He's on holiday

Sitting in church back home the next morning I was too distracted to concentrate and during the sermon (sorry, Maurice) my mind kept wandering back to Weymouth and Burton Bradstock. I felt like the rope in a tug-of-war with a house at either end. After lunch I told Ian that the only way I could be sure which house to go for was by scoring each marks out of five for price, condition, location, transport, garden, culture, broadband and mobile, shops, community and so on and then adding them up. I think I already knew what the outcome would be but I wanted to be sure that I had covered all bases and was using my head as well as my heart in the decision-making process. The winner, by quite a fair margin, was the wildcard, the Weymouth house. Ian agreed, although I think he’d already made up his min in his own way.

At about two minutes past nine the next morning I rang the estate agent to put in our offer. Aargh! They were all in their weekly staff meeting so I had to wait. There are times when I can be incredibly relaxed and patient; times when I can get completely absorbed in something and not notice where the time has gone. This was not one of them. A little while later the estate my call was returned and I put in our offer of the full asking price. More waiting. Two hours later she called back and said “I’m not getting anywhere with this”. “What?” I asked. “He’s on holiday this week”. The vendor was a solicitor acting on behalf his client and presumably had gone on holiday thinking that nothing much would happen while he was away except that by the time he came back the particulars for the house would be ready for him to sign off and the house could officially go on the market. So, not only did we have to wait a week for an answer, we actually had to wait until the following Wednesday as the weekend between was the Diamond Jubilee weekend with two public holidays on Monday and Tuesday. We then had to tell the other estate agent for the Burton Bradstock house that we couldn’t give them an answer for ten days either.

Ten days and we might have a new home or we might have to start looking all over again.