bear country

So, faced with the prospect of doll houses, nicotine palaces, and the seismically challenged, we were struck with the niggling realisation that the house-hunting satnav had us stuck on cruise control down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. We didn’t need a map to know this road wasn’t headed toward a nice neighbourhood.

We were ready to give up. Reality wasn’t living up to the menu’s promise. We were stood outside the house of many cracks vaguely worrying that our final slam of the front door might precipitate its collapse. I felt I’d broken the heart of the agent who for some unaccountable reason seemed to think we’d be other than disappointed. It needs some work. I would have suggested demolition but I wasn’t sure it needed the help.

So we stood there in a fug of disappointment denser than the atmosphere in the nicotine palace. Over the road a ‘For Sale’ board peeked through a freshly manicured hedge. We’d been looking at weeds for days. What the hell, let’s take a look. Behind the hedge were three new houses. Not miniature house, no sign of toxic fog, and not a crack to be seen. The kind of house we’d come into this expecting. Somewhere you might want to live. The garden gates were unlocked, so we took a good look around. Tried the doors too, like trainee burglars, but they were locked more the pity. This is what the estate agents should have been showing us. Out comes the mobile phone and a quick Google later.

Oh.

We did the calculus of financial optimism. Pulled out the crystal ball of future penury. Contemplated grand larceny. It wasn’t going to happen. We glanced back across the road. I was sure that house of many cracks had listed further to starboard in the meantime. That was what we could afford.

We spent a few more weeks in dank, dark houses of varying levels of disrepair and despair trying to make it work. We explored far realms of the borough, one bus route, then two, from the station. It could have been Middle Earth. We could make that commute in the morning. That surreal sense of optimism again. The same sense of optimism that deserts us when we find ourselves standing outside another semi, driveway part jungle (I don’t know, if you’re selling your house, maybe pull up the weeds?), and realised we didn’t even know what this place was called. We had to look at a map and it turned out the place was called a A Long Way From Where We Wanted to Be. As that was a bit of a mouthful, we called it Nowhere.

Optimism sprang a leak and the fight mostly dribbled out of us.

A couple of weeks later a walking miscalculation had stranded us at some indeterminate point on the North Downs at beer o’clock. Some frantic Ordnance  Surveying had us rolling down a hill towards the nearest train station. Half-way down we pulled up short beside the driveway to a new development. Given our recent foray into B&E, we decided to take a self-propelled look around, sauntering down the side of one of the properties still for sale. As I looked into the window, my reflection turned out to be the estate agent. There was a mutual ‘argh’ and a round of explanations that we weren’t burglars or serial killers. Having spent a hot day stomping up and down hills, we probably didn’t look the average house hunter. But she offered to let us look around, which seemed charitable, considering we’d nearly given her a heart attack and that we probably smelt like we’d spent the last eight hours in the gym before rolling in a garbage pile.

I think she’d liked the fact that she’d snared city folks. The stench of money and kebabs. Trees! She pointed out like we didn’t have them in Zone 4. We do, along with pavements unholstered with mattresses that look like they might have been slept on by incontinent tramps. Judging from the nuptial kick to my shin, I might have said that out loud. Out on the patio, overlooking an admittedly pleasing vista of trees stretched across the valley (the view from our house was a car park, where we could watch neighbours engage in gladiatorial combat over parking spaces), she was layering on the country life, buttering a big scone with what I suspected was manure. Still, it was nice. I had to ask though, what about the bears? Where there bears in the area? My wife has edged over to the distant railing. I’m on my own. The agent took some time to answer as though she were giving it some genuine thought.

“Oh no, there are certainly no bears around here,” she responded with a completely straight face. Like there might be bears, just not in this development. Bears, obviously, make bad neighbours. Unfortunately, this rather serious discussion of ursine matters caused my wife to stifle a laugh. She should know better. Once a big belly laugh has been conjured into being, it has to go somewhere. A laugh like that is devious and merely denying it exit via the usual channels will result in it taking the nose, or if you have extreme nasal self-control, the ears. This one took the nasal route with a huge window-rattling snort that echoed down the valley. The agent looked mortified. My wife look mortified. The bears were hiding.

“Is there anything you’d like to see,” in a voice that suggested there really wasn’t.

