piapiapiano

I'm so fucking depressed. We're never going to be able to stop renting. Ever. What a shitty, shitty system this is.

This is a walk I went on two months ago, I'm afraid. I've been meaning to write it up, but boring grown-up stuff got in the way. Oh well. Here it is now!

One of my geochemist friends came over for a visit. He likes walking, and he likes taking photographs, and I wanted to go somewhere new and potentially picturesque -- so we decided on the Dhoon Glen, somewhere none of us had ever been before. It seems odd that there could be anywhere on my rock that I haven't already explored -- if it's open to the public. The only defence is that the Dhoon Glen is tucked away behind a cafe, and it doesn't look like much from the main road. The other defence is that it's only recently been re-opened: the floods in 2002 (which destroyed my piano) washed all the footpaths away, and they've spent several years laying new paths and clearing away the fallen trees.

Anyway, after the walk we all agreed that we felt pretty stupid for not having been there before. I'm definitely going again, preferably in the morning to catch the sun, and preferably in the spring to catch the bluebells. I suspect it'll be spectacular.

On this particular September afternoon, the sun was shining, the clouds were blowing away to Liverpool, and the ground was muddy and wet from recent rains. We slipped round the back of the cafe and started tramping downhill.

It's an entertaining glen -- like Glen Maye -- with lots of different sections. Some of the glens over here are just trees and river from start to end. If you go in the spring you get wild garlic and bluebells. If you go in the autumn you get mushrooms. Otherwise, it's monotonous -- nice, yes, but nothing startling and new to delight the eyes and ears and nose.

The first section of the Dhoon was far above the river. We couldn't even see the water from the path. We could just hear it roaring and crashing far below. There must've been all kinds of amazing waterfalls, but no amount of hanging off branches and leaning over the edge of the path could reveal the water itself. But we did have shafts of sunlight blazing through the trees:



( More photos, including a long one and a wide one, under the cut. )

The house-buying fiasco is using up nearly all my available brain-space at the moment, which is why I'm barely updating here at all. Who wants to read about yet another negative survey report?

It's both boring and all-consuming. Oh well.

I have a couple of very overdue posts lined up, with photos of the allotment and a lovely glen. I'll write them up tonight. It'll do me good to have something else to think about.

I was working at the private school this morning, and three of us were sat in the secretary's office when the maroon went off to sound the two minutes silence. We observed it, but no-one else in the building did. I was surprised how angry I was about that.

Anyway, afterwards I was chatting with the violin teacher about what we think of during the silence. She said she remembers her father serving during WWII, and how extremely glad she was when he turned 40 and became officially too old to fight. And how she can't help worrying about her sons who are under 40 now. I said I thought about my grandfather, and how his experience of WWII was mostly starving in POW camps, and watching his friends die on the forced marches between camps. And how that changed him forever -- he went from being a happy-go-lucky chap who played football for a local team and did a bit of gambling at the weekends, to someone who had to work very hard at being happy (and often failed). And how that affected his marriage. And how that affected my mum. And so on.

I suppose we were both thinking of the same thing -- that the ripples of WWII are still discernible, and that the effects will continue to be felt long after the war has faded from living memory.

We chose small varieties for our pumpkin patch this year. One smallish pumpkin is enough for two meals for two people, so there's no need to go for the enormous kind. However, one of the small pumpkin plants got attacked by slugs. All but one of the small pumpkins it was producing got eaten while they were still babies. With only one fruit left, the plant put all its energies into making that one fruit as amazing and slug-proof as possible. So what was supposed to be a modest little thing turned into this monster:



To quote everyone who walked past our house this week, "that's a big pumpkin."

I'm particularly fond of the twisty stalk. It gives it a pleasing, cartoony air.

( Carved pumpkin nonsense pics under the cut. )

I'm not sure if anyone's taking the Telegraph's YouGov poll about the BNP seriously. But if you are, you might find this interesting.

The statistic that's appearing everywhere is that, after Nick Griffin's pathetic appearance on Question Time last week, 22% of people would now seriously consider voting for the BNP.

First thing to note: 22% of what people? If they were all extremely rightwing, then it's not that big a deal. If they were all previously Labour supporters, then the UK has a huge problem. I can't find any information at YouGov's site on the demographics of their polling sample.

Second thing to note is the actual question that was asked: Are there any circumstances in which you might seriously consider voting BNP in a future local, general or European election?

