Another day spent on the mighty Internet, searching for houses.
It felt like the most shockingly idle waste of our lives at the moment, although I suppose it did not really matter, because the thing I really needed to do was to go to the field and bring back some firewood, but it has not stopped raining almost all day. I got uncomfortably wet on yesterday’s walk, and I did not feel desperately inclined for another yet another seasonal Lake District rinse.
Fortunately it stayed almost dry whilst we were on our walk this morning, apart from some malevolent spitting and a chill wind. Oliver came with me. It is both good to have his company, and wearisome because he has got longer legs than I have and I finish up puffing and panting like an irate rhinoceros, tagging along in his militarily-fit wake.
It is not just because his legs are longer than mine, if I am strictly honest. It is also because I am still portlier than I should be, and because I am not very fit.
I am not as portly as I once was. I am now a comfortable Size Ten, which would once have seemed like an unattainable princess-happy-ending daydream, but actually when I take my clothes off I still look like an upturned bowl of blancmange, the sort that hasn’t quite set properly and made all the children at the party eye it without much enthusiasm.
I am trying to be less portly, but without much success. Eating is still one of life’s happy moments.
I wish I had Oliver’s genes. Oliver thinks eating is boring, an activity to be rushed through as hastily as possible and made cheerfully predictable by never including anything thrilling.
I do not know where that gene has come from. Certainly not from either me or Mark.
Anyway, I have spent much of the day scowling at the computer. We are down to a short list of ten exciting house possibilities. Obviously this is too many. We cannot purchase ten houses. We will not even have time, during our approaching visit to France, to look at ten houses, and so some difficult choices are going to have to be made.
All the same, some of them are absolutely splendid. A couple of hundred thousand Euros will purchase all sorts of magnificently fantastical daydreams, with swimming pools and terraces and orchards and lakes, and enough land to be filled with beehives and wildflowers and ducks and perhaps even a couple of horses. Most of them even add, as a footnote, that there is a second house in the garden as well, for when you have visitors.
We are contemplating each one with grave thoughtfulness, asking each other what might or might not be a good idea about each one. Some of them are entirely magical, bathed in estate-agent-manufactured glorious sunshine, rather like our house in its photographs, others are stone-built and squat, dripping with wisteria and honeysuckle, and we are having to concentrate very hard on asking sensible questions, like How Far Away Is The Supermarket? and Is There An Airport Anywhere Near It?
Also, Ibbetson Towers has gone on the open market today.
I am currently lurching between desperately hoping that nobody purchases it and so we can stay here without needing to make any drastic life changes, and longing and longing for somebody to turn up tomorrow afternoon, clutching a small fortune in their sticky fingers, wanting to move in before the end of the week.
I have attached the link for your edification. For the less computer literate among you, you should just be able to touch or click on it, and a tour of Ibbetson Towers should unfold before your very eyes.
It is not really as brightly glowing as it seems to look in the pictures. When you turn the lights off it is as dull as anywhere else really.
Anyway, it is there if you want to look.
https://windermerediaries.com/wp-admin/post-new.php
