Some Comments on Life
Moving
house ifs famously a stressful activity, and thankfully not one I have done
that often in my life. The current move ought to be pretty straightforward. I
am, after all in a far more financially stable position than at any other time
I’ve moved and have no great constraints. On the other hand since I bought my
flat in Earlsfield house prices have had a long period of concerted
hyper-growth, followed by a crash and a mortgage crisis. I think my
limited experiences do shed some light on the state of the nation with regards
buying and selling houses.
The
first thing I noticed which had changed radically was the way Estate Agents do
their business. In the past, as often as not, the Estate Agent simply confirmed
we could do a viewing and the householder would show the buyer round and both
sides would report back. Not any more. Every visit we have made – and every
showing of my flat – was done by the estate agent. What is more, random viewers
are really not encouraged. I knew exactly what the financial position was of
every viewer before they arrived. If you need a sale to finance your purchase
and your are currently not under offer, they are not very interested in you.
The
second aspect we couldn’t fail to note was that house prices have fallen quite
spectacularly over the Summer. I accepted an offer about 86% of the original asking
price, while the house we have an offer on dropped £20,000 between viewings.
Frankly, if I was putting an offer in today it would be even lower. The reason
for this seems to be that there are not many buyers, and not many properties either.
When the expected influx of properties arrived on the market in June, including
many buy-for-rent properties, it simply had the effect of driving the market
down. Having said that, new properties have become hard to find, so I can see
the prices climbing again.
The
downside of this strict control is that timelines are squeezed. If you cannot
make an offer until your own place is on offer chains are going to get longer
in time terms. There is therefore an assumption on the part of the Estate
Agents that people down the chain will move into rented accommodation at some
point. This is essentially what I shall be doing at the end of September –
although in my case I move in with Amanda – not in the way we planned, but
needs must. Indeed we ended up pressurising the sellers of the house we want to
do the same, otherwise we I will be squatting in Queens Park at Christmas.
Essentially I said complete by November 12th or we pull out. It
should be said that the Estate Agent is entirely with us, and feels the
sellers’ behaviour is outrageous – even though they have a young baby and are
looking for more space. They finally accepted the deadline with tolerable
grace.
The
mortgage should have been no problem, and indeed it wasn’t. I did not require
any further funding and wished to simply ‘port’ the current mortgage over to
the new property. I am earning very well at the moment, have money in the bank
and the mortgage represents under a quarter of the price we are paying. The
process still took two forty minute phone calls to agree, and they went through
just about every aspect of my financial situation. Had building societies
operated like this when I bought in Earlsfield, I would never have got a
mortgage. I was almost bankrupt and simply trusting to a very positive
assessment of my earnings potential supplied by a certain Mr Challinger. When I
later extended the mortgage to build the loft extension I think the decision
took less than 3 minutes.
There
can be no doubt that the mortgage providers had become stupidly loose with
their decisions, but I can’t help but feel that they have redressed the balance
too far. If the attitude had been so cautious through my life I don’t know what
we would have managed to do. No wonder there are few buyers, and a fully funded
first time buyer is the holy grail driving the market.
So,
the housing market is still out there, but it is weak and volatile. Getting a
mortgage is going to be very difficult for most youngsters (and I mean
youngsters very broadly) and you can expect every details to be handled by the
Estate Agents. If you are buying and selling, expect to spend some time
renting.
So the current plan looks to be
me moving out of Earlsfield at the end of September and Amanda and I moving to
Guildford by November 12th. We were quite glad to have this settled before
our ‘leaving London Party last weekend, otherwise it would have been rather embarrassing.
In the even a good collection of people assembled in Amanda’s garden, didn’t
get rained on, ate some food and drank some wine. Part 2 in Guildford looks like
it won’t be until the spring, but that will come soon enough.
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I am certainly finding
it a bit of a struggle to keep up the usual pace of things with all this house moving
stress. Not that we have done too badly, seeing Pygmalion in Chichester, All my Sons
in the West End and a wonderful small scale La
Boheme in Soho with Pete Birks (review as yet not finished). I am also
trying to finish a long book review of Decency
& Disorder by Ben Wilson – hopefully I can finish both over the long
weekend. The other exciting news is that I am working on a major revamp of the
website, with a serious Medieval History offshoot. I thoguth this would be
quite straightforward, but to be honest, I thin it will take until Christmas at
this rate.
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Life is mighty strange sometimes.