A very vague question. I'm quite imaginative. I can easily imagine a situation where I might vote BNP for a future local, general or European election. Perhaps it's 40 years in the future and their policies have completely switched around. Perhaps every other party has become a cesspit of corruption, sleaze and extreme bigotry and the BNP is suddenly the least awful option. Perhaps I've gone mad. Perhaps the BNP is the only party to come up with a coherent plan for climate change and I've decided that I'd rather see the world saved and have bigots temporarily in power -- with the proviso that I'll vote them out at the next election. Perhaps the local BNP candidate is secretly anti-BNP and needs my vote to help them get in and destroy the party from within. Etc.

Third thing to note is the spread of options:

Yes, definitely consider voting BNP
Yes, probably
Yes, possibly
No, under no circumstances
Not sure

I count three "YES"s to one "NO" there. Not exactly a balanced set. You could argue that the "Yes, possibly" answer really falls exactly in between the two extremes of "definitely" and "under no circumstances", which would leave us with two "YES"s to one "NO". Still not balanced. And, anyway, that's not how YouGov interpreted the data, which brings us on to the fourth thing:

Are there any circumstances in which you might seriously consider voting BNP in a future local, general or European election?

4% Yes, definitely consider voting BNP
3% Yes, probably
15% Yes, possibly
66% No, under no circumstances
12% Not sure

According to YouGov, that translates to 22% of people now seriously considering voting for BNP. Utter bollocks. 7% are seriously considering it. 66% will never seriously consider it. 12% aren't sure. And the other 15% can imagine a set of circumstances where they might one day seriously consider it.

And all of this is irrelevant anyway without knowing the political leanings of the people taking part in the survey.

*really wishes there was a UK equivalent of fivethirtyeight.com*

No progress on the survey yet. Still waiting to hear from them. But Matt's dad (who has had a lot of experience in doing up old properties) came with us for a second viewing, and pointed out lots of potential problems: work needs doing on the chimney stacks and flashing on the roof, new guttering, re-plastering inside, re-wiring the whole house, new floor in attic room. Worse, one of the supporting roof-beams appears to be damaged at one end. It might not actually be damaged -- could be just evidence of an old damp problem that is now okay and the beam itself might be sound underneath. But. If it is damaged and needs to be replaced then that essentially means replacing the roof and basically doing a brand new loft conversion.

And I was congratulating myself on having a few thousand left out of our deposit! If the mortgage people slap a retention on it then we'll have no money left for any repairs, and if the roof does need replacing then we won't be able to afford it at all.

I'm still keeping an eye on the estate agents' listings...

The other problem (to justify the plural of the subject line) is the laser hair reduction I've been having on my legs. It's been eight months now -- six sessions, totalling £1,320 -- and there's almost no difference at all. The staff at the clinic are not being helpful. The UK distributors of the machine are not being helpful. I'm waiting to hear from the American manufacturers, but I imagine they won't be helpful either. The attitude seems to be that I am a unique flower with a special gift of not responding to laser treatment. It seems more likely to me that the machine has been set up wrong for my skin/hair combination (this despite being repeatedly told that my skin/hair combination was IDEAL for laser treatment), or that the technician is using the machine badly. But I don't have any concrete evidence.

I have to decide now how much of a bitch I want to be about this. Either I walk away and just wave goodbye to all that money. Or I cause a scene at the clinic. Neither option appeals.

And now for Paddington! It was my sister's birthday a couple of weeks ago and, since I happened to have one of her childhood pillowcases stashed in a cupboard, I decided to make her a bag and pencilcase.

( Many pictures of a decidedly sewingy nature under the cut. )



I'm really pleased with how it turned out. Chances are strong that several people will be getting pencilcases from me this Christmas!

Well. We put an offer in on the little cottage that I've mentioned before -- £19,000 below the asking price. It was rejected and, oddly enough, we felt relieved. We wouldn't have been able to add any value to the house, because it was already really lovely inside, so it would've been hard to move up to a bigger property (if we ever wanted to).

What we really wanted was this house, which is two doors down from the really nice cottage (you can just see it on the corner in that first photo). We'd seen it several weeks ago, while we were waiting to see if the bank would give us a mortgage. By the time the mortgage had been approved, the vendor had accepted an offer from someone else. We tried to convince ourselves that this was a good thing, and continued looking for other homes.

Anyway, on the day we got the rejection for the lovely cottage, Matt noticed that the listing for the shabby house had changed from "sold subject to contract" to "for sale". So we contacted the estate agents and arranged for a second viewing. And Matt, being the proactive chap he is, put in a cheeky offer of £150,000.

