I have become cross-eyed with house inspections.
I am both polishing our own lovely-but-cluttered Ibbetson Towers so that it shines for its day of modelling for the estate agenty photographs tomorrow, and I am spending every other minute peering at French Property websites to see what we might want to go and look at.
We like one very much, as you know, I have attached the picture to a previous post, but Mark thinks it is probably too far south and it will take him ages to get to work.
I can sympathise with this point of view even though I would very much like to live somewhere hot with a swimming pool.
Hence we are still looking at houses in the north. We have occupied every telephone call to one another scrolling endlessly through page after page of almost identical French houses, with a dizzying combination of workshops and lakes and gites attached and orchards and log stores and terraces and thousands upon thousands of square metres of land. This last is a measurement which means nothing to me and I have got to scurry back to Google every time for a handy translation into acres.
We have got a short list, which now I have examined it carefully doesn’t seem to include a single house I might actually want to buy, so I am going to look at it again in quiet moments at work later.
We do like the look of one very much, although to my surprise I seem to have neglected to add it to the short list. Actually, Mark likes the look of it very much and I have agreed. It is an old mill house with an attached mill wheel.
You will not be surprised to hear that Mark thinks he could get the mill wheel going again and use it for generating electricity.
I am sure he is right, and also sure that it will provide him with hundreds of contented hours tinkering in his shed should we actually purchase it. I could probably carry on working in the UK for a year or two until he gets it done, he would never notice my absence with such a happy project to absorb his attention.
Apart from that, I have been cleaning. I have tried to tidy away all of the clutter that houses accumulate, but we don’t have enough cupboards so I have given up. We are going to have to have cluttery photographs on the estate agent’s website. Whoever buys it will probably just turn it into a holiday house anyway, and I am trying not to hate them for it.
Guffy disgraced herself halfway through the cleaning process by having an accident on Lucy’s quilt, necessitating some very bad-tempered bed-stripping and laundry, but it was tempered with a cautious optimism, because it was not a leak. I could be justifiably cross with her, because it was an actual, real poo, not a revolting brown slurp.
It was still revolting, obviously.
The problem is that she will not use her new cat flap. We have had several cat-flap training courses but she is stubbornly resistant. She went through it a few times when it was propped open, but once she was compelled to push the door she fled in terror and has refused to go near it ever since.
Mark said I should put her in a box and leave it jammed against the cat flap until she manages to escape, but I suspect she would be very cross indeed about such a heartless imprisonment, not to mention that her hatred of the cat flap is such that she might not go out through it anyway. When the cat flap is not propped open she mews at the door and if she is ignored, disappears indignantly and squirtily into the flower bed.
This will not make the house beautifully scented and delightful if anybody comes to view it.
The estate agent said that if anybody does come to view it we have all got to go out and take the dogs. She did not mention Guffy going out as well, but it might be a sensible idea. She can behave fairly badly if she puts her mind to it.
It is happening tomorrow.
I might put Guffy in that box after all.