At the top of road, my wife was trying to push me into a bush because apparently the gargantuan snort was somehow my fault when a Mini pulls up beside us. It’s the agent.

“I hope to see you both again,” she says, while looking like she didn’t, and if necessary she’d change her name and emigrate to stop that happening.

I was going to explain that this kind of spousal behaviour was normal in zone 4, especially if we’d not had a kebab for a while, which if you’d walked down the local high street at 11pm wasn’t far from the truth, but I got that look from my wife. The one that said I should stop speaking or she’d be doing more than pushing me through a bush.

welcome to the nicotine palace

Things have to start somewhere. Or otherwise they wouldn’t start.

On paper it seemed like an uncommonly good deal. Everything we wanted at a price we could afford without even palpitating into a financial sweat. That ought to have screamed bullshit like a spontaneously combusting cow. The last time this happened the house had a hole in the roof. Not a leaking roof. An entire hole. A chance to observe the stars as you sleep. Al fresco midnight snacks without having to step outside. I fear the estate agents on that occasion really didn’t do themselves justice and make the most of it rather than begrudgingly admitting it ‘needed some work.’ Yeah, we had asked to only see places that didn’t need work.

This was a new four bedroom detached house. Come again? It was with a heady, if stupid, sense of optimism that I rolled up outside. Now it looked a bit on a small side for a four bedroom house, but appearances can be deceptive. Possibly it had some TARDIS-like innards.

It didn’t. Of course it didn’t because TARDIS is made-up thing and houses aren’t. There was a certain fiction, as I was about to discover.

The living room was fine. Open plan, reasonable size, enough to rotate a cat without needing to notify the RSPCA. There was even a small office that might better have been called a storeroom, but perfect for industrious midgets with minimalist office furniture needs. The thought counts and there were those promised four bedrooms upstairs. Plenty of office space for those more grown-up industries. Let’s go see. We squeezed upstairs, a motion uncomfortably similar to peristalsis, all the way to the second floor. A decent master bedroom and en-suite. Not huge, but then unless you’re a tall person with a love of Twister or have a very literally acrobatic sex life how much space do you need? That left the growing topological quandary of the middle floor that somehow had to contain the three remaining bedrooms into a floor area that only fitted the one bedroom on the top floor.

They didn’t lie about the number of bedrooms. One might have fitted a double bed if you didn’t want to breath out while standing next to it. The second wasn’t long enough in any dimension to fit any kind of bed, unless you fancied sleeping at a quirky angle from the horizontal. The third was a small cupboard with a window. At least wardrobes have Narnia. This might have held a couple of pairs of shoes.

The house squeezed us out into the street with a pop. As a postscript, I was cycling past several months later and I saw a couple having a row as they tried to squeeze a double bed through the front door. The only way they’d be getting that upstairs would be by taking the roof off and using a helicopter. No amount of optimism will undo physical reality. Believe me, I’ve tried. Presumably the people who needed four bedrooms had also cruelly underestimated the eventual size of their children.

The second viewing looked more realistic. A little of the shine wore off I stood outside. There was that certain patina of years’ of omitted maintenance. It could be fixed. Admittedly the furious growling from behind the kitchen door as we approach gave us a little cause for concern. The estate agent reached out gingerly to knock like it was the door itself growling. Whatever was behind was audibly more Cerberus than Fido. Fortunately the hellhound didn’t answer the door. Less fortunately the owner did. She looked like she’d been dragged through the proverbial hedge backwards. The forwards and backwards some more until the appropriate state of disarray had been achieved. With a vague explanatory mumble, the dog dragged her off, probably to eat schoolchildren or other snacks.

The guardian of the door out of the way, we were free to enter. There’s was a distinct whiff of cigarette smoke already. By whiff, I meant the kind of full-on olfactory punch in the nose you’d get standing next door to a developing world chemical plant. Inside, it was the full-on nicotine palace. The estate agent’s skyscraper heels sudden seemed a practical choice. She was elevated high enough to escape the carpet which clung to feet with a stickily disturbing kind of amour. The walls had a an accretion of luteinous hydrocarbon thick enough to be mined. Every surface lustily clung to you. The reek made grown men cry. Me too. The agent was tottering back towards the open door her skin already a pallid, anoxic grey. ‘Did I want to see more?’ she gasped. I wanted to run to a place with free-range oxygen. Which was unlikely since my blood had probably already turned the colour of ash and every step threatened to pull up the carpet behind me. By the time I staggered outside of the door I expected t to find the carpet had risen up behind me like some great, reeking foetid beast. Outside, the agent wobbled on her heels, and I wobbled on my feet. If we’d stayed in a moment longer, we’d have both been caught like bugs in amber. Future generations would have studied us. Really, it was like being inside some installation of a smoker’s lung. A medical charity should have bought it as an exhibit. A fantastic voyage inside a smoker’s lung. I took the smell of cigarettes with me as a souvenir.