Actually it feels pretty strange most of the time. I have lost the past few
weeks, mostly travelling round visiting schools – as opposed to my more usual
colleges. It is many years since I spent so much time in schools, and I admit
to finding it slightly stressful at first, though settled in quickly and have
had rather a good few weeks. Anyway, I had been visiting a secondary school in
Somerset and was staying overnight in Salisbury, and hence changing trains at
Bristol Temple Meads. For those who know there is a lovely cafe on the station,
and I was happily sat in there watching Andy Murray tear someone apart when I
noticed that a steam train had come into the station. Well you have to, don’t
you? I popped up the platform to take a couple of pictures and there in the
viewfinder was Cheryl Morgan, erstwhile hobby member these days part of the US
SF scene. I haven’t seen her in years. Only marginally less weird was going to
a birthday drink with someone a few weeks ago at The Lamb. ‘Do you know it?’ Well, just a bit! How many years did we
attend the Lamb twice a month? And of
course there was Challinger, Woodhouse and me going to see TV21 just 29 years
after their last London gig. And we have a coalition government. Is it all a
dream or do I wake up soon?
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Although allegedly (and
deliberately) not doing a great deal, we still seem to fit in a few interesting
moments. The exhibition at the British Museum of Italian Renaissance Drawings was breathtaking. All the better for
me as I wasn’t expecting a great deal; I see the Renaissance as more Amanda’s
thing, but I was just blown away by this collection of preparatory sketches by
Lippi, Raphael, Leonard and Michelangelo. A reasonably small – though still too
much for me, we need to return – tightly focussed exhibition of simply some of
the best drawings you will ever see in your entire life. To help we more
ignorant punters, there was also some really useful material explaining
techniques and methods, all of which served to make the end results the more
extraordinary. Absolutely fascinating to see a sketch by Leonardo of some
statue he was designing, and to see his apparent inability to concentrate. He
clearly got bored, and decided to draw a water wheel, and a row of balconies.
Think how good he would have been had he not had Attention Deficit Disorder!
Very different, but no less
remarkable, is the small exhibition currently running at Lambeth Palace, the
Treasures of their library. Never opened to the public before, the very, very
best of the Lambeth Palace library is opened up for the public. It consists of
a few cases in one large medieval room. A few of the highlights include: a
gospel owned by King Athelstone, a 10th century copy of Aldhelm’s De Virginitate, the fabulous Lambeth
Bible, the hour book of Richard III, a prayer book of Elizabeth I and her
letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury with her personal note written at the bottom
(explaining that although smitten with the pox, it hasn’t dented her looks at
all!). And more. We also went to an excellent lecture on witches and exorcism
in James I’s reign arising from one of the texts in the exhibition. Meandering
back on the other side of the river we stumbled into Westminster Abbey from the
back, and discovered you can explore the cloisters for free – or at least, no
one bothered us! The Chapter House I had
never been in before and is stunning, with some very ancient medieval wall
paintings. A highly civilized day!
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Our short holiday to Seville gave us an interesting
opportunity to experience being the other side of a headline news story. We
were due to fly aback on Thursday evening (April 15th) but in the
end I actually arrived at home at lunchtime Wednesday April 21st.
The biggest problems in the interim were the stress of not knowing what was
happening, the stress of not knowing what to do for the best and the expense.
The
first surprise was that having cancelled the flight, Ryanair offered a
big fat nothing in the way of help. There was a link to ‘re-book your flight’
but it didn’t work for me. Essentially we just had to start at square one,
competing for the most expensive tickets with everyone else. I was not impressed.
Initially we didn’t realise how long this would go on for, and I was determined
to leave by Sunday at the latest. The hotel we were staying in had a couple of
laptops that were quite slow with Spanish keyboards. Trying to make actually
bookings for things was possible, but required more patience than I could
muster. Also, of course, demand for their use was very high. So we decided to
go to the professionals and visited a proper Travel Agency. Our initial idea –
train to Madrid then to Paris then to London was already sold out. This was a
blow we hadn’t expected. We took a break and returned Friday afternoon, and
then tried flight to Bilbao and a ferry – also sold out. Rod had come up with
the brilliant idea of train to Madrid, flight to Lyon and TGV to Paris. But by
then Lyon airport had closed. The best we came up with was based on getting a
train from Barcelona to Paris on Monday evening at 21.00. This was later than I
wanted but even on Friday afternoon the best we could get, so even though we couldn’t
get a train to Paris, we took the gamble and booked it. The real gamble was the
flight form Seville to Barcelona. Spanish airports were open at the time, but I
was terrified of their closing and hence being pushed back to square one.
