Happy Clappy - Monday

Pull up outside a Victorian terraced house and feel an immediate sense of disappointment. The sparse front garden has been allowed to go wild with unidentified plant-life running riot, it could be ragweed it could even be cannabis if it wasn’t for the north facing elevation and the lack of any heat-and-light lamps. B in lettings is still negotiating with group legal over the house she rented that turned out to have a loft full of grass growing and a unfeasibly low electric bill - until the police found the direct plug-in to the street’s main circuit.

I scan my valuation sheet, not much detail there to tell me what to expect behind the garish patterned curtains that might actually be some sort of Bolivian rug. As I approach the door my hay fever early warning system starts to twitch. The neighbours might be glad the owner, a Ms according to my notes – not a good sign – is thinking of leaving, but trying to shift the shabbiest house in the road is going to test my team’s marketing skills.

As I bang loudly on the tarnished brass knocker for the second time, I finally hear footsteps as one of those irritating wind chime pipes spins by my ear emitting a dull ringing sound – something I get more and more, tubular hanging arrangements or not.

‘The agent yah?’ Questions the wild haired woman who answers rhetorically, as she gazes at my proffered business card with a barely disguised look of distaste. Necessary evil, she’s obviously thinking. Unnecessary evil I’m thinking, as I step inside to an unpleasant herbal pong and nearly slip-up on some sort of dead sheep’s carcass strewn over the parquet flooring. Health and safety zealots would love this, I chuckle to myself as we move to a front room with more throw rugs than a wig makers Christmas party.

A brace of grubby looking children of junior school age, are sitting on a lop-sided sofa, clad in homemade jumpers. The sort of tops that still give me shivers nearly forty years down the line. I told my mother I’d pay for a school jumper out of my pocket money if necessary, but she still insisted on knitting grey monstrosities she never managed to get the v-neck collar quite right on.

‘Kids off school today?’ I query, looking for a non-contentious line of conversation to break the ice with.
‘They’re having a home day.’ The born-too-late hippy announces mysteriously, as I think don’t let my youngest get wind of this wheeze. Meanwhile, the two urchins eye a man in a suit with the sort of suspicion usually reserved for those soapbox street preachers exhorting you to repent before it’s too late.

As we exit the kitchen back door and walk to the rear of the house my heart sinks further. The whole garden area has been given over to some sort of feudal farming strip. Wild flowers, unidentifiable vegetables and a chicken run with another unpleasant pong emanating from a crooked coop, assault my senses. The first sneeze arrives, shortly before I notice the flea-bitten cat winding itself round my trouser legs.

‘How did the valuation go?’ Asks assistant manger T when I return to the office. He’s half hoping I won the business and doubtless half thinking if I haven’t, he’d have done better. So I tell them about the new age family and their caring and sharing values. One’s that ended pretty abruptly when I recommended an asking price. Capitalism returned with a vengeance then.

‘Think the kids went to one of those Monty-something schools,’ I say in mitigation trying to move away from the failed appointment discussion.
‘Monty Python?’ Asks T with a grin, as I begin to wonder if it was actually one of those alternative Waldorf establishments the children attended. Curiously they too have a nebulous John Cleese connection from my salad days.

‘It’s Montessori actually,’ sniffs B. ‘A friend of mine sends her kids to one.’
Turns out they get no formal qualifications - but can knit a bomb shelter out of goat hair, given enough warning.

Think I may have missed a trick. But it’s too late to ring my mother now.