At this point it could only get better. Right?

Wrong.

The next one had cracks. Not little cracks. Big ones. Fault lines. The San Andreas stretched across the kitchen ceiling and beyond. Walls looked like they’d upset rhinos. Needs some plaster work? And a seismographic survey. Dear estate agent, I appreciate such things may look different from your elevated vantage point, but seriously if I can see through or into walls and I’m not blessed with x-ray vision, then something is wrong with this house. I think we were lucky to get out of it before it came down on top of us.

game on

Unless you’ve a taste for the comforts of cold, damp underpasses and soggy cardboard, or are brave enough to risk the rental markets, the equation of selling your house needs to be balanced with a corresponding purchase. Of course, you’d like to just cash in your chips, move to the south seas to drink rum and catch your dinner, but equally you’re burdened with being a grown-up and one who struggles to open a can of tuna.

Plan B you might remember. We’d officially bloodied the water and agents were circling ever closer. My inbox was pulsating like a bad headache, devices playing the high bpm chime of arriving mail. If it wasn’t all from estate agents I could claim to be popular.

Research to date had instilled a minimal operating level of optimism. There were properties that we liked (this bit is easy) and properties that we could afford (this bit is hard). Fortuitously, a Venn diagram of the two categories revealed a perilously slim overlap. You drew the circles big enough, the overlap looked better. We were compiling a list. As a nod to technology, I was even plotting them on a Google map. It was a real plan. A campaign, no less. We were going at this in a way that a TV property pundit — or an armchair general — would surely approve of. We should build a bunker from which to run the damn thing. Except we were on course to learn that we couldn’t afford a bunker.

Arranging to see a house is more fraught. It’s the synchromeshic dance of four mutual ambivalent calendars: yours, your partner’s, the agent’s, and the owner’s. As the only way to own and buy a house is either to accumulate vast sums of cash from exciting illegal ventures or through endless tawdry hours in salary hell, it’s difficult just to pop to the other side of town for ten minutes. Getting those schedules to mesh is like overriding Pauli’s Exclusion Principle. Those dreams of getting them lined up so you could bowl through them on a Saturday morning. Dream on. You may as well, you won’t be needing to get up early.

That’s because of the ‘open house.’

Fear the open house. It’s an unashamedly brutal technique to pitch buyer against buyer by cramming them all into the same subpar property on a Saturday morning in the hope that the mutual inhalation in the miasma of desperation will result in a premature gush of offers. There’s always someone who will buy any old tat on the singular basis that they’re beating someone else. We decided early on to avoid. Offered the open house, we’d decline and ask for an appointment later in the week. ‘It’ll be gone,” the agent will plaintively declare. So be it. Confucius probably say never enter bidding war with idiots.

The open house also means, of course, that there’s no agents available to help you view houses on the only practicable day for viewing houses. On the plus side, there’s fewer badly driven Minis on the road.

In the meantime, you’re still the tastiest fish in the sea. Every estate agent has the ‘list’. These are not the dream houses, not the ones they put in the window, not the ones they call you about. These are not opportunities. These are the liabilities. These are the houses and flats that haven’t sold and are showing an increasingly stubborn insistence on not ever going anywhere. They’re going to cling to their current owners like a bad smell. The houses that lean like they’re trying to make an exit, the ones that have cracks big enough to make for exciting room-to-room navigational options, the ones with the price tags that seem to have fallen off bigger and better houses. The ones you really don’t want to see never mind live in.

These house and flats are, of course, the qualification level. You have to get through this level to play the actual game.

Game on.

demon dating

When there’s a man at the end of your garden path in a suit peering at your house he’s either a well-dressed burglar or an estate agent. There’s a certain symmetry in the fact that they are both vying to rob you.