The estate agent called back this morning to say that the vendor was hoping to get nearer £160,000, and could we perhaps meet him halfway?

We made an offer of £155,000.

It was accepted!

Things I like about this house:

1. The vendor originally bought it for £189,000. So it feels like we're getting a bargain.

2. It's ex-rental and it shows. Stained carpets, ripped wallpaper, half-finished paintwork everywhere, holes in the floor, etc. Basically, cosmetic problems that Matt and I could probably manage to fix.

3. There's outside space.

4. The piano will definitely get through the front door.

5. It's on a really nice street, and it's only a couple of hundred yards from the beach.

6. You can see the castle from the upstairs windows.

7. I can't wait to sort out that badly-designed kitchen.

8. The bathroom is brand new.

9. At that price, our mortgage will actually be less than our rent. Madness!

10. Also, we'll be able to keep back several thousand pounds from our deposit, so it won't feel like we've lost all our savings. Savings are an extremely comforting thing to have nestled in a bank when you're self-employed.

*is gleeful*

I really hope the survey doesn't turn up anything awful.

I finally got up the nerve to make an offer on the little cottage. I think it'll be rejected, but we might get an idea of whether the vendor is willing to negotiate.

Today we saw this house. Glancing at the online pictures gives you the impression that it's actually quite a nice house. But it's a DIY mess. The guy selling it tried to do everything himself and none of it is finished properly. Nothing in the bathroom fits! The bath was sloping so badly that I said, "Surely a spirit level..." and the estate agent replied, "Or, you know, eyes..." and we all laughed. But it'd be a big job to take on. And it's in a really scuzzy area.

Two streets up, we also saw this other house. Note the suspicious lack of interior photographs on its listing. That's because it's a dump. Really. It'd cost thousands to do it up. Thousands and thousands and thousands. The estate agent left us alone to talk to each other about it for a few minutes and, as soon as he'd left the room, I turned to Matt and whispered, "I HATE it. It's horrible! I never want to live here ever!" Just in case he had any delusions about actually making an offer on it. I couldn't believe there were people living in it. Or that anyone would think £178,000 would be a fair price for it.

We had to have tea and hot chocolate and a caramel shortcake thing at Costa Coffee afterwards to lift our spirits.

And I've just realised that we'll be leaving this house sooner rather than later, so when I got home from teaching I took the telescope outside (while we still live in a place where such activities are possible) and had a look at the very twinkly planet that's been brightening up the sky to the south every evening for so many weeks. Even if our offer is rejected, even if the only houses we can afford are squalid and horrid, I can at least console myself with the knowledge that tonight I saw the moons of Jupiter.

Matt said yesterday that he couldn't work out how we've come to be in this position (ie. having a mortgage agreed, and actively looking for a house to buy). Neither can I. We can't remember whose idea it was to visit the mortgage advisor in the first place. I suspect it was my mum, goading us into it. Either that, or something clicked when we were in Paris.

( Cut for sheer dullness of it all, except for the picture of the steam train at the end. )

How about this one?

http://www.blackgracecowley.com/rdetails.aspx?pmax=200000&beds=2&id=GVH3089

*is stupidly excited about getting into huge debt*

In an unexpected turn of events, a mortgage provider has actually agreed to provide us with a mortgage. We are now able to look for houses under £175,000. Which brings me to the next problem...

I have writer's block. I've had it for the last four months. I generally haven't been posting here on my LJ unless I've had pictures to show you, because thinking of words without pictures is just too hard.

My sister thinks I should "simply" start another story, and forget about the pig. But the poxy pig story has to be completed, otherwise it will fester in the back of my brain until the day I die.

For the first evening in a while, I've had three whole uninterrupted hours when I could've got a bit of writing done. Instead I've been sitting here, trying to work out why the block started in the first place.

Two things.

I got depressed at the beginning of June, for reasons entirely unrelated to writing. But the pig story is supposed to be funny. Turns out I can't be funny when I'm depressed. This knocked my confidence, which made me more depressed. Etc.

Time. During April and May, Matt took on an unfair share of the household nonsense, because he was as keen as me to see me beat my deadline. The deadline swooshed by, as deadlines do, and I felt too guilty at the continuing domestic inequality so I started doing my share of the chores once more. Chores are wonderfully distracting, and you feel like you've achieved something at the end of the day. Much more satisfying than trying and failing to be funny in a story.

