4694/17353
Back house hunting, seeing some places we liked for a second time and some new houses too. As a man who deliberates for weeks over what pair of shoes I should buy, a huge, life-changing decision like this is almost too much to bear. Will we like the house in a year’s time? Will we be happy out of London? How do we know if the house is worth what they’re asking for it? And is it possible to even realistically see any of this as money when the prices are some surreally high? Do we wait for our absolute dream house or buy something we don’t mind and then gradually change it so it’s closer to something we like?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions.
Luckily I think it’s like this for everyone. You just reach a point where you have to make some kind of decision, cross your fingers and hope for the best. But God knows how I managed to do this twice before. Luckily the idiot younger me’s ability to chuck himself headlong into life-changing decisions has paid off for me. I am ludicrously fortunate to have got on the housing ladder in the 1990s. I am very surprised the 30-something me had the wherewithal to do it. Had he pissed that part of his life away as he did with so much else then I would be in a very different situation. I think I knew that when I essentially gave up two years of my life to write Time Gentlemen Please I was laying some foundations for the family I didn’t yet have. Luckily I wasn’t into drugs or fast cars and there was nothing else to spend the money on apart from a bit of a house.
In choosing a new abode, it’s very hard not to be influenced by things that are pretty much irrelevant. The current owners taste in furniture and decoration are largely irrelevant, but it still probably accounts for about 80% of my gut reaction to a place. If someone with similar taste to you lives somewhere then you perhaps feel that’s where you should live too. But these things are easily changed, relatively cheaply given the money you’re spending. One house we visited was empty of furniture and hadn’t been updated in years and it was impossible not to imagine the little old lady who had pretty much inevitably just died. That house, I think, had quite a sullen atmosphere anyway, but my, as it turned our correct, assumption made it somehow darker and spookier. I feared that my wife might tell me she loved it as we left and I would spend the rest of my life haunted by the previous owner’s definite ghost (would make a good sitcom), but luckily we have similar ideas about what we want, but we’re also similarly indecisive and worried about making the wrong choice. I don’t know what we’re going to do, but there do at least seem to be some possibilities now. And the decision is not entirely ours anyway. Our future is in other’s hands.