As we lived in a what the Americans call a ‘gated community’ they had to get out of the obligatory Mini. Yes, I said ‘gated community’. Unlike US gated communities, it’s frowned upon to treat it like a military compound, stockpile weapons, and take several wives. In the UK, it’s more like an open prison for the middle classes. Private estate. You see those signs malingering outside of such places.

Estate agents love gates of course. They’re willing to walk 75 metres for a place with a gate. A ‘desirable feature’ we’ll come to learn. Everyone likes their slice of exclusivity. Their little slice of Monaco in SE25.

Two facts about gates. Fact 1: they break all the fucking time. They’re as reliable as lifts, escalators, washing machines, and Yodel couriers. When they’re not broken they’re in training to be broken. Fact 2: your average south London miscreant can climb a fence. In fact they don’t need to, they can just buzz and one of your neighbours will let them in. They probably don’t even need to lie. “I’m here to burgle number 51.” Bzzzzzzt. Seriously they kept no one out. Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t exactly have to parachute in during the night. On a couple of occasions they kept several people in. One memorable Saturday morning we held two Sky vans hostage for over an hour during a power outage. Only two houses knew the secret of the manual opening and we were 50% of those. If the power went out completely, I seriously think most of them would either starve or resort to cannibalism. Reality TV producers, there’s a show locked inside those gates.

Bonus fact: when the son of one your neighbours is the bonafide pikey little stereotype, it doesn’t matter if you have a gate. He has the code. And your bikes.

So, he’s at the door. A handful of high-gloss promotional literature. The smell of eau d’aspiration is already leaking through your letter box like there’s a nervous Pepé le Pew outside. To be fair, they’re not so bad. They have a job to do and I — cough — work in sales, so have some sympathy, as much as my worn and tawdry soul can still muster. Which isn’t much.

All four came in as much-of-a-muchness. All young go-getters, I imagine anyone older than 25 was out selling ‘premium’ properties. Other than the one who looked he might have been a young go-getter once. He was older and gone now. All brought tales of their victories in nearby house sales, magnificent, self-sacrificing tales of glory, where perhaps no maidens were saved, but asking prices were answered in the affirmative. House values rocked in at much the same numbers. Apart from agent four, who seemed to have been blessed with a surfeit of optimism. Yes, well the beach of pessimism is a bad place for optimism like that to run aground. We weren’t convinced. We’re still waiting for the promised supporting evidence. I don’t think he was convinced either when it came down to it.

In the end, it was a toss-up between the three. We felt a bit bad in end going for one of the bigger names, but he gave the impression he wouldn’t stop at kidnapping the children of any would-be buyers in order to get the best offer. It’s mercenary, I know.

So, a few days later we inked the contract, signing over several thousand pounds despite that fact they weren’t offering a full-on TV advertising campaign, which might have offered a justification for the fees. I could only assume they’d be carpet bombing SE London with several tonnes of glossy leaflets featuring our house.

A note on valuations

There’s someone dull who will always utter the words ‘estate agents don’t value houses’. They don’t. But it’s not what the house is worth, it’s what people will pay for it. Evidently these are very different concepts. If one met they other they’d hate one another and you’d probably find them fighting in a pub car park at midnight.

That’s why house prices are so daft and drift aloft with the helium of speculation.

devalued

Money is the dull mathematics of adulthood. To buy a house, we need a measure of our own financial worth, which is effectively the house we’re sitting in and any spare change we can find down the back of the sofa. We have no idea, for the previous few years estate agents and their allied cohorts of hell had alternately depressed and effervesced about prices. Going through manic phases where it seems they’re trying to convince themselves that things will get better, before they’re punching themselves in the head again with the fact that things weren't getting better. We know what we paid for it on the grounds that we are still paying for it and will be until sometime after the heat-death of the universe. What we need to know now is how much someone else is willing to pay for the house we are living in? That’s a very different metric to what the house is actually worth.

That means we needed an estate agent. OK, we’re not entirely dumb, thirty minutes on the internet put a figure in mind. We do do some research. Especially if it’s the kind of research that doesn’t involve leaving the sofa and can be carried out with a drink in hand.

