Motorbikes and scooters

Since I started clearing things out in preparation for moving house, I have spent some time on Gumtree.  The original reason was to post some "it's free!" ads for some things I want to get rid of but are still fully functional and someone might still want.  Possibly.  I know, there isn't a big market in slide projectors, for example, but that's the point really.  If you found a load of slides in your loft, and you'd thrown your slide projector away in 1997 when you went digital, you might want a free one, no? 

Anyway Gumtree has seen me before, and it shows me pictures of motorbikes without me even having to ask, which is very distracting.  If you recall, my last post included a picture of a modified Honda C90.  Long story short, I found out that if you want to buy a Honda C90, there are a few to choose from.  At the bottom of the market, if your budget stops at £195, you're limited to this:

Not very encouraging really.  If you want to move up to something that might actually move, you need £1000 to get one like this:

which is a little bit rusty, but not too bad.  If you really want a nice one, here's what £2750 buys you:

Very smart indeed, although it is the late model shape with the somewhat unattractive rectangular headlight.  I'm guessing that the porta-potti on the back come with it too.

But I also noticed that you could have this instead:

which is a 2000 Honda CBR 929 Fireblade, with 26,000 miles on it, together with an expensive aftermarket carbon-fibre silencer, and an expensive aftermarket rear shock.  To get an idea of just how clean this bike is, look at the inaccessible-to-clean castings, inner fairing and bolt heads in this picture.

The exhaust system is titanium, by the way, so it doesn't go rusty.  When it was new it made 152bhp and topped out at 176mph;  I expect it still does.  Oh, and you get to keep six hundred of your hard-earned pounds to spend on whatever you like, because the asking price is a mere £2150.  Somehow, the idea of creating an amusing if completely unusable special out of a C90 seems somewhat absurd.

And the Fireblade is for sale right now in Exeter, by the way. 

Either way, roll on the double garage...

What? Really? No... well, maybe; oh good grief!

This is about the house buying saga.  If you are feeling at all queasy, or hoping for a quick laugh, look away now.

We were romping along looking at forms telling us whether or not we could expect the radiators to still be there, or the bathroom fittings, or the roof, when we bought our new house, when the lovely Jackie suggested that we should point out to our conveyancer that we would be particularly interested if there happened to be any covenants still in force there which would affect our enjoyment of our camper van.  So we did, and it turns out that actually there is just the one:

The transferee (that's us) covenants (i.e. enters into a legal contract)

not to:

• unless parking a domestic vehicle on the Parking Space not to park at any time on any part of the Maintained Areas or on the Property any boat lorry commercial vehicle of any description trailer caravan house on wheels or other similar chattel unless it is enclosed within a garage or other enclosure on the Property.

Hmmmm...  apart from the double negative, that seems pretty unequivocal.  You can't park a camper van (or caravan, or boat) on your own freehold property unless it's inside the garage.

There are loads of these covenants, which are written by the estate builders to keep their nice new housing "developments" free from travellers' encampments, small business owners illicitly operating heavy haulage or waste disposal operations from home, sub-letters, ne'er-do-wells, con-men, purse-snatchers, ruffians, blackguards, malefactors, nuisances, nose-pickers, arse-scratchers and perfectly nice people who own camper vans.  They are then enshrined in law so as to "run with the land" (as he quaint legal terminology has it) which means that they are necessarily passed down to all future owners of the properties on their estate for the rest of time. Phew!  That's quite a long while.

Various parties have suggested that it's probably OK, because nobody will actually care if we park our van on our own property where it can't even be seen from the road; and that is, in all probability, true; but I still find myself bristling with indignation. I just don't like the idea of signing a contract which I fully expect to break on day one, and every day thereafter.

So - there has been discontent in the Sears household while we wonder whether to blunder ahead anyway, with our eyes closed and our fingers crossed, or just call the whole thing off.  We've veered in each direction, sought advice, slept on it, talked it over, and (in a bizarre episode during which we successfully got Layla to go to sleep in the car) sung about it.  Eventually the lovely Jackie solved the ethical problem by asking "what exactly, in legal terminology, is an enclosure?".  It turns out, after reference to my copy of MacKenzie and Phillips (Textbook on Land Law, 10th Edition 2004) and various other sources, that it's pretty much the same as in everyday English: "land bounded by a fence, wall, hedge, ditch or other physical boundary". Since the entire back garden (including the garage and most of the drive) is bordered by fences, walls, hedges, and quite possibly ditches, and closed off from the rest of the world by a gate across the drive (should one choose to shut it) I am happy to believe that it constitutes an "other enclosure".  And so my conscience is clear, and we are back to buying the house again.

All that remains is to lighten the tone with some sort of picture.  Maybe this one:

perfectly nice people who own camper vans

Or if that's just too much of let-down, here's a rather modified Honda C90 Super Cub.

