On the last minute

As per usual everything is a mad rush again. My tenants finally move in on Wednesday and WH has just decided to a) change the immersion heater, b) empty out the loft and c) fix the smoke alarms which have been sitting in the kitchen for 5 weeks. Just when I need help to sort out the garden.

Last week I employed the services of a student to help me do my bit, but torrential rain the first 3 days ensured we achieved nothing. WH took the lad to work with him. On Thursday we finally got going and three hours after starting some serious work the lad decided he had a bad back and couldn't do any more digging. I sent him off on his own to cut the lawn and tidy up. Fifteen minutes later he arrived back said all was done and and tidied and he duly went home. Later I discover the lawn looks like it has been cut with a knife and fork, or maybe a goat has had random bites out of it, the few grass cuttings are still in the mower box in the garage and in any case the only bit that has been touched is in the centre. If anything it looks worse than before he started. So today after 2 nights of even more heavy rain I have to set to and get it looking pristine.

Meanwhile all is not well with the letting agent. This is my third agent and the beginning of the relationship looked promising. The manager certainly talked the talk, the adverts went out quickly and tenants were found on the first serious viewing. This was all 6 weeks ago. The paperwork was all to follow. Three weeks ago the terms and conditions arrived and we decided that as we are so close to the house we would manage the property ourselves. We awaited the contract. Two weeks ago I called the office and asked where it was, "Don't worry all the paperwork is coming together, loads of time yet." Last Monday I called again. No-one in the office at all this time so I left a voice-mail. No-one called back. I rang again on Thursday. "Oh it must have got lost in the post." Why did no-one return my (numerous) calls? " It's the school holidays, lots of people are on holiday and several were sick. No problem it can all be done today, I'll drop it off tonight." She didn't. The contract finally arrived on my doormat on Friday morning to the sound of a hastily driven off car. Several key points were wrong, names and address of the Landlord for a starters. A call to the office revealed the Manager was out, again. The secretary said she would sort it and I would be hand-delivered a new agreement on Friday night. I am still waiting.

Why is it that these firms are all very ready to talk up their service and to take your money but when it comes to actually doing anything they fall at the first hurdle? Their attention to detail is absolutely zero. All these systems are in place for instant messaging, voice-mails and good old fashioned secretaries still take messages but no one ever replies. The offices are run by brightly dressed 20-somethings who talk a lot and do bugger all else. No-one checks anything.

I just hope that on Tuesday the Lettings Manager will actually turn up to do the inventory and condition report but at £100 plus an hour I expect she will. Whether it will get typed correctly and delivered to me in time remains to be seen.

At least I am not still with the second agent I had. WH has been working in a property managed by them. They were given carte blanche in terms of the time scale, no one was due to move in for at least a month. Some of the job was tiling, so days were left for stuff to dry and other jobs fitted in between which ultimately gives a better end result and a smarter finish for the customer. By Friday there were a couple more days left to do and then the refurbishment was finished. The painter, returning the key to the letting office at the end of the week, casually asked if a tenant had been found yet. "Oh yes, we always had one, he moves in on Tuesday." We received a frantic phone call from the already stressed painter. Cue much swearing from WH who is now working over the Bank Holiday in order to complete by 8.30 on Tuesday morning.

And they call this property management?

Progress of sorts

Five weeks living in the new house and progress is slow. WH is working everywhere but here and when we do get all ready to start another part of the project someone moves the goal posts and we have to stop, regroup and take a different course of action. Mostly so far it's all been caused by the weather, the major blight over the whole episode so far. Just a few days of waking up here convinced us that our plan to forget installing the central heating boiler until late September/ early October would have to be scrapped. We need it now, temperatures in the kitchen are regularly less than 12 degrees C in the early morning. We also discovered that a lot of the plaster had still not dried out even though some of it was done late last winter. This has made the whole house feel damp and caused us to leave a couple of oil radiators on all night every night, a strategy which is finally paying off. The house of course had not been lived in for almost 3 years and had no regular heating for even longer so I suppose with all the wet weather we have had in this period it was bound to be feeling slightly chilly.

Tomorrow a major progress will be made, the hall and stairs are being plastered along with levelling the kitchen floor allowing us then to decorate within the next month. After that we can get the rest of the carpets down which will be wonderful as we can reclaim the space in the living room where they are currently being stored. They were supposed to have been kept at the shop until we needed them but the fitter had other ideas, it saved him a journey and about 20 minutes of his time, never mind the poor customers who will have been walking round them for 2 months!

Once this part is finished we will have a large part of the house completed and hopefully a reduction in the dust which I spend hours daily attacking. I have employed a student to do some digging in the garden and help get the foundations done for the patio but so far all he has done is go off to jobs with WH as it has been far to wet here to dig anything.

