Real life

‘I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake with my council tax,’ I said to the lady at Guildford Borough Council. ‘Right,’ she said, only just disguising a yawn and starting to tap away doing something else on her computer. I wasn’t surprised. I had just been through a series of recorded options that more than adequately summed up what Guildford Borough’s expectations of its customers were. Pretty much: ‘Press one if you’ve had a letter about a bailiff’s visit, press two if you feel you’ve got some vague, tenuous piece of information which will persuade us to let you off your council tax, only it won’t. Press three if you want to hear those options again.

‘You’re probably excited about your new service and keen to start using it as soon as you can,’ said the email from BT, not quite taking the words out of my mouth. I’m sorry to be difficult, but I just want Wi-Fi. I don’t want to get excited. I’ve been excited numerous times over the years and it was, quite frankly, over-rated. I’m getting to the age when I really could do without excitement altogether. I would like to send some emails. And I’d like a land line to telephone my mum of an evening. I just don’t want to get stirred to the verge of hysteria about it.

After spending the day unblocking the gutters and drains in the pouring rain, he wasn’t in the mood for a parking dispute. He rang me while I was at work to tell me he had been ‘firm but fair’ with the lady who told him to move my car from the space slightly to the side of my house. ‘Jeepers creepers,’ I thought, ‘the builder boyfriend’s only gone and blown a fuse with the locals in our second week.’ Look, we’ve come from Lambeth. We understand parking problems. I’m used to walking from Streatham, where I parked every day for 12 years to avoid charges of £300 a year to put my Volvo in the road where my flat in Balham was. What could be more complicated and long-winded than that? Well, give things a chance.

The builder boyfriend has dug himself a hole. I don’t mean he’s in trouble with me. I mean he has literally dug himself a hole, in our new backyard. Since we moved in he has been digging there, sinking deeper into the earth on the lower ground floor level until he has almost disappeared. At first he dug happily, then diligently, then like a man possessed. Sweat dripping from his brow, swearwords from his lips, he dug and dug, piling up earth, rock, brick and crazy paving in a huge pile in my cottage garden. Any time I dared to ask what he was doing, he yelled for tea with sugar. As I unpacked boxes, he dug away, becoming ever more Neanderthal. ‘Why don’t you take a break?’ I suggested, tiptoeing down to him with cake.

Well, there were seven of us in this chain, so it was a bit crowded, to paraphrase a princess. We didn’t know there were seven. We thought there were five. Imagine my confusion, therefore, when my house sale and purchase didn’t go through day after day, despite all five lawyers being on the phone to each other in conference calls trying to exchange contracts, and the contracts just refusing to be exchanged. Every day, at 5.30 p.m., my solicitor would call me and tell me it was no go. And the next morning I would ring the estate agents and say I couldn’t understand it. I’ve been under offer since March 2016. My house has been packed up for more than a month.

A gentleman on Twitter ‘writes’ to say I’m boring him with my house move. ‘Snooze-fest’, says this chap, and he posts a little yellow unhappy face or ‘emoticon’, which passes for articulate on Twitter. I’ve never heard of this fellow, although it is likely he is some kind of pundit with followers in the blogosphere who rely on him to tell them what is boring and what is not. I suspect I’m not alone in not knowing who he is, and that no one, including his own mother, has heard of him and that this being Twitter it is entirely likely he has not even heard of himself. However, I am consumer orientated.

With so many last-straw moments to choose from in my house-moving experience, it is a close call to pick the very, very last. But I think the absolute last straw happened like this. I was sitting in my house surrounded by boxes, pretty much waiting for the removals lorry to turn up. With exchange only hours away, and completion two working days after that, my lawyer had phoned me a few hours earlier to make sure I had taken out buildings insurance on the new property. Yes, I told him. I had just put it on a credit card, a year’s worth paid up front, effective from that day. I was now busy making my phone calls to British Gas, Thames Water, Sky and so on, to cut off my accounts and restart services in the new property.

