We bade a very reluctant goodbye to our personal on-board concierge this morning.
He came to our glorious double-fronted stateroom to collect us for our priority return to the car deck, in order that we could avoid all of the horrid inconvenience of queueing with the riff-raff in the stairwells and other nasty public places.
We went down in a special lift that had to be unlocked with a key, and waited in tranquillity right by the exit in order that when the boat docked, we could be the first to get off.
In the event we were not first but second, the chap with the other stateroom went first, but we tolerated it, bravely.
I was sorry to leave the boat. I had been pretending to be Kate Winslet in the bits of film where she didn’t go traipsing off to steerage to mingle with the riff-raff, and certainly in the bits where the boat didn’t sink. I mean the other bits, with the expensive dinner and the gold-trimmed cabin.
Those were my favourite bits.
Mark laughed almost all the way to Paris, and said it was only what he should have expected having given me his credit card and told me to book what I liked.
Obviously he had liked it as well. He didn’t even pretend that he didn’t.
After that we had a longetty, long long drive south.
I mean really long, about six hours. It was really, really long, and occupied most of the day with very uneventful moments, so this diary entry might be a bit abbreviated, unless you want to hear about the bits where I ruminated a bit about what might happen after you die, and Mark said Umm, and tried to concentrate on being on the right side of the road.
In the end we reached our very first house to view at about five o’clock. It should have been the second house, but when we got to the first it wasn’t at all where it was supposed to be, and the estate agent was not there, and we were getting a bit frayed by then, so we abandoned it.
We did not care about this. We hadn’t wanted to see it anyway really, only the estate agent was desperate to sell it and had been very determined that we should.
We managed to call her after about twenty signal-free minutes, and reluctantly she agreed to come and meet us at the second property.
This was really, stunningly beautiful.
I mean really beautiful. It was two houses and a barn, with quaint little attic bedrooms and roses clambering all over their golden stone walls and red-tiled roofs. There was a large garden with a tree-lined lake at the bottom of it and a little stream halfway down.
We stood in the garden and listened to the sound of the birds, and thought how lovely it all was.
It was on the market for two hundred and fifty thousand quid.
We could have bought it with the cash from ours and still had change to buy a house in Barrow.
We gazed at it and we both knew that we didn’t want it.
It was just wrong for us. It was the sort of house that belongs to people who go to work on Monday and come home on Friday lunchtime to drink wine on the terrace and read the newspaper on Sundays. It was not the sort of house where you could bash bits off a colossal motorhome and take the central heating system apart to invent a new one made of string and bits of copper wire.
We sighed, and looked again, because it was beautiful, but it was not for us.
We are in Le Mans tonight.
There will be more to see tomorrow.
