Post script

My last post was actually written several weeks ago, but never got published for some reason, so it's already time for an update.  We've unpacked all the removal company's boxes and crates, and returned a larger number of them than we were supposed to have had in the first place, but they didn't give us a refund.  We did resort to putting some stuff straight into our own boxes instead, so there is still quite a bit of sorting out to do; not to mention all the boxes I packed and stored before we moved.  As a result of all this, the garage is still full of stuff, but at least it's all our stuff now.  And even though it's full, it's more functional than the old one.  Of course, there's now no time for proper projects, because of all the shelf installation, wiring stuff up, furniture moving, and trying to learn how to do recycling the Teignbridge way.  Quite different from Exeter.  Here they collect glass from your door, but only if you mix it up with cardboard and coloured paper in your green box; and there's a separate blue box for food waste, which doesn't go with the nappies and tissues, because they go in the black bin, but not in the black box, which is for metal and plastic, but not packaging film, because that can't be recycled, you see. And what used to be the brown bin is now the green bin, which also isn't recycling at all because it's garden waste (subscription only - may have in-game charges - terms and conditions apply).

All in all it's been a bit of a mission, and it's far from over.  I'm really not sure when I can expect to get back to starting a project just for the fun of it.  I think I will need a solid two weeks to get the garage in order, and I can't see that starting any time soon.  Also, the garage, while wonderful, is, of course, completely unheated, and it's winter now.  Brrrr!  In fact, the project completion rate is going slightly negative with the demise of yet another completely successful custom TV cabinet (affectionately known as the monolith) which is about to be scrapped because we no longer need to house a Sky box, satellite box, Tivo, DVD player, VCR and record collection.

monolith - no place for it in our new, clean world

In our new, clean world, we are settling for Freeview Plus, and saving approximately the same amount of money as my defined-benefit pension brings in every month.  Oh, and we're buying a bigger TV.

(slightly) bigger TV

Finally... it's done

We've done it - we've sold, and bought, and moved.  We are now proud owners of a lovely four-year-old house - a mere baby of a thing really.  I searched for "four year old" on DuckDuckGo to find some amusing reference to quote and discovered that apparently, people also ask:

What skills should a 4 year old have?

4- to 5-Year-Old Development: Movement Milestones and Hand and Finger Skills

• Stand on one foot for more than 9 seconds.
• Do a somersault and hop.
• Walk up and down stairs without help.
• Walk forward and backwards easily.
• Peddle a tricycle.
• Copy a triangle, circle, square, and other shapes.
• Draw a person with a body.

I was going to comment that my new house isn't able to stand on one foot at all, but instead I must ask: how many four-year-olds can actually do a somersault? I've never been able to do a proper somersault in my life!  And although I can walk forwards and backwards easily (sometimes even at the same time) and usually negotiate stairs without having to ask for assistance, I don't relish the idea of having to peddle a tricycle. Is this for some four-year-olds' version of The Apprentice?  When did street sales techniques become a core skill for infants?  And finally, if I were going to test a four-year-old's artistic skills, I would think it only fair to ask them to draw a person with a pencil, or some other proper drawing implement. Not a body. Far too heavy. Not fair at all.

Anyway, I digress.  The whole house moving process jolly nearly turned into a catastrophe when I fell mysteriously and hopelessly ill one day after dinner, and spent the next three days in bed, feeling unpleasantly queasy all the time and so depleted that I was completely unable to do anything at all, except for going to see a doctor, who said "it's a virus", did blood tests, prescribed a protein pump inhibitor in case I had stomach acid, and wished me well: but I still wasn't. Fortunately, when I woke up on moving day I found that I didn't feel ill at all. And indeed, I wasn't, so everything worked out OK in the nick of time.  The lovely Jackie did all the hard work getting stuff ready for the packers to turn up on Wednesday, but they had underestimated the job and were left with a lot to do on moving day - which left a lot for us to do when they had finished.  And then they dumped the whole caboodle at the new house, finishing just after dark by putting everything from the loft, the garage and outside the old house into my capacious new garage, which is now completely stuffed full.

Stuffed full

But I am undaunted.  I'm sure that given a bit of racking, and with the dispersal of lawnmowers and such like to the garden shed (yes!) and beyond we will have everything looking shipshape before too much of the remaining allotted 18½ years has drizzled by.

It is all a bit of a mission though, this house moving. The people we bought from are a couple of hospital doctors, with a family of small children.  How do they do all this, on top of all that?  Beats me.

