I have spent much of today trying to register our field with the Land Registry.
We should have done this ages ago and I have been putting it off.
If I had known what I was getting into I would have put it off again.
It was an awful lot of faffing about and I have not finished yet, and despite endless forms and grid references and Ordnance Surveys and title deeds and holding numbers it would appear that I am still going to need a solicitor at the end of it.
It has all been set up with the egalitarian idea that anybody so minded can complete the whole thing all by themselves if only they have got endless patience for ticking the right boxes and know the difference between a holding number and a title number, neither of which applies to me, but I gritted my teeth, patiently, and stuck my tongue out and thought hard.
When I got to the end I realised that there was one last, final form.
This one involves standing in front of a solicitor and promising that you really are yourself.
There is no other way to do it.
Presumably it is the way that the Government have fobbed off anxious solicitors, desperate not to be made redundant.
It is harder to register yourself as a landowner than it is to get a passport.
I lost patience in the end and chucked the whole lot in the drawer. If I had three hundred quid I would just ring the solicitor to reassure him that his job was safe and to offer him a bargain, because I have already done all the forms. I could just ask him to polish it all up and post it to the Government, along with a picture of us being really who we are.
I haven’t got three hundred quid and so it I will have to continue the whole thing tomorrow.
Hence I was quite relieved when one of our neighbours called round to tell me that her children had some horrible vomiting illness, probably caused by drinking the lake water, and to ask if I had any buckets.
Compared to filling in Land Registry forms, cleaning up sick seemed like a promising occupation.
I didn’t help to clean up sick in the end, because other adventures happened. The Peppers were moving their camper van and I had volunteered to put my car in the parking space to help preserve it from marauding tourists. Parking is an important concern in Windermere, people get very excitable.
We moved the van and the car, and then moved them back again, and it started to rain.
It really rained, a very lot, and we got soaked. I think that the Weather Gods have been away on holiday for the last week or two. Now they have come back, the very first thing on the to-do list is to give all the plants a jolly good watering. We did this in the conservatory when we got back from Blackpool.
They had some amusement with my washing this morning.
We enlivened the wet-through and parking by doing little dances in the street, which made some passing tourists gawp, in case we were street theatre or something. Then we retreated indoors for a restorative cup of tea, after which I buzzed off back home and was still so cold and wet that I lit the fire.
It has become terribly chilly all at once, and it was lovely to have the bright warmth in the newly dark grey world.
I put all the fairy lights on as well, because in fact the Peppers were going to come and have dinner with us, by way of a last evening together. They are going to move next week, if everything goes according to plan.
Everything might not go according to plan, because it is a house move, and they never do, so I am not weeping into my lacy handkerchief yet.
We had a splendid dinner in the conservatory, and did not even drink too much, which was just as well, because we have still not organised a dishwasher, and we had to wash the pots up in the old-fashioned way afterwards.
The olden days must have been awful.
Have a picture of an Attached Document.
