The estate agent’s photographs of our house have arrived.
They turned up on my computer this afternoon.
As it happened I was on the telephone to Mark, who was at a loose end on his oil rig because of the weather being too inclement to facilitate going to work, and so we admired them together. Then I shouted Oliver down the stairs and he admired them as well.
I can’t share them here with you yet because they are not all in one handy place, and it would take far too many pages, but rest assured I will exhibit them all here at the very first opportunity I have, so if anybody fancies exploring Ibbetson Towers you can have a jolly good look.
They are absolutely splendid.
We all stared.
Our house was there, on the mighty Internet, in all of its cluttery glory. It did look quite surprising. We noticed for the first time that the houses on either side of it are both painted in sober shades of navy blue, whilst ours is in vibrant shades of pink with plants gushing out of every possible garden space.
It does not look any less startling for the detail that Mark has cut the garden path slabs to look like a dinosaur’s footprints.
Oliver said it looked like somewhere the Weasleys might live in the Harry Potter books.
They have made our house look truly lovely, lovelier by far than any of the other houses we have been looking at anywhere else, except we live here so we know that it is a bit dull and ordinary and not like that at all.
Except perhaps it is, somehow. Oliver and I wandered around the house afterwards, looking at it and feeling awed at its loveliness. Certainly if it were not mine I would buy it.
I talked about it with Mark and wondered why, when we already inhabited such a gem of Lake District loveliness, we might be planning to move, but of course there is no workshop, and no real garden, and nowhere to park the camper van, and when I am ninety I might not be so keen to live in a house with three steep flights of stairs, by which time of course I will be too old to move.
It is only thirty years away. You need to plan ahead for these things.
Anyway, the house is lovely, but the Lake District is wet and grey, and I would like to live somewhere with some sunshine.
It was not wet and grey in the pictures, incidentally. Peculiarly, it was cloudy when she took the pictures, but the skies seem to have cleared to a brilliant blue by the time they reached the mighty Internet, how marvellous the digital world is, please remember not to believe everything you see there.
Once we had finished admiring our house we returned to our continuing project of trying to find another one. Mark and I are doing this over the telephone together. We find houses and send the pictures to each other, talk about them boringly but very intently for twenty minutes, and then set about trying to find them on Apple Maps.
This last is a lengthy but peculiarly compulsive activity. The addresses are not included with the house details, only a few snippets of information, such as Five Kilometers From The Village, so we compile it all together, examine the roof and the gardens carefully, and set about trying to find them, earnestly scouring squares and squares of green fields depicted from the perspective of a satellite, occasionally zooming in excitedly, and then back out again with a small sigh.
Some of them have taken us ages, but in the end we have found them all, apart from one or two that we had decided we didn’t actually want anyway.
It has turned out to be a very good house-searching exercise. By the time we have found the house we have looked thoroughly at the area, and very thoroughly at the house and its grounds, in order to have absolutely all information at our fingertips.
It has also been very useful, enabling us to spot details that the estate agent never thought to mention, like This House Has Got A Neighbour About Three Yards Away Who Looks In Through The Windows.
We have got a shortlist. We keep adding houses to it and taking others off it, so that it doesn’t become a long list. So far there are six houses that we really, really want to buy, although we will probably change our minds about some of them.
Obviously we are going to have to.
We can’t afford to buy six houses, even if ours sells at the asking price.
It does look very beautiful in its photographs.
