THROUGH the stupendous High Street we walked on the path conveniently adjacent to the unique road and turned into the superb, naturally lit estate agents office.
Somebody sneezed, and when we turned around from saying "bless you" all the roulette wheels had become desks. Above everyone there hovered a smile as reassuring as a Jack `o' Lantern. When 12 people salivate together, it sounds like the tide coming in.
My girlfriend is a wise and beautiful human being - that is why they all looked at me. I give out a visible aura of financial cretinism. I felt the way a chicken must feel when he gets drunk and falls down the fox hole. We had come to speak about buying a house. More precisely, we had come to ask about the possibility of us ever being eligible to enter the market, if we could prove we owned our underwear and everything.
All of the desks came forward. A man with no whites in his eyes said: "Hello, children. My name is Michael. I can help you."
V. explained our situation. "We'd like to get somewhere with a garden, or near the river." "Yes," said Michael looking at me as I rocked back and forth murmuring "Home, home, home".
"Take a look at these," Michael purred.
There are several basic types of dwelling.
1. Mews - a mews is an extremely small space in which you sit and mews as to why you let the man with the shiny face walk away with £110,000 that you never had.
2. New development - a ware house with a buzzer.
3. Old development - a warehouse with a knocker. And no roof.
4. Lower Ground Floor - this means a basement.
5. Basement - you are now living in a well.
THEN there are the much more expensive kinds. Such as:
1. Studios - they have big windows, stripped floors and Americans standing around discussing the political implications of ballet.
2. Lofts - these have been converted meaning they took out the sewing machines when child labour became illegal. People then fill these large spaces with interesting conversation pieces found in markets, such as old sewing machines.
3. Semi detached - luckily you are connected to only one set of neighbours. But these people are always hired by the council to argue at stadium decibel level from midnight to 7 a.m.
THE kind of place you live in pulses a huge current into your sea of consciousness; what I'm saying is that, statistically, you are far more likely to shout at the nine o'clock news if you cook and pee in the same room.
I've done the bedsit thing. It was a very poetic chapter of my youth. I didn't die, but I nearly did, which gives me the edge if I want to talk about it. I ran out of money and came up with the quite brilliant survival plan of eating raw carrots for four days.
I couldn't call my family since that would mean leaving the room and meeting the landlady. The landlady, a striking white haired woman, had beguiling eccentricities, such as scraping kitchen knives against your door at 3 a.m. I didn't need or want for anything else anyway, the hallucinations produced by my stomach digesting itself kept me entertained for hours on end. When I did finally get home, I wasn't let out for a year.
I did the flat share thing, which is fine, if you like four hour conversations about who should get the milk. Knowing you can't walk around naked and sing along with Val Doonican on the radio gets to you eventually.
Buying somewhere, you may be offered a freehold or a leasehold. A leasehold means a time limit - you may own it for as long as 100 years or only 15 minutes, depending on the age and scruples of the vendor. Freehold usually runs to about 1,000 years, by which time you should have paid off a good part of the interest on the original borrowing.
House prices, like temperature settings on showers, have only tow bands: (a) too much, and (b) Ojesusstopitnow.
SOMETIMES a building is under council protection, meaning there is a limit to the number of lozenge shaped windows and roof toilets you can install. The buildings are preserved for historical reasons. "Tobias Burlington Smyth (1801-1899) patented the electric winnowing spool here ... the colonnades in the hall were erected by Jessop Chingley (1801-1923). The inscriptions at the base, a farrago of Latin and Cornish, state that over the course of 40 years of cohabitation Burlington Smythe always, chewed with his mouth open.
These types of places tend to be a bit out of your price range. Trying to find a figure to impress the banks means accounting. Our accounts always look like this:
Nov-April 96
IN: £6,000 (less tax, insurance, rates and other charges) - £18.00 two florins, one earring, a book of Medieval herbal cures (bequeathed).
OUT: Rent £2,000, bills £1,500, food/clothes etc £1,300, misc. living expenses £314,000.
If we sold everything we have, and didn't spend any money over the next year, we might have enough money to bribe debt collectors so they wouldn't re break our broken bones provided they would accept payment in the form of a few packets of Rancheros.
Now before us we have a small forest's worth of paper proclaiming the superiority of every bolt hole, dive and funked out fourth floor closet in London. If you rent, you spoon feed your future to an insatiable landlord; if you buy, you spend all day rehearsing pleas to the bailiffs. You have to pay lawyers, life insurers, the council, service charges and the wandering minstrel house buyers triangle band. There's rent, street tax and all the money you need for Windowlene. It's all impossible, but you have to do it. Us? We re going to a hotel.