Goodbye then, Bal-ham. You were my gateway to the south. I loved you for so many more reasons than that, but the fact that I could get away from you and go down the A3 to the verdant grasslands of Cob-ham was probably one of the biggest ones, if I’m honest, so by and large Peter Sellers was right. It was a love/hate relationship. The dynamic of our life together was forged by the state line that runs through you, which is every bit as drastic as the Mexican border. My flat was a few hundred yards from the boundary between Lambeth and Wandsworth, so I have spent the past 16 years within touching distance of a flagship Tory council while being dictated to by the loony left and their amusing ideas of how to best spend my money, for example on toilets for heroin users.

Some people get into the choosing of tap fittings. I am not a person who gets into the choosing of tap fittings. After a day looking at tap fittings, I don’t so much feel like I’m choosing tap fittings as the tap fittings are choosing me. It is imperative I do this quickly. A short sharp tap choice. Bang. Belgravia Lever Traditional. Or possibly Ultra Chrome Beaumont. Or Ultra Chrome Luxury Beaumont for only £10 more. Damn it! One thing I do know. I’m not having anything with ‘Quest’ in the title. I don’t want a tap that thinks it’s on a Quest. That’s allowing a tap way too much self-importance. Nor do I want a ‘waterfall’ bath or sink fitting. Or a ‘zest’ shower. It’s too tiresome.

‘Information,’ came the reply. ‘We want information.’ The voice echoed in my head. Oh no. Oh please God, no. A month after going under offer again the new buyer hasn’t even booked a survey. The emails from their lawyers come thick and fast demanding bits of paper. And just like the last time, I have supplied every last bit of paper in my possession, to no avail. The sticking point that is constipating this buyer is what they are calling ‘the leasehold information’. Several weeks ago, when I accepted their offer on condition that it be a quick sale, I told them there was no ground rent, and the solicitor sent them a copy of the lease and the lease extension proving this with the Sellers Information Pack.

Of all the many indignities I have suffered at the hands of my iPhone, the humiliation that sickens me the most is that it has rendered me ungrammatical. This monstrous device. This vile, evil, vindictive, obstructive, disingenuous, fiendish machine. I hate it. I loathe it more than I had thought it possible to loathe an inanimate object. For example, I just sent a message to the builder boyfriend saying: ‘Casserole on the oven, can you hear it?’ The BB will come in later, look on the hob for a casserole and, finding none, open himself a tin of soup. He will not look in the oven. And he will not be able to hear the casserole. I’m guessing he won’t even attempt to hear it. Why should he?

‘Mesdames et messieurs, allow me to introduce you to your meals,’ said the waiter. Oh lordy, I thought. Here we go. We were in a country pub near my parents’ home that used to be a little local place where you could get a Sunday roast for reasonable money. But it has been taken over by a gastro-preneur, whose party trick is to buy a small venue in a Midlands high street where people were perfectly happy being served normal food for modest prices and gastro-pub-ise it until no one local can afford to go there. Which is not very nice. But given the decline of the pub industry, one excuse you might make for it is that perhaps world-class food will bring inward investment to the area, an influx of bored young executives from West Bromwich, perhaps.

Someone has given the builder boyfriend an iPhone and things will never be the same. Until now, he has always had a ‘rubbish’ phone and I have always been able to get hold of him. Even though I have a blasted iPhone myself, at least one of us used to have a communications device that made and received calls. His ‘rubbish’ phone was some kind of ancient Nokia or first-generation Samsung — you know, the kind with no access to the internet. It worked. When I had a BlackBerry, we had as near perfect communication as any couple could wish for. He would call me, I would answer, or vice versa. Remember that? Then I got an iPhone, very much under duress, because the BlackBerry corporation, in its infinite wisdom, refused to keep making the phones everyone loved.

