Dearie me, it has been a Day.
We have run into Difficulties with Lucy’s house.
Not only is it going to be for ever before the sale is organised, it even looks possible that it might never be organised at all.
This morning some unpleasant bloke rang Lucy. He had a nasty, bullying manner, and told her he was a surveyor. He said that the house wasn’t fit for a mortgage and had, in any case, already been sold to somebody else.
We all gasped in horror. Then Lucy did some investigation and discovered that he was not a surveyor at all. He was from an online auction house which had inexplicably sold the house to somebody else – not even in an auction, but just as a private sale, and, they said, taken a non-refundable deposit.
Lucy telephoned the vendors in a panic. To her surprise they were as astonished and horrified as she was. They knew nothing about this whatsoever, and had not agreed to any sale, as far as they knew.
Lucy called the estate agent. They would not talk to her at all. They said that they were having nothing further to do with the sale which was now being handled by the online auction house.
We all tried to ring the online auction house, which would not talk to any of us.
The vendors assured Lucy that they would prefer to sell the house to her, and said that they would speak to their solicitor. Their solicitor had gone out and will ring them back tomorrow. We will know no more until then
I think that house purchasing should be re-ranked in the hierarchy of Most Stressful Life Events. At the moment it takes second place to Death, but I disagree. At least when somebody dies all you have got to do is arrange a funeral and take their shoes to Oxfam.
Poor Lucy is very worried indeed. Goodness, the cyber-world is full of sharks. I have no idea how all of this has happened, but it is all an absolute nuisance.
I have lit a nice beeswax candle to the House Purchasing Gods and have stepped back to wait.
In the meantime Mark has been slowly filling in the gaps in the loft with insulated plasterboard. At the moment it is jolly chilly up there and we are hoping that we will be able to use it by Christmas. Cash is tight so we are purchasing the plasterboard at the rate of one board every few days, when we have earned so much taxi money that there is some left over after the purchase of sausages and pizzas.
I did not go into the loft. Next door has given us a bag of apples, and I occupied my morning with peeling, coring and cutting them up and squishing them into jars which I filled with brandy and sugar syrup. Mostly brandy. It is horrid brandy, purchased from Asda in a plastic bottle and guaranteed to make your mouth sore, but it is nice like this. Indeed, by the time we get to Christmas it will be absolutely perfect for pouring over Christmas pudding, or for drinking with a splash of bitters. Half of the apples will go into the mince pie mix, and the rest will make apple pie filling by themselves. There is no apple pie to beat the sort that has been made with brandy-soaked apple slices, especially when accompanied by home-made vanilla ice-cream.
After all of that, Oliver and Mark buzzed off to drive round Kendal. The mighty Internet helpfully offered them of a list of driving test routes in Kendal, but Mark said when they got home that he could not imagine how they had created those driving tests, because all of the routes were absolute nonsense. Some insisted that you went the wrong way along one way streets, some directed you to turn left at the end of roads which were clearly dead-ends, and some other roads were not really there at all.
I am beginning to lose faith in the mighty Internet, it is beginning to look as though it is not at all trustworthy. Between rascally house-auctioneers and untruthful driving test examiners, I am beginning to doubt the honesty and integrity of its very essence.
I think it would just be safer to put my trust in the House Purchasing Gods.
I wonder if they know anything about driving tests.
