Three Weeks

Until we move into our new home in Clevedon! (Oh, was that context missing in previous posts? It's not like I re-read any of them.)

Time is currently both glacial (threeeee whooooole weeeeks) and insignificant (must pack up whole house! Reserve van! Execute nimble maneuvers with utility companies who act like no one has ever moved before in the history of England!). It's also a highly anxious time: it's unusual for the timing of a purchase to slip once contracts have been exchanged, but it was also unusual for our last purchase to fall through (which I would explain here, but I'm still not certain I understand it myself). 

Also, our landlord is being a dick and is unwilling to wait two weeks to show the house until we're out of there. This would be aggravating during normal times, but the idea of seeding our tiny space with dozens of potentially infectious individuals during a time of uncontrolled delta variant spread in this city, when both our vaccinations are old enough to be waning (and mine was the fairly feckless AstraZeneca to start with), and I've been carefully avoiding indoor venues for over a year...well, it's not something I'm taking lightly. And, while it's cortisol-raising, there's part of me that's delighting in being the worst nightmare of the patronizing and arrogant little boy running the estate agency the landlord uses. I have no particular animus against realtors in the US, but it's amazing the difference it makes not to license a field or require any knowledge or qualifications. Two years of UK house-hunting have led to the inescapable conclusion that estate agents here range from unhelpfully mendacious scum to slightly less than utterly appalling. (Your mileage may vary, but probably won't.)

I have keen memories of crying for a week after I bought my last house in Virginia (what have I done?), and I'm just fervently hoping that might have been more a function of, ahem, other factors that are not part of the current decision framework (who have I bought this house with?**)

We're both trying to manage expectations: yes, the new house is ringed with public footpaths, meaning that we'll hear people walking by at all hours. Yes, the freeway is disconcertingly close, and, while the noise isn't too bad during the day (masked, no doubt, by the screaming children from the primary school next door; sigh), it remains to be seen what that sounds like at 3 AM. (Probably not very different than my apartment above the Long Island Expressway in NYC, and that was not a fun time.) And, yes, this was the very best thing we could find in our price range after two years of active house-hunting. I mean, other than the place we saw on our very first day of looking and quite reasonably discounted because it was our very first day of looking.

It's been a long, strange journey, and it's hard to trust that it might be wrapping up soon.

**I jest. The funding for the Virginia house was 100% mine; there was no "with"in any meaningful sense other than physical presence. And yes, that was a very large part of the problem, as things turned out.