Waterworld Too - Tuesday

The rain is back with a vengeance, as I battle through rush hour traffic for a late viewing. You can see why the more sprightly pensioners head for Spain in their early dotage. I’d advise them to keep a foothold in the UK property market, not sell-up completely for the lure of all day piss-ups and a pool, but you can’t tell them. They trickle back when their health starts to fail and they discover the much-maligned NHS its still better than a paid for clinic, more used to dealing with drunken British teenagers than early onset dementia.

I pull out slightly to avid a great sheet of standing water adjacent to a bus stop. I’m rewarded with a nodded thank you from two people in the queue and a bolshie blast on the horn from some boy racer coming the other way. I open my hands in question at the spotty oik as he speeds past oblivious to the road conditions, and get a single rigid finger thrust at me in return.

‘Tosser.’ I mutter towards the headlining. Not sure if Ford deliberately targeted the Ka at semi-literate retards with more tattoos than brain cells, but they seem to have cornered the market in aggressive kids who have somehow passed their driving test, but have more chance of becoming Prime Minister than successfully parallel parking.

‘Terrific.’ I mutter to myself as I crawl down the appointed street looking for a parking slot. These terraced houses were built just post-war and planners didn’t envisage owners, or more accurately around here renters, with three cars per household. The rain is lashing down still, as I finally find a space half across the double yellow lines, and switch off. As the downpour refuses to abate I wonder how those new houses they plan to build on what everyone who 's lived around here for more than twenty years knows is a flood plain, will fare.

As the car clock approaches five minutes before the appointed viewing time, I twist awkwardly to retrieve my umbrella from the back seat. I’m rewarded with a stabbing pain in my lower back and a view of a slightly soiled squab - that old woman viewing the retirement flat turned out to be as incontinent as her aroma indicated - devoid of anything other than a yellowy stain.

‘F**k!’ I bellow, as a vision of my brolly, sat by the office door still dripping from my earlier failed valuation, swims - appropriately - into view. The car is still rocking from my expletive as a teenage mum, with a toddler on one arm plus twin babies in one of those double buggies struggles past, looking at me suspiciously. God knows what she’d doing out in this weather, unless she’s searching for the fathers….

I stand on the doorstep, clipboard in hand and watch the rain lashing down. The owners are at work, not home until late obviously, how else could they service a mortgage without both working punishing hours? They are, needless to say, childless. I try not to become a Daily Mail reader, as I pogoed to The Clash in my youth, but some days I can feel my angry middle-Englander trying to escape.

Fifteen minutes later I’m still surveying the soggy street and trying to avoid a persistent drip that is determined to get down my shirt collar. I could go inside, I have the keys, but there’s one of those passive-aggressive stickers on the door’s side panel, warning Hawkers, Circulars and cold callers to not knock. They might as well put up those offensive notices from the fifties telling Irish and blacks they can’t rent round here. I’m guessing the woman of the house will know if I’ve lurked around inside without potential buyers with me, and you never know when people have motion sensitive cameras rigged any more. It’s taken all the fun out of the knicker drawer…

‘Have they rung in to cancel?’ I ask when negotiator S eventually answers the office phone.

‘Do they ever?’ She answers, semi rhetorically.

‘They’re not coming are they?’ I say, completely rhetorically.

I’m sinking here.

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Blue Mondays - Monday

‘You okay?’ Asks a distant voice. I focus back in the mirror and see my wife behind me, looking slightly concerned.

‘I was miles away.’ I tell her, slowly coming back to an early Monday morning, with another sales mountain to climb. She doesn’t want to know where, some things need to be kept private in a marriage if you want to rack up the milestones.

‘Where exactly?’ Says my wife, unhelpfully.

Doing that gazing in to the middle-distance thing, when you don’t like the reflection in the shaving mirror. Wondering, like some gap-toothed pensioner about to be shoehorned into a care home, where the years went? And why I’m still flogging homes for a bean-counter boss I wouldn’t extinguish if I saw him smouldering in a pile of profit and loss accounts.

‘Just thinking.’ I tell her neutrally. I should know better.

‘Thinking what?’

That, when I was nineteen and The Clash fought the law and lost rather comprehensively, I imagined I could win. I didn’t know about escalating targets, cost-cutting pedants and a public that will lie to you through their teeth if it achieves their property goals. Naive, on reflection. But then I thought tartan bondage trousers and a clip-on nose safety pin, were relevant. What? There was no way I was going to permanently pierce myself…

‘Just wondering what the week holds in store.’ I eventually fudge.

‘Same old same old, you always say when I ask.’ She replies, with a shrug.