A little light went out today

Goggins

01.08.1991 - 14.08.2008

For his entire life he battled infections, cat flu and lung damage, today he lost his fight. He fought with all the local cats for no apparent reason, guarded anything he took a fancy to, drains, ladders, a space on the floor, a cardboard box he had for 6 years, his special chair and loved his playmate Twilight so much that he never really recovered from her sudden death 8 years ago. This photo was him in May after his last bout of pneumonia. Last week it came back with a vengeance. He was a cat with a real attitude problem who loved the brine out of the tuna tin, freshly cooked bacon and worshipped the ground Worst Half walked on. No longer will they have manly cuddles on the sofa and fall asleep together watching Bruce Willis. When I returned from a six week visit to New York he flew round he room he was so, so happy to see me. The little green chair he fiercely defended sits empty, the drain covers under the trees no longer diligently cleared of spiders and the greys no longer have anyone to smack them down and give them a swift bite when they misbehave.

We are now a 2 cat family for the first time in 17 years and oh boy it hurts like hell.

The start of a love affair

Coming to the end of yet another horrid, wet, English summer which in my book is the second which has beenmruined by all the problems we have had with this house move, I have to face that it's highly unlikely that I will be going to Greece again this year. The downturn in the building trade here means that WH has to work while he still has work and so has been unable to finish our new place. Having given up over 5 months last winter to the build, which with hindsight was a total waste of time given the vagaries of the weather (again) and his fellow workers who let us down in droves, his customers won't wait any longer. I don't mind this, after all he is earning when other local builders are not. What I do mind is having had no real taste of warm weather other then during Grandad's Holiday in late May. I am also missing Greece itself and our usual leisurely stays in the back of beyond places we both love.

My love affair with Greece began as a teenager. My required O' Level English reading, along with a million other kids, was My Family and Other Animals, Gerald Durrell's account of his family's sojourn in Corfu in the 1920's. I was instantly drawn to this strange sounding country where interesting wildlife abounded, the people were strange, views were magical and you were never more than a few miles from the sea. The descriptions of exotic plants which my father had planted in our garden and which we fussed over to keep alive in the English Midlands but which grew wild in Corfu fascinated me. In those days I didn't like the heat so wasn't really bothered on that score. I read and re-read that book a hundred times in my late teens and twenties.

It was not until I took up with WH that I actually got to go there. In 1994, the girls were whisked off by their mother to Ibiza for a fortnight giving only 2 hours notice to WH. He freaked as he had done the previous year when a similar thing had happened and so, like the previous year when he was advised by his GP, we decided to go away ourselves. His house would not seem so empty if we ourselves were not there either. In those days, pre-internet (for us anyway), we abandoned looking for cheap deals on Teletext and called the agent direct. We stood in WH's porch listening to the phone between us, WH did the talking. By then of course, I was sick and not able to walk far, the first holiday he was offered was in Paxos, a villa in the Olive groves up a steep hill. He declined. Further unsuitable offers were also turned down. Finally he was agreeing to one, from Birmingham later that week. By then I had tired of standing and was sitting on the bottom of the stairs unable to hear the 'other end'. Having given all his credit card details the call abruptly came to an end. WH was not over impressed but it was a holiday after all and a cheap one at that. "I don't know what the accommodation will be but they assure me it will be on the flat. Allocation on arrival or some such name, they tell you all the details when you land. Oh it's Corfu, don't know what that will be like". My heart leapt, I was finally going.

We went in late May in a heatwave. Our accommodation proved to be a 2 bedroom apartment in a block of 6 overlooking a meadow of wild flowers just off the centre of Roda. We also had a full sized kitchen, two bathrooms and a shower with a curtain, unheard of in those days. It was on the ground floor, had a terrace giving onto the field and which was planted with bright flowers amongst which lived a whole army of little lizards. In two minutes you could be on the beach; round the corner, down the main street of the old village, past the church, on past the old ladies sitting in a row of hard chairs along their house walls, past the kafenion with it's whiff of ouzo, strong coffee and cigarette smoke and the old men arguing outside and walk through a gap between two cafes, the sparkling water visible through the little alleyway. I loved it. We had a bakery on 'our' corner and we went every morning for bread and pastries, sugary, vanilla-ey and cinnamonney scents teasing our taste buds. In those days a loaf was 270 drachma, about 54 pence, a yardstick I still measure the prices with today, only now the currency is the Euro (Evro) and bread is more than 60 cents (lepta).

We didn't do much on that first trip, we were too much in awe of the place and money was tight. We did hire a car for a couple of days and WH began to hone his skills as a Greek driver. 14 years later he slots in effortlessly. We drove around and everywhere we went Cistus sunroses abounded along with fields of myriad wild flowers. Little churches sat on hillsides, old cottages with tumbledown roofs had yards full of geraniums planted in blue painted feta tins, old ladies in black followed herds of goats for miles on the roads in the hills, men carried bundles of sticks whilst riding side-saddle on dusty, sad looking donkeys, chickens flapped out of hedges. Taking a picture in Sinies village one mid morning the whole school of 14 children fell out in to the street and posed for camera unbidden, along with a tiny sandy puppy clutched by a waif like 6 year old with dark eyes and a coy smile, "Hello" they chanted, "English? Thank you" as if by rote. One of the most brilliant sights was on the road along the the sea front in Roda itself, a piece of waste ground next to a moped rental lot. There were a couple of scrubby trees and chickens pecked amongst the dirt and greenery underneath them, taking to the branches in the heat of the day. One day the place was transformed, the greenery had flowered to become a vibrant square of brilliant red poppies.

