In good news, Jason has sawn up the hot tub today. It is now in various chunks all over the decking, waiting until tomorrow when we can borrow my dad’s car and spend the day hauling it to the tip. It seems outrageous that we ended up having to destroy it, but the person who said they wanted it, couldn’t figure out a way to get it out of the garden without bankrupting himself and when he and Jason spent two days taking it to pieces to discover this, they also found parts of it were rotten and the motor was seized. Even a chap from a scrap yard wanted us to pay him £400 to take it away. It is the white elephant of this house and always has been. More like the brown toad, to be honest.
Still, now the new owner has a half built fence, a large patch of balding hedge and a huge hole in the decking instead of a hot tub, and much good may it do her. I have muttered dire imprecations.
I have spent my day, much like all my others in a Waiting for Godot’esque cycle of sorting, packing and wrapping. After Jason had chopped up the hot tub he had the bit between his teeth, so late afternoon was spent reorganising all the things we had already wrapped and packed into a more pleasing Tetris style so that we can still go about our daily business without being hemmed in on all sides by walls of boxes.
Just as we had finished rearranging everything for the nine hundredth time, the phone rang. It was the letting agent to let us know that the owner of the house we were supposed to be renting now cannot move out on the date he said he could and which we had agreed on. He can’t now move out until the first or possibly second week in April. Could we possibly delay things at our end?
The answer to this, of course, is no. We have exchanged. Our completion date is legally binding. It was a fucking nightmare to get that date in the first place and yesterday we booked and paid for the removal firm for the 25th and 26th of this month.
We had choices. We went and looked at what was available on Rightmove. As predicted, the pickings are increasingly slim and the ones that we need in terms of size are even more expensive and even further away. We could do it, but it would mean starting again and lots of them now have a later availability date so we would achieve nothing except more uncertainty and paperwork with a possibly similar outcome.
Our other option is to go with what we have, put our things in store and move in with my mum and dad in the interim, as they still don’t have any dates for anything at all and their entire chain has gone silent, so who the hell knows when they will move now?
This is what we decided on after a lot of agonising and swearing and a lot of sweating at all the extra expense. Jason will call the agent tomorrow.
We were so heartily fucked off by all of the above that we had another curry for tea and watched back to back episodes of 30 Rock for want of anything more cheering to do.
I did yoga. I drank lots of tea. I am reading a book of letters between Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf. They are very soothing. I sympathise with Virginia, who spends a lot of time lurching from one illness to another and in between that worrying about her choice of hats and how annoying it is that she thinks she likes to go to parties and see people, but when she gets there she finds them intensely stressful. Also, they only magnify her hat based concerns. Vita has much bigger fish to fry. Her husband keeps having to go to Persia to organise jubilees and she trails after him, writing from the road where she gets held up by bandits and trapped in snow filled passes. She keeps accidentally purchasing dogs as she goes, which is a thing that could happen to a person seized upon by bandits in the mountains a lot. From her accounts I don’t think any of them are useful dogs in terms of chewing off the leg of assailants, but they have nice ears and are distracting in times of peril.
I think I should count my blessings that it was very easy to go up to London and eat in nice restaurants with Jason when he worked in London last year. At no point did I have to surround myself with livestock and rub goose grease on my lower limbs to stop myself from freezing to death. Mind you, when Vita gets to Persia she has to help re-decorate palaces and deal with too many raw emeralds. There are up sides. I could do with a palace at the moment. Some raw emeralds wouldn’t go amiss either.