The good news is that I'm not depressed any more. I've been generally quite perky since we went to Paris (if you don't count my recent mini meltdown over property prices and income).

Time is still an issue, though.

( Cut for boring details. )

I've tried (briefly) getting up much earlier in the mornings so that I can get some quality writing time in at the start of every day. It didn't work. I can't go to bed early. The evening teaching routine messes it all up. On the bright side, that means I have at least 2 useful hours after 9.00pm on weeknights.

I should stop feeling guilty for not writing during the day, maybe. I could spend the free daylight time doing other stuff instead. Evenings could be writing time. Come home. Have tea with Matt. Write. Go to bed.

There's no point trying to write on Sundays. I declare Sundays a writing-free zone for me. I'm inclined to keep Saturdays clear too. It'd be nice to have a day each week where Matt and I can just spend time together without feeling like we should be rushing off to visit someone or do something useful etc.

Okay. Weeknights, after tea. No word quota. No angsting. 250 words is better than 100 words, but 100 words is better than no words. If too knackered to write hilarious prose, I should at the very least read over what I've already got and try to tighten it up.

Ha. That was actually useful! I was going to ask you lot for advice, but I think I've got it all sorted out now.

Right. I'm going to have a cup of tea and then I'm going to play a few of the Goldberg Variations. Huzzah!

We both got very excited when we found a figure-of-eight walk in an area that we were certain held no new footpaths. It promised a combination of lanes and fields under the shadow of South Barrule. (This is not quite accurate. If we'd been walking at sunset, or late afternoon in winter, then South Barrule would've cast a shadow over the area -- but it was an August afternoon and the sun beamed down from a cloudless sky.)

Leaving the car parked at the side of a dangerous, busy road, we started along a little old farm lane. Various bits of old stone buildings lined up along the left-hand side of the lane. Some were in a worse state than others. Matt and I have very mixed feelings about restoring tholtans. On the one hand, it's a shame when what was once someone's home decays into a pile of stones. On the other hand, it's a shame that what was once a simple crofter's cottage gets renovated into a fancy, over-extended, deluxe family dwelling for a city-worker. On the spare hand, tholtans can be very picturesque, if you catch them at the right moment in their decay.

This one was almost unrecognisable:



But very pretty.

( Four more pictures under the cut, including a terrifying horse. )

I collapsed gratefully into the car and saw by the clock that we'd missed the first episode of the new series of That Mitchell and Webb Sound by ten minutes, but we listened to it all later on BBC iPlayer.

A bit patchy, like all sketch comedy. The sketches about plastic surgery and counting whales were hilarious, though.

We're running out of footpaths. Every time we decide to go out for a walk we get the map out and scrutinise every inch of it. Where haven't we been before? I think we really have exhausted all the footpaths in a five mile radius of our house. And lots of the ones up in the north, and near our old house in the east, and all across the middle. It's getting tricky.

But we found a five-mile loop along the western side of the island -- following part of the disused railway line along the coast northwards, heading inland through Glen Mooar (which we've visited several times before, but that's okay because it's beautiful), and back down south along the Staarvey Road (a road we've walked along before, but not this particular stretch of it). Crucially, it didn't look too hilly on the map.

The first thing you learn about walking along a disused railway line is that the view is often completely obscured by great big high earthen banks. So I was forced to pay attention to the butterflies.



That poor Common Blue was so ragged around the edges that I wondered if it'd been in a fight. And this next one was tiny:

( As usual, far too many pictures under the cut. )

Matt suggested a walk the first Saturday after we got back and, as I was tired and hormonal, I suggested we go for a drive. We compromised by driving to the furthest point from our house that you can get on my rock (ie. to the very northernmost tip of the island) and having a gentle amble. Up there it's all dunes and heather and seabirds and skylarks and sky. Lots of sky.

( Many pictures under the cut, including a mysterious stone and a beetle. )



-------------------

Good news! Matt took one of his big double-canvas prints to a local art gallery on Thursday morning. They phoned up on Friday morning to say that they'd already sold it! He's working on another print now, to be dropped off on Sunday.

*is gleeful*

I thought I'd make note of a few practical things connected with our Paris holiday.

