Open Writing

We had another viewing on 9 February. An oldish couple said that they were looking round on behalf of their son, who was in rented accommodation pending his divorce settlement (“So why wasn’t his wife doing this?” I wondered, though not aloud). Like the bloke that put in the offer, they seemed as keen as mustard. Multitudes of entirely promising words were fed back to us via our agent. However, actions speak louder than words, and the plain fact is that they never did bring their son to have a look for himself.

Back at the end of January, the agent's sign had been blown down in a storm. It took over three weeks, and four increasingly irritable calls to the agent, before anybody came to fix it! During that period, each morning we got up and tried to ignore the symbolism of that sundered sign; we re-crossed our fingers - and everything else - that something would turn up. The egg-timer on our visa kept ticking down remorselessly. As February faded, the calendar kindly informed us that nearly five months had dribbled down the pan.

There was more than just the D-Day deadline. As the days rolled by, several minor deadlines fell by the wayside. For instance, the calendar had also informed me that, in just over a month, I would reach the “Big Six-Oh”. Was that sad, or what? Well, the really "sad" thing about it was that the previous year my birthday card from Hazel & Co. said, "Have a nice, QUIET birthday - because your next one WON’T be!" Poor lass – she had been fully expecting to be organising a big splash to celebrate my 60th. on 5 April. It wasn’t going to happen, was it? We were also pretty well resigned to missing Cody's 2nd. birthday party in May. Unless, of course, something truly remarkable happened to give us a "fairy-tale ending", which I knew we wouldn’t get, if only because I don't believe in "fairies".

On Saturday 2 March, almost a month on from the last one, we had another viewing. Well, they came, they looked, they checked that the bath-taps worked (?!), they sniffed a bit, and they went. Pam and I looked at one another, and shook our heads in comic unison. Not much interest shown there, we thought.

A couple of days later, they put in an offer. It was derisory. Presumably, because they knew we were emigrating, they had supposed we'd be grateful for anything we could get. This seems to be commonly the case, but if folk would just stop and THINK for a moment, they’d realise that it simply CANNOT work that way. The proceeds of a house sale will always be a major, if not THE major factor in the budgetary equation. Sell your house for a mess of pottage and you won’t be going anywhere. We asked them to reconsider, in the light of the existing offer. Sensibly, they matched it, and we accepted.

So, with one small step forwards, we were now stuck in a chain. However, as it happened, it was a short one of only four links - a first-time buyer, A.N. Other, this couple, and us. We were told that all the sales had been negotiated and agreed, so all involved were holding up their little green flags, and the various solicitors were getting on with the contracts. “BARRING ANY DISASTERS,” we thought, “it should all go through. BARRING ANY DAFT DITHERING,” we thought, “that should take only a few weeks.” It seemed that we were at last entering the home straight. We allowed ourselves a muted "hurrah!" With glad hearts, we passed on this shred of optimism to friends.

Suddenly, all those folk who had once assured us of a smooth crossing started giving us tales of how easily ships can be scuppered! True to my nature, I remained stoically optimistic - as far as I was concerned, all the "goings wrong" were now behind us, and ahead of us horizons were blue and bright This meant, of course, that if owt did go wrong I would have that much more to grumble about.

The estate agent sent us confirmation of the "agreement of sale", and because the buyers didn’t have to mess with a mortgage, the estate agents were expecting to be able to set a handover date in a couple of weeks - plus, I presumed, any time added on for faffing around in the chain’s two remaining links. It was getting near enough for me to have to consider facing up to the part of the job I was most dreading - sorting out the banking!

By early April, we were still waiting for the wielders of quill pens to extricate their malodorous digits. I had learnt that, a week or so previously, our solicitor had had to send a document to their solicitor. It was sent by post, even though their solicitor was less than 100 yards down the street! Blimey – I could have done the round trip in about a minute, even with my ageing muscles. Somehow, in spite of their assiduous application of antiquated, dilatory methodologies, they were expecting to have agreed a completion date by the second week in April.

I 'phoned the ASB bank’s London office and had a long chat with a very helpful young - or at least young-sounding - lady. Right up my street, that! It wouldn’t be long before we would be able to shift some money out there, where it could sit quietly, earning interest at a rather better rate than it had been doing in the UK. Unfortunately, the exchange rate (NZ$ per £) wasn’t exactly helpful, being lower than at any time in over a year. We had the impression that generally, at this time of the year, it tended to rise. This time – presumably as a gesture of respect to me (i.e. fist with raised middle finger) – it was showing not the slightest inclination in that direction.

Oddly enough, when I mentioned this to folk who had themselves emigrated, they ALL said that they’d had the same problem. I did a bit of logical deduction: by the law of averages, I surmised, there must as many folk who have walked into favourable exchange rates as haven’t. By the same law, I should have bumped into about as many of the one sort of folk as the other. So, how come I hadn't? I began to suspect a pan-global conspiracy.

Speaking of conspiracies, you remember my list of "Things That We Hoped To Make Do With Until We Leave But Which Have Let Us Down Badly And Become Unnecessary Drains On Our Funds"? Well, at this juncture the electric cooker decided to hop onto the bandwagon. It had managed, with the utmost discretion, to bake some of the insulation around its upper oven door. This leaked hot air which flowed along under the control panel, in its turn baking some of the controls. Understandably not prepared to shell out a small fortune on something we'd only use for a few weeks, we – that is, Pam – started nursing what's left of it along. So why was that a problem? Well, the cooker was listed as “included” in the house sale. Terr-ific.