a word of advice

My advice for the New Year would be: don't do a New Year post entitled A Poem for my Funeral,
it makes people feel a bit nervous.
Anyway, enough of that, on to matters in this life.

We recieved an offer on our house, which was from the first people to view it. They came for a viewing in the morning. Then, overwhelmed no doubt by my neat cushions and carefully placed magazines designed to offer auto-suggestions a la Derren Brown, that master of psychological manipulation, they rushed back for a second viewing in the afternoon. This prompted more fire-lighting, candle-lighting, dimmed lights for mood, and various other tricks for atmosphere which, being intelligent adults they doubtless saw through in the blink of an eye. They then made an offer on the first working day after that. So, they are either keen, or they thought we looked a bit stupid because the offer was a lousy 30 grand under the asking price. For reasons no one can explain to me we have had to play this absurd game of cat and mouse. It is all very strange. No one expects to get the asking price for a house and no one expects to pay it either and so we all put our houses on the market at a price we know no one will pay and do our sums according to an offer below the price we are asking or being asked to pay. If you pay the asking price for a house everyone thinks you are a mug, so no one ever likes to lose face and no one ever offers the asking price, unless they are a mug of course. It seems to me that it would be a great deal less hassle if we all asked for a price we expected to sell at. We're not Turkish, we're English, we don't haggle. The only way we can justify such a lack of manners is to make up spurious nonsense about inadequately supported chimney breasts, damp cellars and unkempt hedges, which makes our mean offer seem 'fair'. As it is everyone spends many confused hours by their phones waiting to hear that the offer they offered below the asking price won't be accepted and the price they asked for won't be offered, etcetera, etcetera. It is all very distressing and boring and predictable. The game is that everybody tries to fleece everybody else and nobody wins. I'm writing this waiting for the phone to ring to say that the buyers can't offer what we are asking, in which case, I would like to ask 'why did they come and visit the house in the first place?'. If they had thought to themselves 'we are first time buyers and we can't afford this house', they wouldn't have visited in the first place and I would not have had to make a point of lighting every scented candle I have in the house. I would have been spared spending an entire week hiding all signs of life, placing unused bars of soap where usually there would be a worn out lump with unsightly hairs all over it. Placing perfectly folded clean towels on the towel rail. Two decisions which may have cost me dear because in the event they turned out to be post-graduates from Durham and Birmingham and will have possessed acute powers of deduction. Who knows, they may have deduced, if their imaginations are as over-active as mine, that we never washed. Either way, had they decided that we had a little self-respect and were not going to give our property away in exchange for an M & S gift voucher I would have been spared hours of polishing the taps, taking down all photographs of us (the occupiers!), hiding assorted underwear, light bulbs and tile adhesive under the bed in the spare room. Graham would have been allowed to use the loo and wouldn't have been coerced into hiding his bed-side table coin stash. In short, my week's work would not have consisted of making the enitre house look uninhabited and scented like the first floor of a department store. Even that backfired when they all started sneezing simultaneously in the bathroom with its 'tea time in Marrakesh' candle.

Now I wait to hear the bad, but ultimately inevitable news that they can't afford our house which I used every psychological trick in the 'how to manipulate potential buyers' manual to try and sell to them. I can't leave the landline phone because my poor mobile has been boiled in a cup of tea for reasons I can't be bothered to explain.

It is all a bit frustrating, but don't worry, you won't be needing that funeral poem just yet.