Silvershed Blog

Now what I’m doing the public transport commute thing, I’m reading a lot more. If I get a seat (and, if it’s not too full, even when I don’t) I can settle down with a good book or the newspaper for the 30 minutes that used to be spent shouting at people jumping red lights or trying to avoid shunting the car in front when everything grinds to a halt.

Something that’s beginning to bother me – where is the light reading for women that isn’t full of fashion or Amy Winehouse? I’d like a magazine that’s intelligent, has politics, economics, tech as well as the usual girly stuff. Does such a thing exist?

At the moment, props to Wired magazine, which I’ve started reading again after a couple of years off. I wish I could subscribe in the UK (well, I can, ish, but it costs so much it’s not worth it). I love the way it’s written so cleverly that articles that didn’t initially sound that interesting to me became so fascinating. (Automotive X prize for 100mpg car, anyone?)

And then there’s the books. One of the advantages of living with new people is I get to skank all their stuff. As a result I’m currently reading AAGill’s The Angry Island about the English character, and have had to work hard to not laugh out loud, especially when I’m debating doing serious harm to some stupid spatially unaware fuckwit with their wheely bag and bovine inability to get out of everyone’s way.

We’ve been married too long. For Valentine’s day I’ve got a jar of special edition Champagne and this:

We’ve had our skates for a bit yet, and Stuart’s always dead keen for me to acutally use them, so on Wednesday he dragged me out to RollerXpress. I’ve never been to a roller disco before – Stuart’s been to one in Manchester, but it sounded a bit naff, and I wasn’t really that keen on the idea because I’m not very good on my skates yet.

And guess what? I actually really enjoyed myself. RollerXpress had taken over SeOne, so the venue was huge, and they had two rooms going, one with a really rather good Funk band, the other with a proper DJ, rather than someone just playing records. I’d have been happy to go to it as a club night, the skating just made it better.

The marshals were some of the best skaters I’ve ever seen, and were happy to show you how to do some of the things they were doing. For the more experienced skaters, that was showing them some moves. For me, it was showing me how to stop.

We’re definitely going again. It was a really friendly crowd, and we’ve made promises we’ll be back.

This was a week of firsts for me, because I’ve also done my first ever run outside. I’ve signed up for the London 10,000 in May this year, and while I’ve never been a distance runner, I reckon I’ve got a chance of actually being able to finish in a semi-reasonable time. I’ve been working on the treadmill at the gym, but haven’t managed to push myself because it’s so boooring for the amount of effort I’m having to put in. The NiceRunningLady at the gym said “There’s one way round that” and took me out along the Thames for a run.

Now, we only managed 5k, and I was walking/dying for a reasonable amount of that, but it’s a start, and it’s so much more fun being able to aim for the next bridge or whatever. And looking down the river when it’s dark and all the lights are twinkling is so unbelievably beautiful, it totally confirms we’ve made the right decision to come down here.

heh. Me, healthy? Whodathunkit?

I was going to hold off naming our estate agents on the blog until we’d sold the house and everything was done and dusted – I didn’t really want to go “yeah, they’re ace” or “nah, don’t bother, they suck” until we could look at the whole experience.

But I’d forgotten that using any agent to do anything on your behalf is utterly frustrating, and can completely depend on the individuals you have to deal with.

So, Lawrence Copeland, I think we’ve made the right decision to go with you. Lawrence himself really seems to know the local market, and some of his staff seem really switched on. Others don’t, like the girl who thought that the landline number for our Manchester house had a London prefix. (No, that’s my work number. Muppet.) It also took them over a week to get photos of the inside of the house onto Rightmove, which wasn’t too impressive.

I’m getting a bit depressed at the thought the house might not go. It’s a truly useless time to be selling anyway, and all the scare stories aren’t helping either. I honestly don’t know what we’ll do if the house doesn’t sell. I guess we could put tenants in it, but it’d mean we ended up renting down here. Mind you, if everything does go tits up, maybe that’d be for the best and we could wait everything out.

One of the things I hate about living in a rented house is there’s just no drive to fix things or make things better. There are several broken things in the house we’re in in the moment that we could fix in about five seconds flat. But it’s not our house. It’s someone else’s.

I want to go home. I just don’t know where home is.

One of the things that’s been bothering me about this move is our cats. The housesitters have been taking great care of them (after all, they’ve worked with Ocelots and Jaguars) but once estate agents start coming and going it becomes a slightly different prospect. I believe that the six foot high cat tree isn’t a great addition to our small house, it’s so loomy, and the cats have a habit of covering everything with footprints.