And
that was what we did – though Barcelona airport did close on Sunday for several
hours which did put me into a panic. We were lucky enough to actually get
Eurostar tickets at Gare de Nord on Tuesday (despite the notices, announcements
and people telling us there were no tickets – that was a constructive lie!),
but the return journey cost about £1000 for the two of us. The prolonged stay
in a wonderful hotel in Seville cost about another £1000, so our short break
turned into quite an expensive holiday.
Our
main source of information was the txt messages sent by Rod, who did wonderful
work for us throughout. The Foreign Office advice was minimal, the BBC useful,
but not specific enough. Rumour was everything, with little groups of Brits
discussing the cost of hiring a car to drive to France, and the likelihood of
getting a ferry from Northern Spain. It was also clear that absolutely everyone
had an open invitation to rip us off. Hotels got mysteriously more expensive
and of course train, plane and ferry tickets became incredibly expensive. Doing
things on the internet is not ideal when in a foreign hotel and I yearned for a
phone number to call. Innocuous sounding phrases on the news like contact
your airline company before going to the airport assume you CAN contact them,
something most of them want to make as difficult as possible. So the result was
a lot of angry holiday makers feeling let down and ignored by the Government
and Foreign Office, and ripped off by the travel industry.
Seville,
on the other hand was a wonderful city. Full of contradictions: the harsh
Spanish Catholicism, the love of bullfighting, the culture of flamenco. Lovely
food, lovely climate, tumbling flowers, the endless talk, beautiful courtyards,
incredibly formal clothes. It is a city of elegant palaces, orange groves and
not just Moorish remains, but Roman too. See a few of our pictures
below.
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Waterloo@Waterloo: Sadly we wasted a couple of tickets for Jerusalem, still being in transit, but we were back to see the return of live orchestral accompaniment to silent films at the South Bank. Carl Davis was back performing his own orchestral composition to accompany a silent classic. This time it was the 1929 epic Waterloo, directed by Karl Grune. Not a terribly serious evening, but hugely enjoyable. And nice to get back into ‘eye acting’ again!
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Having not bothered with such
stuff 35 years ago, on Tuesday I did dress up in silly hat and gown so as to
take a phenomenally expensive walk across a stage, shake hands with a man I
have never actually seen before and not actually receive my degree. It was a
thoroughly industrialised process, a money making opportunity for all sorts of
people, but it did feel good to do it. Most importantly I have a cohort to
share the experience with. So all in all, I am quite please I did it. After the
formal part we convened to Camino, the tapas bar at Kings Cross and proceeded
to drink far too much. I would say a ‘memorable’ day, but actually I am distinctly
vague about the final part of the day! Many thanks to all those who have
congratulated me, and my congratulations to the rest of the group. Any part
time study is difficult, so everyone deserves their moment of accolade.
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Another trip away with work this week, but
not the usual depressed area FE College; this time Bremen in northern Germany.
Astonishingly, I have never before been to Germany, a place that has never
really appealed to me. I suppose I am too seduced by Latin wine and sun, the laid
back Mediterranean lifestyle. It certainly wasn’t Mediterranean weather, but
dry, and although we had only a few hours to look around the town, it was
enough to really fall for it. It has a couple of superbly ancient churches and
a town hall which is a world heritage site. Most importantly, a surviving
medieval area – or at least an area still holding its medieval street pattern,
filled with pubs and restaurants serving solid German food and excellent beer.
Now I find lager in this country almost undrinkable, yet somehow over there, as
my colleague and I worked our way through a few of the local brews, it was
gorgeous. The drama, however was missing the plane home – not something I have
ever done before. We were doing interviews with soldiers in a couple of British
bases over there, and frankly we misjudged the distances. Despite some heroic
driving (not from me) we just failed to make the flight and were left
embarrassed and stranded.
Lovely though the heart of Bremen is, I was all too aware, following my reading of AC Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities, that what remained was simply the lucky surviving bits from our wartime bombing campaign. How we missed the Town Hall I don’t know, but I am very pleased we did.
