She has been.
That phrase has echoes of fortunate children on Christmas morning, but it wasn’t like that at all. Our visitor was not a jolly old Christmas elf loaded with surprises.
She was the estate agent.
She was a modern, polite lady, dressed in black to make sure I understood she was a serious businesswoman, gushingly full of compliments about our lovely house whilst we looked round it, and gripped with a steely determination when it came to discussing terms of business and the price.
I liked her.
Of course we had already tidied up the house, so there was no last minute rush, except for Oliver’s bedroom, which he tidied up by shoving everything in the cupboards. I do not envy him trying to find everything later, but to his credit it all looked immaculate.
Everything looked fairly immaculate, certainly by my slapdash standards.
She talked for ages about what a wonderful house we had, how homely and welcoming it was, and I knew perfectly well that such enthusiastic schmooze was part of her job, but it was very nice to hear all the same, and nodded in self-satisfied agreement.
After that we went to sit in the conservatory and she told me exactly how much they would charge us and added some details about how much she thought the house was worth.
It was, rather to my satisfaction, worth exactly the figure I had thought.
She said that she would send me some paperwork, and left, leaving me in an absolute agony of flappiness, because I am not exactly sure that I want to sell it.
It is no small thing to own a house in Windermere, which is why they are expensively overpriced. There are not very many for sale, and our house is in just about the most desirable position of any house anywhere in the world, being in the heart of the Lakes and the centre of the village, stone built and almost free to heat, with everything anybody might want immediately to hand.
Almost everything.
There is no garden, not one big enough to grow anything more than a handful of bluebells, anyway, and no workshop.
We are spending a lot of money renting Mark’s workshop, and the National Park will not let us build one on our field.
In any case, it never stops raining.
I do not at all know what I want to do.
I would very much like to live in France with a swimming pool and a private lake and a couple of acres of garden, very, very much indeed, but I like living in Windermere as well.
I will have to think about it.
In other news, there was a briefly undignified interlude this morning having my upper regions poked and photographed in the mildly uncomfortable procedure that is called a Routine Mammogram, and which one is obliged to endure as one’s declining years approach. After that I had a day of improving my working environment, by which I mean that I have cleaned my taxi and taken it for some new tyres. Oliver occupied the whole of the time that the estate agent lady was visiting by unscrewing the back of it and replacing the brake light. I know how to do this, having done it a couple of times myself, but could not find any of the tools and was beginning to get impatient, because of the imminent arrival of the said lady.
I rang Mark to enquire about their whereabouts, and after a little while he could tell that it was all going to end in shouting, and said that he would call Oliver and get him to do it.
This actually worked quite well, because the dogs hovered about in the back alley with him, and were not there to make paw marks on the lady’s trousers or follow us around the house, wagging interestedly in every new room. They stayed out of the way.
There are some things that definitely make a house seem more desirable, and our dogs being outside it is certainly one of them.
I do not know how I am feeling.
I am trying very hard to work it out before we sign on the dotted line.
I will have to be quick.
