Happy Valley Towers - Wednesday

‘Are the other residents friendly?’ Asks the pernickety daughter as she guides her elderly father along the first floor corridor of the retirement apartment block.

I’ve managed to get in the main door with the communal key and avoided the overbearing manager, who if past experience is anything to go by will try and hijack my buyer into looking at one of the many re-sales the management company - her employer - are trying to flog.

‘Oh they are a lovely bunch.’ I answer, trying to hurry the pair along the never-ending run of patterned carpet and closed sapele fire doors, with those spy holes. I expect a few ancient inmates - I mean owners - are squintily watching our progress along the interminable dark warren that resembles a budget hotel setting. No doubt if the old boy does move in he’ll be in great demand from the predominately female inhabitants. Rumour has it any reasonably able-bodied pensionable male can die with a wrinkly smile on their face, if they can last long enough and get a decent supply of Viagra.

‘What happened to the owner of this one?’ Asks the daughter as we reach the appointed door and I fumble with the keys. It’s not a great question to answer. The clue is in the name with Retirement Apartments, if they don’t get shipped out to a nursing home the occupants usually leave horizontally - on a gurney.

‘I think they went in to full time care.’ I say as vaguely as I can. It could be argued the embalmer constitutes fairly permanent full time care, but fortunately before I’m pressed further I get the door open and we move into the even darker entrance hall.

I swiftly hit the lights, but I can’t hide the musty smell and the hint of stale urine.  Always best to fit new carpets if you buy one of these places second hand. Hurriedly, as hurriedly as you can usher a man with two walking sticks and a heart condition, I bring the duo in to the living room/kitchen.

There is one window at the far end overlooking the car park and the kitchen is as dark as the hall, with just a wheezing extractor unit to pull the pong of piss from the air. I’m not a big fan either…

Window flung open as far as the restrictor will allow - jumpers can wreck the communal morale - I give the highlights of the room. The illusionary safety net of the orange emergency pull-cords that put you through to a call centre where English is a foreign language, and the waist high electrical sockets to stop rickety backs from popping out of alignment.

‘I’d like to know about the service charges.’ Presses the daughter as her father sinks into the one high-backed chair, left incongruously in the middle of the room. The beneficiaries had their pick of the furniture and jewellery and are just bitching about the asking price.

I give the woman the latest set of figures we’ve managed to prise from the managing agents. They want paying for each piece of reluctantly given information and would even charge for a phone call if they could gouge it from you.

‘It seems a lot once Dad’s paid for his electric and other costs.’ Replies the daughter accurately.

She’s not wrong, but then for years the major players who built these blocks owned the management companies as a subsidiary. Allegedly, it’s not so often the case now, but I still suspect there are mutual interest behind the scenes.

If any member of my family wanted to buy a retirement flat, I’d get our solicitor to take a good look at the lease and management costs and to ask about sinking funds and future major expenditure on maintenance projects. Better still I’d get them to hang on in their own home as long as possible. This pair are not blood relations though.

‘Is it good value?’ Asks the daughter as we stand back in the hall while her father tries out the internal bathroom. We can hear every slow dribbling drop of piss the old boy is expelling.

I’d say so.

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Upgrade Available - Thursday

‘F**k it.’

‘Not a chance.’ Mumbles a sleepy voice.

‘Not literally.’ I tell my wife, before adding. ‘Are you awake then?’ Which on sleepy reflection wasn’t the smartest response.

‘I am now.’ She replies sourly.

‘What time is it?’ I ask wearily. I have a good idea, as I’ve woken at the same time three night’s running.

‘It’s nearly half-past two and you have your own watch.’ Comes the testy reply. ‘Now go back to sleep.’

Not a hope in hell, I think, as I sigh and clamber out of bed to the sort of feminine groan that used to signal slightly more success than waking your partner, before making a solitary cup of tea.

If I wanted to be picky, I think drowsily as I stumble down the stairs, I’d have pointed out to my wife that her time check was a tad inaccurate. The moment I woke up, praying it was after 6.30am, was 2.22am precisely. Like one of those endless Paranormal Activity movies I’ve been pinging awake at exactly the same time for several days now, but the only levitation around tends to involve lifting inappropriate nighttime snacks from the fridge. Needless to say the suggestion of a fixed camera in the bedroom received a frosty response.

Despite loony ladies’ claims to have ghosts residing in their home - still not a great sale clincher - the only poltergeist I have found is the malicious one in my head. A spectre that has me fretting over sales figures and management accounts at sparrow-fart o’clock. Paradoxically, the more you crave sleep the more elusive it becomes, no matter how dog tired you are.

Tossing and turning doesn’t work for me - particularly the tossing as my wife is a light sleeper - so I inevitably end up sloping downstairs for a piss and a cup of tea. Sadly the bladder seems to be weakening along with the mind.

At first, with the thrill of smoking a brand new car and visiting luxury homes I could aspire to if I hit my targets year-on-year, the thrill of house sales kept me running on adrenalin. No matter how hard I worked, I slept like a log. But slowly, insidiously, like water eroding a rock, the pressure of ever increasing targets and ever increasing responsibility began to take its toll. Now I wake up head spinning like an elderly hard drive. I have a feeling I’ve reached capacity.

‘Open you bastard.’ I mutter, as the ancient PC spins and splutters to life, while my cup of tea cools alongside me. The house is silent as a grave now my two sons have left for university and unless my wife starts snoring it’s going to remain that way - other than the tip-tap of a keyboard - until the radio alarm goes off.

Dilemma. Do I look at my office sales figures and the management accounts, the reason I was cattle-prodded awake at 2.22am, or do I write a blog entry and Tweet a few times to fellow insomnia sufferers? I might even have an anonymous exchange with my fellow realtors around the world. Intriguing, but not likely to pay the mortgage. I open the management accounts - eventually.

I’ve always had the gift of the gab, it’s the reason good sales people are often born performers, but mathematics has remained a foreign language to me. If the calculator hadn’t been invented I’m sure I’d be stacking shelves in a supermarket store somewhere, with the prospect of ending up like one of those grey-haired old men collecting snaking lines of trollies in the car park, when they should be lunchtime drinking and reminiscing.

Whatever the numerical equivalent of dyslexia is, I think I have it. My bean counter boss is a figure-fiddler par-excellence but couldn’t flog a life-raft to a drowning man. They say the meek shall inherit the earth, well they’ll be dull, with halitosis and an accountancy qualification.

My mind rapidly becomes snow-blinded by the blizzard of figures. My ailing computer spews out columns and lines but I’m running a drowsy Windows 2000 in my head.

It just doesn’t add up.

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