They say that moving house is second only in stress value to getting divorced. Well I have just moved house and I can tell you that they are 100% correct, what a nightmare!
I just never knew that I had so much stuff, the little house I was leaving became for one day Dr Who’s Tardis, it is actually impossible that so much was in that place. Box after box, bag after bag, temper tantrum after temper tantrum all from and over that little home!
Well the whole experience started off a few flash backs to when I was a young boy in Lancashire and how in those days there was a type of house that seems very rare today. This type of property may become more common again, if Tito keeps attempting Olympic high jump records with the interest rate, but right now they are as rare as English sporting triumphs!
I am speaking about that house where no one has lived for at least a couple of years. Do you remember the agent struggling with the key and having to lean hard on the door to open it because of the pile of letters and papers that had accumulated on the inside? The place smelt unloved and either damp or very dry, there was always a milk bottle with mould in the kitchen and the whole experience was an adventure.
It was not a show house, it was a house with endless possibilities, limited only by your own imagination. There was also that added excitement that the owners had done a midnight flit, as a kid it was almost in the same realms of pirates, these people had packed and run at midnight, WOW! The closest thing today is they did a runner, not quite the same really.
Now if the house stayed empty long enough the garden and hedges took on their natural shape and condition and the house attained an even higher status, it became the witches house. At 84 (or whatever age it is I feel today) it has finally dawned on me that it became the abode of a witch simply because your mum and dad wanted you to stay away from it. How dim is that? They may as well have called it the house with free ice cream, because it was now super interesting!
These houses are very rare now, possibly the witches have all moved to Australia or New Zealand, but more likely it is because of the property boom and developers swept out all the old brooms and made each one of them into a des res, another term that died away!
Let’s fast forward in the Tardis to 2020, what will we see? I hope for all our sakes that the witches still remain antipodean and there are no sad and lonely homes. That way we will know that we all survived this credit crunch, oil crises, economic down turn and period of general gloom. The bottom line is that we will, I know it! We will overcome and the upwardly mobile positive attitude of this great country will resurface and drive us on. The only thing that will probably not change is the English sporting team’s and their ability to self destruct, not even a coven of witches could break that spell!