Finding an estate agent. There’s probably some dark ceremony, performed at midnight on the Devil's sabbath that can raise one. You’ll need black robes and a rudimentary knowledge of Latin curses. Possibly a small animal.

Or you can fill in the form on a property website. Click ‘select all’ in your selected areas and remove yourself to a minimum safe distance from your inbox.

On asking enough friends about an estate agent and someone will always say they know someone who sold their house without an agent. It ought to be completely possible. People might be intrigued by occasional wander through the forest of For Sale signs in their favourite neighbourhood, but it’s all search engines, post-codes and ever-increasing radiuses that find the properties. The internet doesn’t need estate agents. But they stubbornly persist, like malaria. Fact is, very few people can be bothered to sell their house. That's because most of us are not estate agents.

We picked four. The usual high street suspects and one local. We figured the locals will know the territory and could conduct a guerrilla campaign on our behalf, but the big boys will have the materiel, all that high-gloss sales patter. We’re lying to ourselves, of course, we’re not selling a palace, just a standard end-of-terrace townhouse. They’ll get out of bed for us, but then they were getting out anyway. Still, the sniff of commission is coffee to them. They’ll come even if it’s Nescafe instant

So we line them up to visit, like the world’s bizarre speed date.

A note on estate agents

Of course jokes on estate agents are cheap shots. So I’m going to take each and every one of them.

shark bait

Once-upon-a-time, in the post-beige ages (the late 1970s), at school, in that hour-long cat stretch of boredom that they’d timetabled as RE, we were once given the task of drawing the devil. As a class of thirteen-year-olds the results were predictably monsterific. There were horns, forked tails, occasionally sour scouring breaths of vindaloo fire, and he’d be carefully tending his rotisserie of souls, all that sin dripping and sizzling off them. Hell 101. I believe I drew a genie in an attempt to be clever and because I couldn’t draw a clown or Jimmy Savile.

On of my classmates (possibly the only one who now shows up in Google search without accompanying references to court proceedings) drew a nice besuited gentleman. An estate agent, he explained. We were mostly bemused.

I guessed he’d grown up moving a house a lot.

Estate agents.

We’d forgotten them. Or rather pushed them out of mind in the same way as you push a drunken party guest out of the door at 3am. When they’ve already redecorated the bathroom (and cat) in virulent burgundy-red wine sick. And you never invited them in the first place. Seriously, you have no idea who invited them. Or in fact, who they are.

We were, of course, dipping our toes in their ocean. They know. They sense the fresh blood of the buyer in the water. They salivate when they spot you outside the window. You see them, they see you, and there’s a meeting of eyes through the glass. This we know. This necessitates the drive-by window viewings. Except we weren’t in the car, so it was mostly walk-quicky-by like we were the most sedate gang in LA, the one that doesn’t even have a bus pass. We’d sidle up pretending we were just walking by, some other more important place to be. Have things to do, places to be. Slowing slightly, enough to read, but fast enough to keep momentum. It’s important to maintain sufficient escape velocity. Judge it right and you’re all already past with a clutch of information before they even grab the keys to their Mini. Eyes, of course, are snagged by glimpses of palatial properties. Number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and…

Just how fucking much? It’s like a surfboarding hippo has just landed right in the middle of your plans. One dropped out of a C130 high overhead.

You’re stopped on the pavement, mouth hanging open, plan B blown right out of the water, like the time Jaws decided that gas cylinders were just the thing for dessert.

It’s the short of shock that requires a drink or three. Even after that stern medicinal you’re still how much?

But it’s summer, another of those lazy, warm, beer garden evenings where everything eventually seems hazily possible. We’ll recalibrate our expectations, perhaps invent an entirely new scale. Figure out what we can afford. Move up another notch on the scale of grown-upped-ness. It’s a word. We’ll do some financial planning. Say it slow. Financial planning. Like we’re the government of our own little country. We can even do austerity. We can make this work.

Then we laugh until our noses dispense beer like a broken soda stream.

A note on estate agent windows

Yes, it’s an online world. You can type your search into whatever your favourite property engine is, and hundreds of results will be yours. You can’t believe any of the blurb. The stuff in the window is the stuff they’re proud off, their advertising, not the stuff that burned stuck to the bottom of their list. As such, the window is a useful barometer, and worth taking the drive-by risk.

plan b from suburbia

So, this is based on a true story.