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I have just written a review of the excellent The Habit of Art at the National Theatre. There is some discussion about the phrase both within the play itself and in the programme. It seems to me that the many years of publishing in one form or another has left me – and many of the ex-zine editor readers of this site – with the habit of writing. When Ken and I were churning out 36 pages of ‘stuff’ (sorry, now called ‘content’) once every 5 weeks you quickly learn that waiting for ‘inspiration’ is an affectation we jobbing editors had no time for. What we needed was simply time. If you had a spare ten minutes, get writing. I have never really lost that ability. When we have (rather more boring) reports to write at work I simply do them when the time opens out. I have been tardy on this website of late, but only because every spare second has been spent reading and writing about medieval history. Now time has returned, I am quickly back into the habit of writing. It seems the most natural thing to do. I have a few plans for this site too, principally I plan to spin off the history content into a more formal specialist medieval website. This should stimulate more interest in all things medieval, and potentially could be a serious academic forum.
I have been doing a great deal of travelling round the country in the past few weeks. I managed to squeeze out the time to stop off at Bracknell last week to meet up with Ken, currently doing that itinerant IT thing of working far away from home on a long sequence of short contracts. I can’t say I remember ever having been to Bracknell before, but slightly astonishingly we did find a decent pub to while away a few hours. Good to catch up. This particularly busy phase at work is almost at an end. The majority of our work finishes at the end of March, and like most of the public sector, there is huge uncertainty about what follows. The current political debate in which somehow the government has positioned itself as supposedly not making cuts to public expenditure seems very odd from the FE perspective, where most colleges are looking at 20% cuts in funding next year (ie after March). Most public authorities are planning for similar cuts. If this makes the government position seem disingenuous, it also makes the Tory position very scary indeed. I think we know we are in for a prolonged period of relative austerity. I am not sure how aware people are of just how close this is to affecting us all. Unless you work in the City of course.
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I can hardly complain. For years I have been whinging about the lack of proper seasons, we’ve had so many warm, damp winters and chilly damp summers. Well, this has been a proper winter and even as March approaches it is still damned cold! It always takes a while to get going in the new year and the weather hasn’t encouraged us. Still, our first music and theatre gigs are now past, we have even seen a film and been to a classical concert and both Amanda and I have had the builders in! The film was the account of Ian Dury’s troubled life, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. It was hugely enjoyable with excellent central performances – particularly the children. Clearly Ian Dury would have been a nightmare to live with and the women in his life come out with great credit. Musically the star is Chris Jankel, who somehow managed (most of the time) to interpret Dury’s genius moments and capture them in a form the rest of us could enjoy. The film has a ‘typically’ inventive structure, no clear chronology or point of view. Even a very few years ago such structures were considered avant garde and experimental; it is interesting to see how soon they become mainstream. I wouldn’t say this was a big screen film, so if you haven’t seen it, a DVD is recommended. It also spurred us into booking tickets for the Blockheads at the 100 Club at the end of April.
A few days ago we headed off to Guildford Cathedral to see The Sixteen, a group of choral musicians who specialise in early church music. I admit I didn’t think this would be a sell out, but how wrong can you be? There was not a spare seat in the Cathedral as this superbly gifted group of singers sang a series of 500 year old pieces of church music in Latin which I doubt very many people had ever heard before. It was spell binding, magical and sublime beyond explanation. We came across them in the BBC4 series Sacred Music with Simon Russell Beale, the Sixteen providing the musical examples. There is a second series starting in March and if you notice it do tune in to see a presenter on TV who understands how to be still and to hear the sublime music of Sixteen.
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As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century (!) I really should be pretty stress-free. In the past few weeks I have both gained a successful result from my two years studying Medieval History, and my sister and I have successfully sold my mother's house in Cardiff, thereby lifting a huge responsibility. I have to admit that I don't feel as relaxed as I feel I ought, but perhaps that is just because these things haven't sunk in yet! Overall, however a remarkably successful year and looking aback I fail to understand how Amanda and I have managed a fraction of what we seem to have done. We were supposed to be limiting the music and theatre, yet looking back over the reviews, I think we have done well. And probably been to more exhibitions than previously. And while we didn't have a 'proper' holiday, stays in Cornwall, York and Paris were all very enjoyable and we even managed one proper party. Work has been quite busy, and I am starting to feel I actually contribute something to projects - though the whole world of FE is preparing to shut down at the end of March and await the election. If Brown wants to do something for us an early election would really help!
Finally, there was my piece of art, the David Begbie sculpture. So far this is not even remotely properly displayed, so perhaps that is the first ambition for next year, to ensure that by next Christmas it has a proper home (and lighting).
Oh and Matthew was 21 a couple of days ago. Can you believe that?