Batting For Both Sides - Tuesday

To a corporate day out at the cricket, I’m only going because the guy in Land and New Homes had a better offer, but gift horses and mouths. And yet even as I walk through the gates and flash my all areas access pass the long-buried punk rock, angry socialist feelings regurgitate like a bad kebab.

I wrestled with my conscience for years, particularly through my first property recession when the repossessions came thick and fast. I felt a bit better when I snatched back a flat a fellow, but dodgy, agent had mortgaged to the hilt. To fit the stereotype he’d sub-let illegally, hadn’t made any payments, taken the tenants money, then stripped all the fittings out days before the bailiff and I arrived. Even so, I still feel I shouldn’t be there in multi-million pound homes, or executive boxes with a dozen braying hoorays. There is a free bar though…

‘Champagne sir?’ Asks a comely waitress as I shake a few hands and apologise for the fact I’m a stand-in guest. I nod and smile, then detect a briefest flash of distaste from the girl as I grab the long-stemmed flute, dripping with condensation, and gulp down the bubbles. She’ll have to work on her facial expressions if she wants to make it in sales. The pavilion clock shows a shade after 10.30am.

‘So how’s the second hand market doing?’ Asks a hard-faced, yet curiously attractive, woman from the Developers footing the bill for the gig. She’s dressed in power skirt and jacket combo and will be thrown out of the ground if she walks on the pitch in those vertiginous heels.

‘There are deals to be done if buyer and seller are realistic.’ I tell her with a stock phrase from my mental basket of answers.

She laughs. ‘Yes, people are always bleating about the market, but we are shifting plenty of new units.’ I nod a non-committed response. ‘The trouble is the lenders are too picky on who they’ll advance to, then their valuers carp about the price.’ She continues, then pauses and looks me up and down. Briefly I wonder if she fancies me, until she says. ‘Has it always been like this?’ It must have been the bubbly. I’m as delusional as 75% of vendors.

Come the lunchtime break I’m wondering round the public areas, legs Bambi-like from free booze and not enough vol-au-vents. It feels good to be back with the public. Momentarily, I’m tempted to buy a sweaty looking hog roast in a bap, but I move on. I’m a man of the people at heart, I think, until I see the snaking queue for the gents’ toilets. I head back to the cordoned off area, nodding convivially at the dayglow-jacketed bouncer on the gateway. He gives me another unguarded look. Probably seen which box I’m in. I decide he’s one of those House Price Crash doom-mongers who sit in the same room they’ve occupied in the parents’ house for the last forty years, stalking message boards exchanging prophesies of meltdown to like-minded men in their pyjamas – all waiting for homes to become affordable.

‘There are winners and losers in all walks of life.’ Pontificates a sweaty-browed lawyer I’m sat next to on the balcony, as the number three batsman departs for a duck.

‘The trouble with all these people whining about property prices is they’re not prepared to graft.’ Continues the man, turning towards me and blasting a garlic-laced typhoon of bad breath my way. I’ve said something similar myself; after all it was never easy. But still, like the chilli and rice I opted for an hour ago, it doesn’t sit well with me. Like the time I tried to set up are new home router, I realise I’m not that good at networking. I want to go home.

‘How much introduction fee do you get from the conveyancing firms you recommend?’ Asks the lawyer earnestly, revealing his true interest in proceedings. We’re not supposed to take any secret profit without reporting it to our client nags the inner voice from a long distant man who studied the Estate Agents’ Act.

I have his business card – just in case.

----

No hidden fees, just cheap as chips on Amazon, the satirical property ebook:

http://amzn.to/ttGZ4j

US Readers: http://amzn.to/vXpFJf

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.

-----------

More spitting about the property market here:

http://amzn.to/ttGZ4j

Golden Duck - Friday

‘This should be a good craic.’ Says massive mortgage man M, using the Irish term that has mushroomed everywhere, along with faux-pubs sporting shamrocks and a pissed bloke at the bar wanting a free pint of Guinness because he’s down on his luck. He usually is when he taps me up.

‘All you can eat and drink and it’s free gratis.’ Continues M rubbing his chubby hands with glutinous glee. It isn’t exactly, I think sourly, as I wonder if I’ve done the right thing by accepting the corporate-jolly ticket, which became available with a late withdrawal by somebody higher up the greasy promotion pole. The latent lefty in me hasn’t entirely withered, even after twenty years of mortgage and pension payments. I sometimes hear a retro punk rock track on the radio and think I could still pogo, until I look in the mirror or try to tie my shoelace without bending my knees.

‘If you get asked any questions about current rates or lending criteria.’ Suggests M leaning towards me conspiratorially and giving me a blast of garlic-breath that would clear a colony of vampires. ‘Just refer them to me, or act dumb.’ I can do the latter easily enough, it think, as the train comes to a halt at a crowded platform and the jostling for position, I’m about to experience at a linen-clothed round table, begins early.

I hate public transport with a passion. Another reason my dwindling man-of-the- people credentials don’t stand close inspection. I’ve driven a company car for longer than my two sons have been alive and apart from reluctantly allowing punters in the back when I’m ferrying them to viewings, I prefer not to mix with the public. Windows up, music and air-conditioning on is now my default mode. Which is pretty incongruous, as I’m en-route to a venue where thousands will be milling and drinking with no central locking.

The invite is from a big lender with labyrinthine corporate ties, kickbacks for introduced business and glamorous sponsorship deals giving access to prime sporting events the likes of me don’t often get to. M’s immediate boss had a better offer at an event he clearly preferred. I recognised at an early age - after standing next to the fat kid, looking like a junior M, in the school football team selection process - that I wasn’t ever going to be first choice. It was a theme that continued at awkward school discos and job interviews. I was always somewhere down the batting order, but this day at the cricket was too enticing to miss.

‘Here’s your invite in case we get separated.’ Says M as we sit in our seats and the crowded carriage sways back and forth, standing room only passengers towering over us and looking daggers. I was taught to give my seat up for ladies but the only woman I can see is too far down the aisle, and after that awkward time when a rotund woman refused prissily and I realised she was probably not pregnant - just greedy - I’ve become wary.

I take the golden ticket like a wrinkled Charlie, en-route to the Chocolate Factory. The goodies will be of a more adult theme. A bag of bribes paid for by borrowers, limitless alcohol, a welcome buffet and a three-course lunch with high tea, but I’ll still be mixing with “Wonkas”

‘What part of the organisation are you from?’ Asks some plum-in-the-mouth voiced hooray as he leans towards me clutching a glass of bubbly. I’m still stunned by the greenness of the grass below our lofty eerie of a private box with balcony, and feel - as I often do in homes I’m valuing but could never afford - like an impostor.

I give a puffed up version of my role with the sort of sales hyperbole I’m no longer allowed to use since the Property Misdescription Act. He turns to the guy in the other seat. Fine by me, I think, as the bubbles start to take effect and the pretty girl in a short skirt and access to a free bar, comes to top up. So easily corrupted.

I didn’t score.

-----------

Get hit for six by the property e-book here:

http://amzn.to/ttGZ4j