The idea snuck in one sunny summer evening, in the pub, as we relaxed after a hike with a cold beer. What if? Everything is plausible and ineffably reasonable on summer evening with the third drink in your hand. Drink is the universal lubricant for bad ideas. They slip right in amongst the camaraderie of good ideas. By the end of the evening you’re all having a laugh and you can’t tell them apart.

Now we already had a house and we quite liked it. It wasn’t even threatening to fall down. It didn’t even look like it would fall down any time soon, despite the fact that we were living in it. The neighbours didn’t indulge themselves in nocturnal seismic drum ’n’ bass. All said, it was nice house but like many nice houses it wasn’t in a terribly nice place. You can’t afford nice houses in nice places. Not unless your CV uses the term ‘oligarch’ and you think helicopter is a viable commuting option.

Now, it wasn’t one of the places that operated under a UN mandate, just one that struggled to muster much enthusiasm about itself. An area of south London where every night there was an airdrop of mattresses onto the local pavements, as though someone, somewhere (possibly Dustin Hoffman sealed in a plague-proof bubble) was worried about an outbreak of contagious narcolepsy. There were plenty of handy local amenities such as the train embankment waste-disposal facilities that accepted everything from builders’ rubble to used nappies. The opportunities to buy fried chicken were it seemed infinite. Assuming it was chicken. If the rats had been any bigger, you’d have been able to put a saddle on one and trade in your travelcard for the next new commuting phenomenon. Did you cycle? No, I ratted.

But six years in the same place. There’s an itch to be scratched. Like wearing the same underpants for too long, it’s time for change.

Ideally, once you start to entertain the idea of moving, you need to start to construct The Plan. You’re entering the territory of the adult. Even the A-Team needed their Hannibal. There’s no shortage of things you need to thinking about. You don’t just rush in like a child who’s mainlined a highball of e-numbers and processed sugar. Ideally.

It turned out we were unsure which day the Evening Standard put out its property supplement, so we decided to pick places that began with the letter B.

So, Plan B. Yes, I’m calling it that.

Beckenham, Bromley, Bickley lined up nicely. Check a map, it’s true. They line up like they’re on parade, waiting to be inspected. Stand tall, suburb, don’t slouch! We’d wandered that way and there were trees and passable pavements. You didn’t need to worry about tripping over a mattress and your fall would unlikely be broken by a fragrant pillow of dog dirt. There didn’t appear to be any al fresco mattresses. Those wanting to lie down, perhaps through a surfeit of Special Brew, had to go home. And when I say Special Brew, I mean Chablis. The squirrels seemed unrabid and houses had net curtains that didn’t look like they’d recently been used as a shroud for a decomposing corpse (the same one they’d rolled off one of the pavement mattresses). The residents did quaint and unheard of things like tax their cars. Who knew that was even necessary? I thought those yellow DVLA clamps were accessories from Halfords.

Plan B was necessarily vague because we don’t do plans. And we were just looking. Reconnoitring. We weren’t even committing to be noncommittal. It was like poking a dead rat with a long stick to check it was dead. We’d go look around, take in the lay of the land, look in a few agency windows, perhaps sign up with a few estate agents. It can’t hurt to ask. Can it?

A note on suburbia

Much derided, I know. But once you’ve lived in a house, you cannot compress yourself back into a flat. It’s become too late, like a middle-aged serial frequenter of train station ‘award winning’ pasty franchises you’re not going to fit back into those teenage Levis. You’ll be lucky to fit through Gregg’s doorway. That contemporary lateral living space off Kingsland Road? It’s less cool when you are sandwiched between the drum, the bass, and staccato percussion of your neighbours upstairs fucking. Plus they’re doing a better job of it than you and if you can hear their boisterous attempts, they can hear yours. They’ve probably been judging your performance on Twitter. You’re no Animal.

In the suburbs, of course, no one cares about your sexual inadequacies.

But I also like living in a house with a garden where the squirrels aren’t tooled up and looking for iPhones. As I’ve not yet managed to think of a plan that will net me several million pounds and doesn’t involve a spell pleasuring Her Majesty and a large extravagantly tattooed man called Barry, that means I’m effectively banished to the hinterlands beyond zone 3.