Revving up for the General Election!

Sunday 29 March 2015

Very windy with scudding clouds and sunny periods
14 degrees

Today I had fixed to go and see a house in the mountains for a client who will be here next Saturday.  The client sent me an email rejecting the location and so I rang the owner to change the date.  I don't want to be going out on a Sunday if I can avoid it.  The phone rang and rang and no answer.  I looked at the private ad again and noticed it didn't have a thermal energy report.  It has been the law for over five years now, that each house advert must show its thermal efficiency - rather like the bar graphs you see on fridges.  An hour and a half later, and almost at the time I would have had to have been leaving, the phone rang and it was the owner.  He agreed to get a report done before I came and I gave him the name of my man who does.

Spent an hour and a half loading names and details into the Mail Chimp software, ready for producing the newsletter and received two more articles, one on an international quilting project and another on wedding ring fine scarf knitting.  I have one week before Easter to get my act together.

Had lunch and felt exhausted.  OH said why didn't I go for a siesta, so I did and was spark out for an hour and a half.  Still felt tired when I woke up.  Need to sleep later this week - most of last week I woke up around 6 am.  OH was watching a  film and the dog was complaining so I took him out for a quick walk and he ran off.  Again.  Did actually smack him this time. Informed OH that he would be walking him from now on.  

Shutters banged and clattered during the night.  Gusty winds.  Tomorrow, the UK parliament will be dissolved and electioneering will begin.  

David Cameron - Tory leader

David Cameron of the Tories will probably resign if he isn't reelected.  

Will Ed Milliband and Ed Balls of the Labour Party have to climb into bed with the ghastly Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party?  I cant wait to see how EM faces up to public debates - he has already forgotten to talk about the economy in one of them.

Ed Milliband labour leader

Alex Salmond - SNP

Ed Balls - labour chancellor - talking balls is english slang for talking rubbish

Will people vote UKIP?  Nigel Farage is all over the media, fag and pint of beer in hand.  I think this is going to be a really fun election to follow.

Nigel Farage - United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)

I note from the Live Feed that there is someone in Mountain View, California who regularly reads the blog, for which I thank you.  I wonder what you think of it.  I wonder who you are, so far away in sunny CA.

Bugged by the rain.....

Thursday 26 February 2015

When will it stop sodding raining?

Phone rings early and it is partner agent, who has been up and at her laptop since 4.30.  I suggest that 4.30 is silly o'clock and she said she had been lying in bed, thinking about work and she had decided she had better get up and do some.  She has just started her own agency and has a pre school child and a husband who expects his meal on the table at 12.30.  I wouldn't go back to those times for all the Darjeeling in Darjeeling.  She had been hoping to make her first sale this weekend.  It transpires that the wonderful first visit had been made with just the wife, and the husband has since refused even to go and see the house, saying it just doesn't do it for him.  

This happens all the time, alas.  The couple who came to see my flat in January ended in the same result - the lady had been out in May 2014 and had loved it, and the husband didn't at all.  I also had a great visit on the main house last year with a lady, and her husband has yet to get out of Paris and make his way south.

I find a wonderful photo of a moth looking hacked off by the rain. 

 (Image Source: black&white)

Go down to the weekly market and find it much reduced.  Rain bucketing down.  Dive into the charity shop and footle around the packed rails.  There are various dank smelling locals lurking in their and peering at the sheets of rain through the windows.  I find some ravishing things which are built for someone without a bust and with arms like a fairy.  Happily, I then come across a pair of jeans which fit me like a glove.   The German lady stands by the changing room to preserve my privacy.  The curtain has fallen off the rail and has just been looped over, giving everyone in the shop a fine view of the lower half of whoever is in the middle of divesting themselves in the vestiaire.  She is very impressed with the jeans but says the large white scarf makes me look like a granny.  I had thought of buying it and using it to keep myself warm whilst writing this in the mornings, but am suitably shamed into putting it back in the box.  Today, I have on plain white cotton knicks which do not attract attention.  Last week, in the swimming pool changing rooms, I was wearing a pair of frilly blue nylon ones which caused reactions varying from hilarity to consternation, depending on the age of the unfortunate viewer.  Must remember not to run out of clean underwear again.

OH is having morning off from the rental units.  I went in to look at the bathroom door, which is sticking.  Donning the ear protectors, I sanded for a good half an hour and it made no difference whatsoever.  The floor needs planing.  Played on Facebook for a while and drank a cup of coffee.  I am so fed up of these rental units.   Back home and to my surprise and delight, someone rang up and asked to visit the big top unit!!  

Back home and watch Bargain Hunt.  Dog steaming by the fire.  Have a little sleep.  OH goes back down town to recommence battle with the skirting boards, which have popped off the wall, and I ring people up and no one is home.  Walk dog briefly.  No one else dog walking.

Look back at previous writings stored on my mini hard drive.  Heavens, I have been writing this sort of drivel for years....

Tapas, rain and Mummies

Saturday 31 January 2015

Stormy and lashing down with rain 11 degrees

The river had risen significantly and was just below the bridge.  It was carrying a mass of frothy spume and its slate grey waters were crushing themselves against the ancient stone parapets and bursting spray into the air.  

