Estate Agents

We are house hunting, which I imagine is just like deer hunting except there is a much higher risk of turning the gun onto yourself. Our first choice for living outside of London was to live somewhere like Berkhamstead but since we are not millionaries we had to be more realistic and consider places like Tring and Wendover.

But now due to some financial jiggery where we might keep our place in London and rent it out we have down scaled our house buying intentions to somewhere further out.

This far out place goes by the name of “Bedfordshire”

First thing we did on arriving was to have a fry up in a pub. It was large and inexpensive. So far so good.

We parked the car in a multi story and forgot to lock it. Amazingly it was not stolen or even broken into. Either Bedford is the nicest place on earth or we drive a worthless car.

We found the one street where all 8 estate agents lived and one by one went in to talk about what we wanted. We want somewhere with 3 bedrooms, a kitchen-dinning room, a reasonable garden and close to a station but we don’t mind whether we don’t get all those so long as there is scope to smash it all down and built what we want out of it.

I started to wonder whether the same approach was used when my Wife decided on a Husband?

Bedford is a “north/south divide” town with a river seperating two distinct areas. South is where the new action is and we were told that the new station being built would be a “revolution for the South Bedford area”.

I considered getting one of those “Che” T shirts but with the face of Martin Umplewood – Senior Transport Planning Director for the South Beds District. They were selling them in the market outside.

After having the same conversation 8 times we headed out in the car to explore some of the areas we were interested in.

As I was shuffling through brochures in the car while we were supposed to be finding the houses I said “this is the place from Peacock Wenlock, remember, that guy with the really nice eyes?”

Errrrmmmm. Yeah I guess.

I am not going to bore you with the inane except to say we saw a load of houses, they all had walls and roofs and she is definitely not up for living in a bungalow. I quite like the idea of moving in somewhere where we (I) won’t have a load of heavy crap to carry up some stairs.

I am scared though, not the moving or the money but that at some stage I might end up caring about the “South Bedford Area”. What if I don’t want the revolution? What if they close the library or pull down a bus stop or condemn a 200 year old oak tree to dereliction? What if I end up caring about this crap? That’s terrifying.