Inside the house, so far we have unpacked the kitchen.  Rose Removals use a lot of packing paper, which is good because it isn't plastic bubble wrap.  They suggested that we might scrumple it up in the boxes and return it to them with the rest of their stuff (including those rather nice yellow boxes in the garage picture), but since one of the features of packing paper is that it takes up a lot of room when scrumpled, I have been unscrumpling it.  This is my pile of unscrumpled paper so far:

Unscrumpled paper

The lovely Jackie holds the entirely reasonable position that this is probably a complete waste of time, but I disagree.  After all, I am one of those dinner guests who quietly unscrumple their After Eight wrappers. I do it for the sheer joy of achieving an almost mirror-like smoothness of the silvery side whilst avoiding unsightly tearing.  I'm quite good at it, too.  I have, quite accidentally, inspired other dinner guests to try their skill at the art - possibly to the despair of dinner hosts who were hoping for something a bit more erudite, in return for their largesse.  Anyway, I find it quite rewarding in a Zen-style, taking refuge in the small, kind of way.  Before house move - fetch water, smooth After Eight wrappers, drink beer: after house move - fetch water, smooth packing paper, drink beer!"  That sort of thing.

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!

No, no, no, no, no. no, possibly....

It's been a long time since I wrote a blog post, hasn't it?  It's not that nothing has been happening, it's just that it's all been extremely dull and frustrating, because we've been trying to buy a new house.

Buying a new house sounds like a good idea until you actually try to do it.  You set out all the things you simply must have, as well as the things you'd like to have (in addition to all the things you already have, which somehow get taken for granted) and away you go.  Looking at houses.  First you look on on the very wonderful Rightmove site, which now shows floorplans at last, and has lots of lovely pictures, and is really good all round, filling you with a dangerous sense of optimism that your dreams may come true.  And then you do viewings, which is where it all comes crashing down.

Firstly, there's the problem that nothing's perfect, and there are always new and unexpected ways to compromise what seemed like a good candidate.  That's the "it's up a dirt track next to a chicken farm" syndrome, which somehow they always fail to mention in the description.  Sometimes these factors can be weeded out by a drive-by, but sometimes you have to waste a lot of time meeting estate agents to find out something that you aren't going to overlook when you find out about it.  Access limitations (which are the bane of camper van owners) are never mentioned on the details.

Then, there's the problem of wide-angle lenses completely changing the appearance of spaces.  Sometimes you get a clue - like a single internal door that appears to be 6ft wide - but sometimes not.  And slopes!  For some reason, it seems to be impossible to correctly detect sloping drives from an estate agent's photograph.  And they always slope, at least in or around Exeter.  Sometimes precipitously.

Precipitous

All together, the chance of viewing a house and being NOT being disappointed within the first few minutes is extremely low.  I think we have seen about three which didn't dash our well-intentioned optimism immediately - sometimes before even opening the door.  Out of 34 viewings.  So far.

And obviously, every single one you go to see is either no good, or you can't buy it for some reason - right up until the until the last one, which is where you stop.

You might think that you could say "OK, we've given it our best shot, and there just isn't anywhere within our budget which fits the bill.  We'll just stay where we are, have a G&T and admire our lovely view some more" but actually the process gradually becomes utterly addictive - it's so easy to look on line (even without Rightmove's text alert system) that after a while you can't stop looking. After all, the next one you see might just be the one, might it not?

There have been a few slightly amusing incidents along the way. In one 1930's house, seemingly still occupied by the couple who bought it new, and decorated from top to bottom in deeply textured wallpaper covered in many layers of worn gloss paint, a slightly desperate estate agent encouragingly pointed out several times that the decor was "quite neutral".  We didn't make an offer.

There is a whole class of newer houses which are just like normal houses, but with everything scaled down in size. Presumably fewer and fewer people actually swing their cats nowadays.  I suppose if one harboured aspirations to feel like Gandalf, this design idea might actually work in one's favour.  We didn't make an offer.

Another (very expensive) house had a lovely view of the Exe river valley from the living room - almost completely obscured by the blank gable end of the house in front, about 20ft away.  Didn't mention that in the details, did you?  We didn't make an offer.

The last but one house we saw was "a truly outstanding property" featuring five bedrooms, four bathrooms (plus downstairs cloakroom) and a dining room whose extraordinary dimensions (3.4m x 2.95m, including the floor space used up by the double doors) could accommodate as many as four of the occupants eating simultaneously.  Or even more, if they all agreed to eat standing up.  We didn't make an offer.

Of course, it doesn't help that our must-have list includes a double garage and somewhere to park the van, which two criteria narrow the field considerably around here.  And be within a 15min drive of the house of luuurve, for ease of grandparenting.

Despite all this, we think we might just have done it.  Our offer has been accepted on a house in Exminster, which we both liked immediately.  Perhaps one reason for that is that it never actually went on the market - "our" agent showed it to us before the details were complete, so it never made it to Rightmove, so we never saw any misleadingly over-attractive photographs or hyped-up description.  So we were't disappointed when we got there.

Of course we're not out of the woods yet; the various agents still have to get all the links of the (short) onward chain forged into some semblance of continuity, and it could all fall over at any time, so no celebrations yet.  But it could happen...