That was the week which really kindled the fire. We have returned to Corfu 6 times since together and WH even took the girls on an 18 to 30's holiday in Kavos on another occasion, just Dad and 3 teenage girls. Together we have always stayed in the north and love the quieter more laid back spots. We've also been all over Greece since some years going 3 times. We want to live there eventually but sadly probably not in Corfu. We love the quieter, totally Greek places now and somewhere sleepy on the mainland beckons, maybe somewhere in Pelion although that is getting quite touristy now, maybe on the Amvrakikos gulf, Amphilochia perhaps, where we once had a wonderful Sunday lunch and not a Brit in sight (or sound), maybe near Volos airport at Nea Anchialos, the centre of a growing wine region. Wherever we end up it will always be that first holiday to Corfu we will remember the most, the week that sowed the seeds of a dream.

Studying the natives

I have lived in this house all of 28 days. A few things have been achieved but I still have a rudimentary bathroom and a very basic kitchen, cooker, sink, dishwasher and 2 shelves. We are getting stuff done though, I have repaired almost single handedly a hole in the floor, put up shelves, cut down trees and cooked basic meals. WH has rewired, plumbed in, put up ceilings and generally fixed. Our neighbours find us fascinating with our pot garden, temporary parking space on the front lawn, garage full of tools and missing side gate and fencing. Not however as fascinating as we find them.

We only moved about 400 metres but this neighbourhood (should I say road?) is just soooo different. For a start we have more neighbours, there are 4 more houses and the residents are generally younger, have more kids and and all have driveways in front of the garages attached to their houses. My last abode was one of only 3 which had a front driveway, in my case attached to someone else's house but at the front all the same. Here because we all have front drives much more family life is evident to the casual observer. They also have far more vehicles here, all except 2 have at least 2 cars per house, a couple of houses have 4 cars. This raises the question where on earth do they park them? Mostly in the road, in the turning spaces and on the pavement. The whole place looks like a used car lot. And there's always someone polishing one, or mending one, or cleaning one or just plain admiring one.

EH?? Yes this last one, in fact all the afore-mentioned car-related activities along with a whole heap more are carried out by one of my more immediate neighbours on a daily basis. WHAT??????

I think this guy is a teacher. He's definitely a sad case. Married with one child, he's really in love with his car. He changes his car with extreme regularity we are told although we've only seen 2 in the 12 months we have owned this place. He has a day-van too but that's a whole other story. This guy, a sad, boring, extremely rude (well the way he talks to his wife is, he doesn't seem to speak to any other adult, EVER) cleans his car, hoovers it out, removes the seats and wheels to clean them of any hidden, lurking specks he missed the first time then polishes the whole thing with an electric polisher gadget until he can see his face in it. Every other day. Now the school holidays are in full swing he can spend all day every day doing it, not just the evenings. It's rained a part of most days except for about 4 in the last 28, and he still cleans his car. The polishing and shining are relentless. He must have something wrong with him surely. He appears to have no life away from his car, spending upwards of 6 hours a day on his driveway.

When he got this latest one, brand new about 5 weeks ago, he was still sitting in it at 11.30pm admiring it on the day it arrived. I know, I saw him as I left from a curtain hanging marathon and frightened myself to death as he had all the lights off and as I pulled off this drive I saw something move in his car in my headlights.

All the time this cleaning is going on his 3 year old child is told to stay indoors and behave. His dog is tied up lest it interrupts. He appears to be the main child-carer in the holidays, his wife going to work in the day-van early each day. I heard them arguing at 7 am one morning out in the street, and he told her categorically that she is NOT ALLOWED to drive his car YET, she changed gear too roughly and frightened him, let alone the damage she had done to his beloved gearbox.

Reading this you probably wonder if this guy is for real. Well yes he is and living in my road and teaching some hapless kids at a local school. God help his class. He's a real nutter but he's so, so interesting to observe, a psychiatrist would have a field day.

Ah, now I have a plan to fund my longed-for designer kitchen. Any psychiatrists out there want Bed and Breakfast and the opportunity of some fine behavioural studies? I'm taking bookings now!

Summer, what summer?

We went to a barbecue this afternoon. We sat under a gazebo in a back garden in coats, hats, long trousers and fleeces. Great food, drink and company but Oh, what about the weather?

It rained for 3 hours non stop including some extremely heavy downpours. By 7pm we were all frozen and so the party split. I came home and got straight in the shower and there I stayed for 30 minutes until I was warm again. If we had a bath just now I would have had a bath. I'm now dressed in thermal socks and a very large winter fleece top over my regular clothes.

I am reliably informed that the hottest temperatures of the year usually occur in this first week of August. Well where the flippin' heck are they? Our winter is long enough without it starting already.