She doesn’t need to know what happens when you deal with property all day long. If I told her about every gut-wrenching setback perpetrated by sloppy solicitors, lazy lenders and destructive surveyors she’s be suicidal after a week. It’s taken me years to get this disillusioned.

Truth is, I was doing that Turn A Different Corner thing. Wondering, after scraping away even more pesky grey bristles, what I might have achieved with a bit more get up and go? I certainly wouldn’t have stayed this long. Stayed with a bunch of Corporate form-fillers. The headhunting offers, from estate agency recruitment firms, dried up about the time my double-breasted three piece suit fell out of fashion and I’m still too timid to start my own estate agency business. I’ve repossessed enough houses where the owners used the family home as collateral for a business loan.

‘Have you got much on?’ She persists, gallantly.

Underneath the vest and boxer shorts I’m more naked than you could ever imagine, I want to say. But unless it’s your last Rolo, sharing isn’t always a good thing.

I open my pocket diary and she laughs at me.

‘You are a stubborn old sod.’

The truth can wound. ‘Why?’ I ask her needlessly.

‘Because you could have all that information on your phone.’

I could, in theory, but I find a phone that is smarter than me as much of a threat as each new agent that has opened up in every town I’ve worked in. And besides, the screen is too small to see without reading glasses. And I’m holding out. Holding out doggedly. No sign of a hero, though.

I’ve been in enough homes, where regrets seep from the walls like a damaged damp-proof course. Homes where memories sit mournfully on mantelpieces in the shape of faded photographs and where yet another wrinkly owner, who doesn’t want to leave, counsels you: “Don’t get old son. it’s no fun.”

But the alternative isn’t too peachy either, Pops.

‘You need to move with technology.’ Says my wife, with the sort of kindly smile you give to the old lady who pushes the empty pram round town, muttering endlessly to the non-existent baby.

I used to be the youngest branch manager in the company, but short of keeping a mystical painting in the attic - and mine is full of old Lego sets and boxed Furbies we just can’t throw away - time will run you down every….well… time. 

She’s right about the phone, she usually is, but I’m damned if I’m giving Apple any more of my hard-earned cash.

Analogue man in a digital world - still spitting. 

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Perfect Day - Saturday

‘I’m surprised you agreed to go somewhere this close to home.’ Says my wife’s friend’s husband, as we head towards a nearby pub, with live music on offer.

‘I’m hoping it’s too dark to be recognised and too loud for conversations.’ I tell him bluntly.

He nods and shuts up.

That’s the dilemma of the estate agent. Local knowledge is a key ingredient to winning the business over younger, more tech-savvy upstarts. And living in the same town you work in can underpin that awareness of regional quirks such as; housing stock vagaries, schooling catchment areas, common problems on particular construction types, etc. Unfortunately, it also means people know where to find you and tend to recognise you out and about socially. If you’ve just informed someone they’ve been gazumped, or gazundered they don’t always take too kindly to seeing you in civvies, at the bar.

‘Sound like the band has already started.’ Says my wife, as we approach the pub door and a deep throbbing base stirs the ground beneath our feet, and probably causes a few more of those 1970s built bungalows with the flooring screed compaction problems, to require mini-piling.

‘At least I won’t have to talk about what the property market is going to do.’ I reply, as we push through the door and are enveloped with the warm fug of a crowded room and the pounding guitars of a punk-based band, playing loud and fast.

The room is literally bouncing. Floorboards springy from use and awash with spilt beer. But due to the demographic of ageing rockers with big bellies and little hair, it’s more likely arthritis causing the drinks spillage, and excess weight damaging the floor joists. Pleasingly, unlike the last time I heard The Stranglers’ Something Better Change being played, there’s not a hint of phlegm or menace, in the air. At least, not until I get spotted…

‘That man over there is waving at you.’ Bellows my wife, mouth to my ear, as drinks shoutily obtained, we stand and watch the band thrash out another three minute, three chord classic. We’re so near the big Peavey PA rig I can almost feel the air disturbance as the speaker cones pump in and out.

I look furtively across the room and see an ex-vendor of mine. He is rather incongruously wearing a blazer, with jeans and a formal shirt. He’s a colossal time-waster. The type that periodically puts their home on the market only to take it off again, once you find a buyer, citing the old chestnut, “there’s nothing a nice as ours on the market, now if we could just pick it up and move it….”

I give a half nod of recognition, one calculated not to encourage the twat to fight his way through the crowd to bellow an update on his house value request, at me. Then I see a local solicitor with a woman who is definitely not his wife. I’m hoping she isn’t his daughter either, the way he is holding her. A few rows over, the postman who always grumbles about our franking bag is stood next to the decorator who made a shoddy job of painting my barge boards.

