Exchange!

There is something apt and poetic about getting the news that contracts have (at last) been exchanged and that the sale of the house is now official and legal in Cardiff’s take on a Spanish bodega at the bottom end of Saint Mary’s Street.

After all the shenanigans of the past few days and weeks, it was an anticlimax to find that everything for the sale of the house has been completed. I feel relief; but not enough relief to justify the tension in getting to this stage. What is it that people say about the most stressful events in a person’s life? To think that they have the temerity to place bereavement, giving birth and breaking a nail on a par with the raw horror that characterises the sequence of events which constitute buying or selling a house!

Now the endgame starts. The house is still full of things that I remember one broadcaster describing as ‘itemries’: things that shouldn’t be thrown away, but have a marginal utility and limited chance of being included in the boxes which will join the rest of our equipment lurking in the warehouse of Pickfords before its transportation to Spain.

The selling of the garden continues apace and we are making good progress towards the total which I considered to be the minimum to save face!

I have watched years of growth sold off for a fraction of their real cost but also I suppose I have a grudging realization that they will be cared for elsewhere. I wonder if employees in garden centres feel the same way as their plants walk off in all directions. I suppose that mine carry a little more personal hope than the anonymous serried ranks of industrially produced plants, but, at the end of the day they are only plants, and the money is more than welcome. Though, of course, as a dedicated gardener I merely use the money to further my horticultural aspirations. Ahem,

We have been blithely assuming that the hiring of a flat or apartment for the month that Toni will have to take to work out his notice will, in this city of rented accommodation, be a complete synch (?) [Have I ever written that word before? Is it the right spelling?] Anyway our expectations are rapidly being revised in the light of the experience that lettings are usually for six months not for one. An interesting predicament, given that there are three days before we have to find somewhere else to live – when I will be a homeless orphan.

Sob!