years ago this Thursday (December 11 1998). T’was a Friday as I recall and it was the first place I’d ever bought, so you can imagine my excitement as I arrived at Foxtons (my estate agents or something called “realtors” according to my American wife) to pick up the keys and you can also imagine my dismay as they told me that “the person with the keys won’t be back for two hours”.

This was a real problem because I’d booked visits from the electricity board and phone company to come and change the pre-pay key meter into a proper one (this was previously a rental property) and to install a phone line, respectively.

I missed them of course, but finally got to the house at about 5pm. Actually to be honest I got to the wrong house at about 5pm because in my excitement I’d forgotten where I now lived and turned right one road too early.

The house whose front door I attempted to unlock was similar to my own in that it was a corner house and had a driveway, but was disappointingly run down, was missing an extension I was sure I’d bought and had a car I knew I didn’t own in the driveway. None of that stopped me from jiggling the key in the lock for 5 minutes and reaching for my phone to curse the Foxtons before it dawned on me that I didn’t live there.