One or two people reading this might be interested in the prosaic money side of it, so here's how much we spent between us:

£164 for two return tickets on the boat/train from IOM to London
£272 for two return tickets on the Eurostar from London to Paris (this would've been £100 cheaper if we'd booked them a fortnight earlier)
605 euros for 11 days in our tiny flat in the centre of Paris (on the edge of the Marais district)
300 euros for spending on stuff while we were there. We mostly prepared our own picnics/meals in the flat, but occasionally we ate out (mostly street food, and one very nice meal courtesy of Matt's parents).

At current exchange rates that makes £1250 for the two of us. We had £500 put aside for the holiday (a wedding present which we were only allowed to spend on a honeymoon) so we ended up spending £750 of our hard-earned money on top of that. I think it was worth it.

---------------------

We both lost half a stone in weight. I expect this was because of walking 5 miles every day (albeit walking very slowly) and eating hardly anything because of the heat. I'm happy, anyway, because I'm back down to what I consider my ideal weight. Hurray!

---------------------

Last thing: I've always had problems with aeroplanes and pain. On the descent the pressure in my head builds up to such an extent that it feels like my brain is going burst out through my ears. This is partly why we decided to do it all by boat and train (and we were also keen to keep the trip as eco-friendly as possible). On the way to Paris the Eurostar had to go through a lot of little tunnels. It went through them very fast, and each time my head/ears did a pale imitation of the pain I always experience on aeroplanes. It wasn't awful, but it was uncomfortable.

Living on my rock I find it's best to always have a tissue because I tend to get a bit sniffly. So I always had a tissue in my pocket in Paris, too -- but I never needed to use it. The city was so hot and dry that there was no need of it. I didn't sniff once! A miracle! Matt also noticed that he was a lot less sniffly.

On the way back from Paris I was prepared for a bit of pain going through the smaller tunnels. There was none.

Within 24 hours of returning to the UK, though, we both noticed that we were sniffing a little bit.

After 48 hours I suddenly had this feeling like I'd gone deaf. I'm thinking now that it was just the gunk in my sinuses finally making its way into my ears, where it normally lives.

Clearly, my sinuses (and Matt's too, apparently) want to live in a hotter climate.

The rest of me rather likes the feeling of a cool breeze, though.

--------------------

And that concludes my very short series of Paris posts!

First of all, this isn't going to be a proper "what I did in the order I did it" kind of write-up. I wrote 9500 words in my holiday diary (because the camera kept threatening to die, and I didn't want to forget any of it), and I do not want to write them all over again here on lj. So the following will be a collection of photographs, and a collection of thoughts -- all jumbled up out of chronological order and grouped together according to an arbitrary set of themes that leapt out at me when I was looking at them.

Feel free to skip the text and just look at the pictures! :)

( Approximately 30 pictures under the cut, and many more words. )

We came back from Paris via Milton Keynes and Aylesbury (visiting friends and godson for a night) and Crewe and Liverpool (eating noodles with sister), and finally crawled into our house at 11.30pm on Tuesday.

By 10.30am on Wednesday I was wading through the weeds and blinking through the rain at the allotment, searching for tasty things to bring home. There were lots, but it was too wet to get a decent photograph of the collection so I arranged them all on a table the next day:



( Four more colourful pictures under the cut. )

I'm just going to complain a bit here, so don't mind me. My sister says I can be an obstructionist -- and she's right! -- but sometimes all I can see are the problems and no way out without utterly fucking up mine and Matt's lives.

Current joint annual income: £25000
Savings: £30000 (a surprisingly huge amount!)

We would have to get a subprime mortgage because of being self-employed, which means we might not be able to get a mortgage at all these days. We'd also have to pay a higher rate of interest, if we did get a mortgage. And we wouldn't be able to borrow as much (ie. 75% of property price, rather than the 90% that people were getting before last year's crash).

I've been keeping an eye on the estate agents' websites, checking for 2-bedroomed houses under £150000. Such things don't exist, unless you want a house that's basically a wreck and would need to be done up first and is listed as "unsuitable" for people wanting to actually live in it. Or you want a teeny-tiny house with no room for Matt to work or me to have a piano. Or you want a newish terraced house with no sound-proofing so that rehearsals and home-teaching would have to stop.

There are lots of articles on the internet saying that this is a good thing. Well done, Isle of Man, for weathering the property crisis so well! You've done a great job of keeping it a sellers' market for these many years. How wonderful that the average house price over here is now £292000.

Anyway, it's all irrelevant. On a joint income of £25000 we could only borrow, at the most, £100000. Which means we could only afford £125000 with our savings (add the legal fees on top of that). For that price, over here, we can buy a small flat. Hurray.