Sink holes and house sales.

It's been over a year - a whole year, since I penned my last blog. Well, you can hardly blame me. There's been nothing much to talk about, apart from the end of COVID, Russia invading Ukraine, the UK coming second in Eurovision, the economy hitting rock-bottom, parytygate and Northampton Town being cruelly denied promotion by all sorts of skulduggery. Nothing much at all.

Oh yes, and I moved house. Yep, I moved from Bromley to Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. And that's the real reason for my long silence. It took a long time. A very long time. Initially, I thought that moving house would be a piece of cake - it wasn't. It was hell. And a hell which totally dominated my time for every minute of the day and night. No, I lie. It was worse than hell for a variety of reasons which I won't go into here, except to say that it took more than 10 months, involved 2 buyers, 4 surveys, a council meeting, an illegal building, the environmental agency, the geological society, Thames Water, damp on my living room wall, an ancient and dangerous fusebox, a gas 'blow-out', dodgy air-bricks, asbestos on all the ceilings and... a sink hole. So, a run-of-the-mill sale then with pretty average problems.

The sink hole, as you might expect, was the main reason for the delay. Inspectors visited, of course, revisited and then passed the hot potato onto someone else. It wasn't a very big hole either - just 10 feet deep and 3 feet wide, and not even on my property, but in a narrow lane which went passed my garage at the end of my garden. It was, however, enough to create havoc with my house sale. It was even suggested (I kid you not) that the only way to get the hole sorted was to fall in and beak a leg or, better still, to get a child or baby to take a dive into the hole. Then, I was advised (unofficially) that I should get the local press involved - the Petts Wood News Shopper (that beacon of cutting-edge journalism). This would quickly put my hole to the top of the list of council priorities. As it turned out, a good six months down the line of sink hole shenanigans, my Turkish neighbour and his nephew, decided one sunny weekend that they had had enough of the thing and promptly filled it in with soil from their garden. Simple as that. All illegal and dangerous, of course, but problem solved and case closed. The council inspectors breathed a sigh of relief and decided to let sleeping dogs lie, more out of bureaucratic weariness than anything else. Great. And so I finally sold my house.

I arrived in Tewkesbury in February this year. And yes, the picture above really is of my new place. It dates back to 1440 and has a hundred low and very painful wooden beams throughout the building, which took great delight in thwacking my head at every opportunity. My first week left me feeling as if I'd done ten rounds with Mohammed Ali. It's getting a bit better now but, for the first time in my life, I wish I were just 5Ft 5 inches tall. Anything taller than that invites disaster. But it is beautiful and pretty-much my dream house. And not just because it's sixty-five paces (I've measured it) from the local pub and eighty paces from the River Avon. Oh, and I'm told it has a ghost, as well. Fantastic. So, it's a place that ticks all the boxes on the Adrian Liley scale of happiness.

OK... so that's my little story and my reasons for silence for so long. I will now get back to incredibly interesting anti-marketing issues, things that peek my interest, and how the world (and the English language industry) is going to the dogs, in future blogs.

I should also add that I have written a short horror story about my house sale, called 'THE MOVE', which details the chaos and mayhem of the last year. It isn't available to read or even buy yet, mainly because I still can't get to editing the brute, because I become so depressed after reading just a few paragraphs.

Moral of the whole story - don't move house unless you really have to and give up entirely if a hole of any description suddenly appears within a mile of your property!