Oliver’s car has passed its MOT, and almost immediately the accelerator pedal has packed up, much to everybody’s disappointment. This is going to necessitate a trip to the scrapyard later on this week.
It can’t happen tomorrow because tomorrow we are going to Manchester to look at some houses for Lucy. This has become something of a fraught occupation. She had an offer accepted on a little house, and everything was sloshing along nicely until the mortgage company decided that it was the wrong sort of tenure, something called a Flying Freehold. I do not especially understand this but the outcome, after some email squabbling, was that she needed a different mortgage product, one for which she was obliged to provide a fifteen percent deposit.
She didn’t have a fifteen percent deposit and so we withdrew, along with some grumpy remarks to the estate agent about incorrect classifications, to which they gave a metaphorical online indifferent shrug, and put it back on the market. We were sad about this because she had liked the house very much.
However, onwards and upwards, and tomorrow we are going to go and look at some more. We are especially interested in one which looks like a set from a Hammer House of Horror, the previous occupant seemingly having ended his tenure by recklessly smoking a cigarette in bed and nodding off halfway through.
We are nothing if not optimistic, and it is obvious to all of us that with a jolly good scrub and a new kitchen, it might turn out to be very nice indeed. It needs a new bathroom as well. The last occupant was not only a reckless smoker, he had less interior design sophistication even than I have, and the bathroom has been fashioned in mulberry-coloured plastic, which frankly could only have been improved by somebody setting fire to it. What remains of the carpet has a pattern reminiscient of puddles of cat-vomit, in which I am now an expert, and the kitchen bears horrifying testament to its occupant’s utter and total lack of interest in all hygiene and domestic-cleanliness related matters. It is truly ghastly.
Still it has that starry quality greatly desired by all hopeful house-purchasers, being Potential. By this I suppose I mean that it is Potentially considerably nicer than it is now, which would not be very difficult. You could go on holiday there and pretend you were in the Gaza Strip, not that anybody would want to pretend they were in the Gaza Strip at the moment, thank goodness I live in the Lake District.
We are going to go and look at it tomorrow and see exactly how terrible it really is. This is very exciting. If nothing else it will be a little excursion, not quite as thrilling as a day trip to Blackpool but still quite interesting, it will be a day of exploration.
We did not explore anything today. Lucy is exhausted after weeks and weeks of fighting crime in the Midlands, and went back to bed almost as soon as she had finished breakfast, somewhere around lunchtime, and Mark and Oliver buzzed off to practice not crashing his car. Hence I was left to myself for my Task Of The Day, and jolly tiresome it was as well.
British Telecom have decided to upgrade our domestic telephone capacity to something called Digital. This means that all of the roads around Windermere have been dug up, on and off, for months and months, and now our telephones will not work when the electricity goes off. It also meant that they sent us a new Thing called a Hub into which all of our internet-using devices had to be programmed. It turns out that there are a jolly lot of these.
This was today’s job, and I jolly well wished I had left it to the children, which was what Oliver told me afterwards I should have done.
I had to find a thing called an IP Address which is not Ten Oak Street but a long number with dots. Then I had to install a passcode and download a thing called Google Home which asked a lot of nosy questions and then sent security codes to my telephone before it would explain to the speaker that it had to talk to the new Hub. I had to plug a box into the wall next to the Hub and link them together, and then take the box downstairs and plug the telephone into it. I had to type a new password into the printer and scan one of those peculiar little boxes full of black and white squares with my telephone.
By the time I had finished I was exhausted, and believe me you have had the streamlined version, we will not talk here about scowling and losing glasses and not knowing what a QR Code was and You Are Not Connected To WiFi and This Computer Needs An Update Before It Can Be Used With This App, and swearing, so much so that Lucy woke up and came to see what I was doing. Also by then nothing worked. Both telephones had a permanently engaged tone and neither would ring when I called them from my mobile.
It took me until it was time for work before I had it sorted out.
Next time I am going to ask the children.