We toyed with the idea of taking them down to SouthHouse, but that didn’t really work either – we’re in a room in a shared house, and there are two cats there already, so it’s easy to see all the potential problems that could cause.

Which is why I’m so incredibly pleased that my Aunt announced that she was thinking of getting a pet to keep her company. Mum’s ears pricked up and she goes “I know two cats that need fostering” – so yesterday we took them down to a new big house, full of exciting things to explore – and to trash. I don’t think my Aunt was quite aware what she’d let herself in for, but in the two hours that we were there settling them in, they managed to jump far higher than she’d expected, and managed to fall from the upstairs bannister to the downstairs floor – and this is an old house with high ceilings.

I really really hope they don’t trash something precious, but this is such a stroke of good luck for us. They’re safe there until we get our own place sorted out, she gets a dry run with a pet, and I get to sleep properly through the night instead of sitting up worrying. What can go wrong

So where are we up to now?

I think all we have left to do is do the odd bit of touching up in places we’ve obviously missed, wipe down the gloss that is getting left as it is, get the painting stuff put away and go. Hurrah.

Although our for sale sign blew down in the winds, so that doesn’t look good.

I can’t believe it’s been a week already. OK, it’s a rest because we’re not at work, but I’m absolutely shattered. Can’t wait to get to sleep in a real bed, rather than on kip mats on the floor.

It’s odd, but this doesn’t feel like home any more, it’s just a building. Partly that’s because we have friends here house sitting, so we’re in another shared environment, but I think it’s also because we’re starting to identify more with our London life than our North one. Very very weird, but rather exciting.

Today, we have painted the bathroom (twice), the kitchen and touched up bits we’ve missed on the other rooms.

We have also been to the DIY store twice, to buy lampshades and stuff so we don’t have bare bulbs round the house, and to return them to get ones that fit.

Yesterday we painted the kitchen, the bathroom, the vestibule and the front bedroom.

Tomorrow, we are going to be washing down gloss, touching up bits that are too tatty (but not too obviously, we don’t want to be doing the lot again) and trying to tidy up the front of the house. We even have numbers, rather than post-it notes stuck in the window.

We do not however have an appointment with the estate agent to come and take photos, because he’s on holiday. We also do not have a solicitor, because their normal working hours are Monday – Friday 9 – 5 (I thought today was a normal working day, or maybe I’m missing something?)

I’d like my Christmas break now, please.

We’ve done it. We’ve put our house on the market. We are soon to be exNortherners. We’d ummed and ahhhed about keeping NorthHouse, renting it out, but it’s become increasingly obvious that a) it’d do our heads in because we still see the house as ours, rather than as property and b) we need the money for a SouthHouse if we’re going to get anything halfway decent, especially now the mortgage people are getting increasingly twitchy about lending on money that isn’t really there.

We’ve battled estate agents, who have various screwy ideas about just what they want to do to get our business, and finally settled on a local guy who seems to be OK about returning calls, and seems to know the market in our particular area. Of course, there are risks, because he’s not as big as the huge guys who have the huge mailing lists, but we’re hoping that most people are just going to look on rightmove anyway.

But this means that we’re spending Christmas painting the house magnolia. Local guy was terribly polite about the fact our house is a little “tired”, but it’s true. Some rooms haven’t been decorated since we moved in in February 1999, and other rooms were full of holes where we’d taken down shelves and pictures.

Even after the first day of filling holes, it looks a hell of a lot better. But I just wasn’t expecting to be spending Christmas Day hanging off a ladder trying to get the magnolia to cover the Apple Green that seemed like a good idea when we first applied it.

So, just the sitting room to finish; the kitchen, bathroom, front bedroom and glossing left to do. Easy. Honest.

It’d better bloody sell after all this. I don’t think I could handle months of looking after a spare house. I don’t know how holiday house people do it, it’s a real pain.

Now it’s real Christmas, I’ll get my finger out and show you the photos from November when my brother came over for an early Christmas visit. We popped up to my folk’s house in the Lakes, and took him and his girlfriend to see Castlerigg stone circle.

Now, while Cheryl claims that she’s visited cold countries before (like France!) I don’t think she quite expected to be as cold as she was. She’s one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen, yet in these photos, she just looks cold.

Why is it that when you get a cold, it’s always worst on days where you actually want to do things, and is just annoying on work days? I’m way too well to stay at home, yet going to the gym last night was a massive chore, and I really really want to drop out tonight too.

Gah.

I’ll end up going, I always do. I just want to go home and eat pies.