The Pit and the Pendulum

We go down, we go up. Life seems to delight in playing games with us at the moment. One step forward, one step back. We continue to do the house sale dance. Today we got a thick wad of papers from our solicitor – hurrah. Things are moving. Then we read them. Eh? Since when did a stream become diverted through our potential property? No wonder it’s darn well damp, if it’s got a river running through the cellar! OK, I exaggerate – but not that much. There were also horrible scary photographs of the behemoth of a wall that separates our house from the vicarage. It’s a mammoth wall. Forget Hadrian’s malarkey, this is akin to the Great Wall of China – huge and tall but sadly not as thick as it should be, and doing a bit of a Pisa number….(sorry, the geographical references are skittering all over the globe) This lean has been measured and tracked over years and seems to be giving up the struggle to remain vertical. We are advised to have builders prod bits. We are further advised to get quotes for its replacement. Replacement? I have visions of the pyramids being built (yup, we’re in Egypt now) – hoards of builders like ants in endless lines, overseers holding out bottomless buckets for us to empty out our pockets into.

Spurred on by your advice I have been sending ever stiff emails, starched emails, emails so sniffy and affronted that even Running Woman, queen of all shifty tight-lipped estate agents, began to quaver and sent back appeasing notes, ending up with an extraordinary phone call.
‘He (as in our buyer) wants to know when you want to complete.’
She threw it down like a cat bringing in a mouse. Pitifully hopeful of pleasure, but in all reality expecting a clout round the ear.
‘Complete?’ If ever a word could be spat, this was it. ‘He can’t even exchange so how on earth does he think he can complete?’
‘He just wondered when would work for you. He’s totally flexible. Maybe to tie in with school holidays?’
I know what he’s doing, the toad. He’s trying to take our minds off the fact that the whole thing is still wafting round in the air like a big balloon.
He’s trying to sound like Mr Nice Guy, Mr Reasonable. I know we aren’t the most hard-bitten of buyers but we aren’t total idiots.

I sounded off a bit and felt much better for it. We decided that, should exchange not happen on the 22nd May, then the house will go back on the market – full page ads, the whole shebang. If that doesn’t put a rocket up his, er, bottom, I don’t know what will. So, the clock is ticking.

Whether it’s the clock ticking or that bloody woodpecker still pecking (it’s now taken to acting as a 5am alarm clock, hammering on the wheelbarrow), I have had a headache all day. ‘Move the wheelbarrow,’ said Adrian. So I did. And what did it do? Started pecking at the flipping window. That’s all we need, window frames collapsing due to woodpecker activity.
When I got up, bleary-eyed and horrible after a few brief hours of slumber, there was another unpleasant surprise.
‘Come and look at this,’ yelled Adrian.
‘What is it?’
‘Come and look.’
Don’t you hate that? So up I got and walked out onto the landing to join Adrian, James and Asbo staring at a pit. OK, so not a true Quatermass of a pit, not a Pit and the Pendulum pit but a depression nonetheless. A concavity in the carpet between James’ room and the bathroom.
‘Oh for pity’s sake, what the heck is that?’
We edge up the carpet and found that we do not have floorboards, we have odd little squares of chipboard bearing our weight and that of our furniture. One had given up the ghost and had sort of collapsed in on itself. Rather how I felt looking at it.
‘Thank God that hadn’t happened when the surveyor came.’
Indeed. The surveyor arrived last Friday, unexpectedly and looking stressed. He’s gone into the estate agents to get directions to another house in the area he was supposed to be surveying and had been bullied into doing ours while we was out here. Well, I have to give the agents brownie points for that.
It was a hot day and he had four dogs in the car. Hurrah!
‘Oh, do let your dogs out – it’s far too hot for them in there. Jack won’t mind.’ Fixing Asbo with a pleading stare. Yes, I like dogs and I did have their welfare in mind. Well, partly. But most of all I know full well how wrongfooted anyone is when their dogs crap all over your garden path.
The poor man. He tried to demur but I gave him a look that said he would be cruel indeed (and I would be on that phone to the RSPCA within a nanosecond) to leave three labs and a terrier in a small car in blistering sunshine.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course, of course.’
So he let them out and they did what all dogs do which was to sniff around and then wee and poo liberally all over the place.
‘Oh God. I’m so sorry. Have you got a spade? I am SO sorry.’
‘Not at all, not at all. Don’t worry about it.’ Lady Bountiful incarnate.
Let’s be honest, he barely looked at the house. He asked me if we’d had any problems and seemed to think it perfectly fair when I said not. He desultorily measured the perimeter and took a few snaps with his digital and that was that. The poor chap could barely wait to herd his dogs back into the car and zoom away.

So there you have it. We go up, we go down. Our poo quotient rises; our floor levels sink. Then, just when it seems to stop still for a moment, Adrian gazes out of the window, over the lush greenness, watching four stags wander over the field.
‘We’re going to miss it, you know.’
Should I murder him now, or save it for a treat for later?

PS: Talking of pits and pendulums, I have given up on The Poe Shadow - type too small, story too tortuous. Life too short. Am now reading Shamanka, a children's novel about shamans and magicians (aaagh, but not remotely similar to my own, Walker Between Words (another segment of which awaits your perusal).