‘This is one you might remember, by The Clash.’ Announces the lead singer, as the elderly band stumble in to I Fought The Law which amusingly sees the local beat policeman pogoing in a rather stiff-limbed fashion. I’m a teenager again, as I keenly try to work out which chords the guitarist is playing, while endeavouring not too spill my beer Meanwhile, a crowd of fifty-something career-drones all pretend they are proto-anarchists rather than mortgage slaves. 

‘It’s too loud to talk.’ Shouts my wife, as a Lou Reed number pounds out and my fillings rattle.

That’s the best bit, I think, nodding in agreement. Then I spot the fat building surveyor, wearing a Ramones t-shirt. In my mind, I’m still elegantly wasted, but he is most definitely corpulently-waisted.

‘You going to answer that phone?’ I say, stumbling up to bed later. My wife looks at me quizzically.

‘It’s not actually ringing, is it?’ I eventually mumble, as a beery belch bubbles up.

Only in my head.

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God Save The Queen - Sunday

‘So no real reason then.’ I state to my wife as she fusses over which blouse to wear and I vacillate over unlikely shorts this time of year, or trousers.

‘It’s just nice to do.’ She replies, tilting her head in the mirror then turning towards me. God I haven’t a clue which one, I think as she sees the look and decides not to ask. She goes back to the wardrobe as I tug the shorts off. They seem a bit snugger round the waist since the last time the sun came out.

It’s another ill-fated, much rain-delayed autumn barbecue, which will still probably end up with soggy attendees huddling under a leaky gazebo, a couple of kids heading for casualty after bouncing off the trampoline at unexpected angles and a beer-fuelled argument about property prices. I don’t really want to go as I could happily live without seeing the majority of people coming, for at least another year – probably longer. But my wife and her cronies still arrange the twelve-monthly gathering of friends, neighbours and even ex-neighbours, who have the sort of lifelong membership usually reserved for Wimbledon winners and those who make double centuries at venerable cricket grounds. I’m not bowled over by the prospect.

‘Most people wait for a jubilee or a dead monarch to have these cheesy garden parties.’ I grumble, as I notice the jeans are a bit tight too and that’s before a carnivorous chow-down on burnt burgers and incinerated ribs with less meat on them than Kate Moss. My wife glances at me with what eighties warblers ABC definitely wouldn’t call The Look Of Love, although no doubt someone will be playing them, along with Simply Red and the f***ing Lighthouse Family before I’m sufficiently pissed to care. My Clash, Sex Pistols and The Damned compilation was swiftly ousted by a woman who loved Michaels Jackson a couple of years ago. Her husband looked like an albino chimp appropriately enough, and it was after I inadvertently called him Bubbles that the first argument started.

‘Just be pleasant’ Coaches my wife as I decide against any shirt with even a hint of Hawaii about it and plump for something loose and plain – the best way to get an easy screw according to the serial shagger I ended up drinking with last year.

‘Hi great to see you.’ Gushes a pasty-faced man as we enter the chosen garden clouds gathering, and I try to hide the cheap lager I brought with me in the pile on a wobbly trestle table.

‘You too mate.’ I fib, wincing at the unconvincing term. He must know, as I do whenever the disingenuous word is used, that I can’t remember his name or what he does. The man has worn horribly and looks as grey and washed out as a pair of old underpants. This sort of barefaced deception would get me prosecuted under the Consumer Protection Rules if I applied the lie to a worn out three-bed semi detached house presented, immaculately.

My wife seems to be circulating effortlessly while I get stuck with bores bigger than North Sea oil rigs can muster and a new couple who are wetter than the weather is about to get.

‘So you’re the estate agent?’ States the scrawny wife as her underfed husband with the limp handshake looks on attentively. He looks in need of a good meal but as she’s already told me she’s decided they should both be vegetarians, he’ll get no sympathy - or sausages - from me.

‘We think we paid a good price for our house.’ Continues the woman in what sounds like a challenge. They didn’t buy it from me so there’s no duty of care. I mention a similar one we’ll be marketing in a week or two at less money and leave.

‘Christ these people have aged.’ I whisper to my wife when I go for a top-up - of someone else’s beer.

‘We all have.’ She replies tartly.

‘Which family have those bloody cats?’ I ask, glancing at a portly man carrying more timber than a lumberjack’s trailer, wearing a suspiciously hair-covered fleece

‘You won’t be crapping on their lawn.’ She tells me decisively.

God save.

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More spitting about the property market here:

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