If it takes any longer to find a buyer for my London flat I am going to start coming to the conclusion that it is perfect for me in my old age. Forget moving to a cottage with a vertiginous staircase in the inhospitable countryside, this two-bedroom apartment minutes from the hustle and bustle is just the thing for an aging couple like the builder boyfriend and me. ‘Think about it,’ said the BB the other evening, as we sat in my cosy living room, he nursing the usual aches and pains he brings home after a hard day on a roof. ‘This is just what we need. It’s handy for shops and services and it’s all on one level so I can limp around as my dodgy hip gives out.’ He’s right.

Shoot me if I ever let slip I’ve been mucking out with rubber gloves and a dustpan and brush. As God is my witness, I have just left a stable yard where the clientele were all ‘non-riders’ — women whose only joy in horse-owning was to make the mucking out last as long as possible. This is because horse-owning is changing, I fear. Stable yards where people once came to ride their horses are becoming petting zoos where women who have never grown up, possibly because daddy didn’t love them, store a horse they call My Minty, who they believe will fulfil their emotional needs by allowing them to overfeed it. These women can’t ride.

Unexpectedly re-available is a very good phrase. I have often seen it applied to house advertisements and thought how fabulously impertinent it sounds, so I am asking the agents to attach it to the description of my flat now that it is back on the market after a right old hoo-ha with the buyer from hell. Unexpectedly re-available is a grammatical tongue-twister, and a euphemism that manages to be both enigmatic and facetious at the same time. I also like it because it speaks to me on a personal level. I have been unexpectedly re-available countless times and I wish I had thought of saying so whenever I went on one of those dreadful dating websites. Unexpectedly re-available, due to time wasters. Well appointed, in good decorative order. Traditional yet versatile.

Fine, so I got it completely wrong. It turns out the sale of my flat was not held up by a wiggle in the garden, but by a kink in the kitchen. This kink in the kitchen is far more serious than a wiggle in the garden. I should have realised that, the buyer’s solicitor has complained. I don’t know why I got the idea that exchange of contracts had been delayed by a mistake in the plan for the garden, but I’m struggling to keep up. I’ve been deluged with complaints about absolutely everything I had thought was fine. From the crisp new electrical safety certificates to the diligently maintained boiler service history, nothing has been good enough.

The builder boyfriend declared himself very happy with his £65 pee. He insisted it was good value for money because it was reduced from £130 if we paid within 28 days. Some would say that is still extortion, but the BB insisted he was a totally satisfied customer. He was also unfazed by the fact that Transport for London issued me with two fines for stopping on a red route in Elsynge Road for 30 seconds so he could relieve himself. This is because he didn’t have the bother of sorting it all out. The two fines had two different serial numbers so the total cost of the pee might have been £130 or indeed £260 if I had left it longer than 28 days to pay, and had I not rung up to challenge the error. ‘Welcome to Transport for London.

As if by magic, a sign that I am doing the right thing by moving out of London arrived in the post. And not a moment too soon, for with all the to-ing and fro-ing over arcane anomalies in the floorplan of my flat I had become so heartily sick of the conveyancing process I was almost ready to jack the whole move in. Two identical, suspiciously thin and official-looking A5 sized envelopes arrived at the same time. This is either the Inland Revenue telling me I am going to jail for believing that half-asleep guy at their call centre who told me I shouldn’t worry too much about my tax bill, or it is something even worse, I told myself, fingering the envelopes gingerly. I ripped one open without further ado and a letter from Transport for London came out.

The problem holding up my house move turns out to be a wiggle. Have you ever had a wiggle? It sounds jolly enough but, believe me, you don’t want to go there. If you have a wiggle in your garden, you had better be prepared for the worst. I had no idea about this wiggle, because when I bought the flat I only had my lawyer scrutinise the Land Registry documents to a normal degree, which is to say I asked him if everything was broadly all right, and when he confirmed that it was I told him to proceed. I have lived in the flat quite happily since 2002 and I have never had any trouble at all with the boundary lines. I fix the garden fencing one side, the neighbour takes care of the other.