I rather like this actually.  I particularly appreciate keeping the original front forks, and the "it's a C90, so the fuel tank is underneath the seat, right?" aesthetic.  And the bicycle pedal kickstart.  And the hardtail.  I just can't quite imagine actually riding the thing.  Still, now that the double garage is back within sight again...

Oops! No comment...

It seems that, despite my having chosen

Who can comment = anyone
Comment moderation = never

...in the bowels of Blogger's settings, those comments which people have actually made on this blog have mostly been lost somewhere in the anonymity of the dark web, only surfacing occasionally in an email account that I don't ever look at.

So I'm sorry about that, and I apologise for my apparent rudeness in not replying to those kind people who have engaged enough to spend their time responding to these little verbal frolics.

Please feel free to have another go.  As far as I can see, it's all working now, and comments go straight onto the page.  If you have trouble (I have heard mention of a password, which is complete news to me), please let me know and I'll try to sort it out.

Having got that out of the way, I need to make this post a bit more fun.  The best I can come up with is a couple of random things I've come across, so that you don't have to spend hours idly surfing the web in order to find them.  You're welcome!

1. Someone other than me ranting on about free will.  In this case, it's Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote "Sapiens" and "Homo Deus".  Here's an article about the new dark art of taking advantage of people's mistaken belief in their own agency.
   Yuval Noah Harari: the myth of freedom
   
2. On the topic of Blade Runner:
1. Why the 1982 original is actually the best, and why Deckart isn't a replicant
   
2. Typography and ridiculous attention to detail  (I really enjoyed this one.  If you're reading my blog, you have to give it a try.  It is a bit nerdy, it's true, but the reconstructed picture enhancement video is truly spectacular)

And of course no post would be complete without a picture or two, so here are some.  Personally, I think that life is an art form, and that it's is all about balance.  A corollary is that every apparent positive can become a negative if you take it too far.  Americans (some of them, at least) seem to disagree, and think that once you've discovered an axis of something you like, it's just a case of doing more of it.  Thus, I offer these examples of automotive creativity for your judgement.  What do you think?

I just hope these aren't the same Americans who control most of the world's munitions.

Yes!

Coo er, gosh, it's actually happening!  I refer to the nascent house move, of course.  And what a rare and delightful opportunity it is to use the word "nascent".  Anyway, the chain is complete; everybody is very excited (instead of trying desperately to keep in mind that it might all fall through) and money has changed hands, in the form of a cheque (yes really - isn't it quaint!) from us to our firm of solicitors.  It turns out that these solicitors aren't actually providing us with a solicitor, but a conveyancer. She still charges out at £185 per hour though, so I hope she's good at it.  I imagine the up-side might be that as a specialist, she doesn't consider conveyancing to be a bit beneath her, as I'm sure actual solicitors do.  So far so good; she seems to be on the case and responding to emails.

One feature of house buying nowadays is that the legal fees involved pale into insignificance next to the stamp duty imposed by our ever-inventive government du jour.  They have to do this, so that they can let some people off it, who couldn't possibly afford to buy a house otherwise.  If that sort of natural market force were allowed to prevail, the price of houses would come down, which would of course be bad for morale, because we'd all feel poor and insecure.  So to keep prices artificially high, and trick house owners and first-time buyers into feeling more wealthy that they otherwise would do, the innocent house-buying public have to shell out.  Really the only winners are estate agents, who charge a percentage of the sale price (regardless of what the thing is actually worth, and whether they do anything positive to help sell it).

Anyway, I expect you're all wondering what this fabled mansion, of such rare qualities that 34 viewings were needed to find it, is like.  Or maybe not.  All I can say at this stage is:

• It's at 50.681868,-3.492276 for the google maps enthusiasts amongst you.  No street view camera has made it that far yet though! If you're wondering what's happening next door, and what the big hole in the ground beyond that is, I've no idea yet, except to say that it doesn't look like this when you go there!
• It's only four years old, and it's on a small development of extremely similar looking houses. It remains to be seen whether they are, in fact, all made out of ticky-tacky.
  (Pete Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_FB9bwyp6M )
• It requires a small extension to make it into the house we actually want, so we have all the fun of that still to come.
• It recycles its own rainwater and uses it for the garden hose, and flushing the downstairs loo!
• It comes with a trampoline in the garden.  It's good one too - definitely adult size, with a big safety net for the avoidance of the more obvious catastrophic operational mistakes. I made it a condition of our offer:  the trampoline stays.  They said OK.
• It has a double garage.

In celebration of the last point, here's a picture of the garage:

Ahhh!  I think you can see the appeal now.  I'm feeling more relaxed already. Cheers!