We have had our photographs.
In fact we have had all sorts of things.
A team of three people appeared this morning. One of them had a list and asked me loads of questions, one had a camera and a tripod, and the other one had a measuring gadget which might have been part of his telephone.
They busied themselves about the house for an hour.
There were lots of questions, and I couldn’t manage a sensible answer to any of them. The first one was: Have you done much work to the house? – and stupidly, I said, No, just decoration really. Then we went into more and more detail, like moving the kitchen and building the conservatory, and I realised that actually we have done lots and lots of things to the house, and decoration was probably the smallest part of it.
It is a good job I have got to go out when potential buyers come round. I should not be allowed custody of a set of vocal cords.
The measuring man was doing something called an Energy Performance Certificate, on which to my utter astonishment, we didn’t score very much.
I gasped and spluttered and showed him where we had installed the piles and piles of insulation in which our house is swathed, if it gets subsidence it will probably be due to the extra weight of all the insulation, but he said that none of it counted because of not having an installation certificate to say it had been done by a Properly Qualified House Insulator, so perhaps Kingspan that you put there yourself doesn’t work.
I wish I had known that when we put it in, we could have saved ourselves about five hundred quid.
I showed him the solar panels and the solar tubes and the windmill, and he said that we didn’t have a certificate for them either, so as far as the energy performance rating was concerned, they weren’t there either.
He wrote down the solar tubes in the end, which I thought was rubbish, since they are not as good as the windmill and the solar panels, unless the sun is terribly, piping, steaming hot, and guess how often that happens in Windermere.
The photograph lady turned all of the lights on to make everywhere look bright and cheerful, so it is a nuisance that we don’t have an Energy Performance Certificate. She said that she was doing a Virtual Tour. I had always imagined that people did these by wandering around taking a video, but she said that she would just splice lots of separate pictures together.
Mostly she was interested in the conservatory. She was a plant sort of person, and was very impressed indeed by our Swiss cheese plants, the ones we have just hacked back down to a manageable size. She said that they were the biggest she had ever seen, and came up with all sorts of technical words to describe bits of them, like Striations, which I had to look up later. It means grooves in the leaves, what an amazing thing to have a word for. Apparently you can use it for rocks as well. I would like to think I will remember it and use it to make myself look intellectual sometimes, but probably I won’t.
I showed her the fruits, and she chatted away knowledgeably as if she was talking to another expert, so I nodded sagely and pretended that I knew what she was going on about and was not just the sort of person who remembers to water them when they are starting to look a bit dried up.
They all went away in the end. I had not stripped the sheets off the bed so that it would look pretty for the photographs, nobody wants to see a slightly yellowing electric blanket, so I dragged them off and chucked them into the washing machine. After that I was suddenly exhausted, as if I had spent the morning doing things to my abs in the gym with Oliver, which I hadn’t and almost certainly never will.
I had a cup of tea.
I am afraid that was a long time before I remembered about the sheets again. They sat damply in the washing machine until almost four o’clock and are hanging over the fire having an emergency late-evening drying even as we speak.
I will put them on the bed after I get home from work.
It has been a busy day.
It might really be happening.