Quick breakfast and decided to head off into a very large town and enjoy some tapas.  The roads were almost deserted.   Everyone else had had the same idea and we finally managed to squeeze the car into a tiny space and dived into a nearby bar for coffee and loo break.  There was a forest of leaking brollies at the side of the door and the owner periodically took out the bucket in which they stood and threw the water out into the street (without looking if anyone was coming).  Coats steamed on the backs of chairs and the air was heavy with the aroma of coffee and dank wool.

After ten minutes, the rain eased and we took a turn around the shops.  The Spanish are rather bling in fashion terms.  The shoes on offer were either gay pride with diamante or toe crushing stilettos.  The coats which fitted me were labelled as XL, much to OH's amusement.  I am between a 12 and a 14...  I was quite taken with a pale coffee coloured parka which was heavily padded and had a fur collar and sparkly buttons.  OH took me by the elbow and guided me firmly out of the shop before the sales assistant could get me to the till.

People were battling to cross the street and we passed a number of carcasses of dead brollies.  Unhappy small apartment dogs were being hauled along the pavements, their locks plastered to their heads.  Newspaper pages were stuck to the side of buildings.

We headed down into the casco viejo (old town) and into a great tapas bar.  The walls are covered in azuelos (hand painted blue and white tiles) and above the bar are many air cured hams.  The tapas are spread over the ten metres of the bar.  There were pimientos like delicate leprechauns fingers dancing over tiny cubes of pepper and onion and bathed in pale green olive oil, fat crusty rolls with delicate slivers of rich cured ham edged with a deep yellow layer of fat, succulent tortillas of potato and onion, great wedges of tuna and mounds of patatas bravas coated with mayonnaise and garlic.  The perfumes and aromas were exquisite and we dived in and carried a selection to a nearby table and ate til we could eat no more.

The skies were closing in and the hail started beating a tarantella on the rooves so we headed back and lit the fire and I was overjoyed to find the Return of the Mummy.  The Mummy is strangely compelling...

thank you Film Web

Monkeys and the Wrath of God

Thursday 29 January 2015

Rain 7 degrees 

Take OH a cup of tea and it looks like the bed has been a wrestling ring for rhinos.  He struggles out of the sheets which have him in a dead lock and announces that he has spent the night chasing (in his dreams) obdurate chimpanzees who were insulting him and throwing bananas.  It is only when he tries to get out of bed, that he discovers he has both legs in one of his pyjama legs....

Spend the day uploading properties and walking the dog, who is very bored but doesn't want to go out in the rain.  Late afternoon speak to a friend who tells me that there is a weather warning out, and we should batten down the hatches.

I pin back the shutters and discover we have no firelighters.  I can't make fires without firelighters.  Bugger, bugger, bugger.   Use five million bits of sticks and most of a newspaper that we will now never know the contents and finally, after an hour of almost asphyxiating myself, get the sodding, bloody fire to light.

Rain is lashing down and we have hardly anything in the cupboard.  Consult the BBC website which gives supplies based recipe suggestions and manage to come up with chicken parfaits using the old, pungent blue cheese, some spare chicken breasts and the remnants of a packet of Bayonne ham.   Mashed potatoes tarted up with some creme fraîche and a variety of little roasted veg.  Not bad, Mrs, even if I say so myself.

OH arrives home looking knackered after tiling above the bath in the rental unit.  He produces a good bottle of white and we watch Eggheads.   Looks like Daphne is no longer on the team.  She was phenomenal and could always guess right, even when she didn't know the answer.

We started watching the most dreadful film which OH had recorded a while ago, when I wasnt paying attention.  By Werner Herzog, it was called Aguirre the Wrath of God and was filmed in 1972.  Here is the summary

1. Aguirre: The Wrath of God Review

   By 

   Matt Turner

   Published: June 7, 2013  Front Row Reviews

   

   Aguirre: The Wrath of God is one of those films where the production story seems to overshadow that of the film itself. Werner Herzog’s third film, and the one that marks his international breakthrough, is remembered as one of the most tumultuous film shoots in cinema history. Thankfully, the film is every bit as fascinating and mysterious as the nature of its production.

   The inimitable Herzog, then aged 30, shepherded a cast and crew of 450 off to Machu Picchu, largely without a plan or prayer. Herzog knew he wanted to track the fateful course of historic adventurer Lope de Aguirre, a man whose conquests he had read about in a children’s book and felt ripe for dramatic reinvention, but its turnout, he left largely to the gods to decide. Herzog threw together a largely wordless script in a few days, and set course for lands unknown. The rest is (film) history.

   Amongst the four hundred was the now notoriously volatile Klaus Klinski, whom Herzog, always enjoying a challenge, would employ as leading man four more times after this. The combination of the inhospitality of the land and of the personalities involved would make for a remarkable production. Over a rushed, trying five week shoot, Herzog and his crew of countrymen and natives reportedly faced danger at every corner, living in as much in fear of Klinski’s rage as the torrential weather conditions. Starved, soaked and exhausted, the crew battled on, with Aguirre, in all its atmospheric, enigmatic glory emerging as the fruit of their labour.

   An epic of doomed persistence, Aguirre’s narrative perhaps gains significance from the story of it’s making. The struggles of the cast and crew cloaking the film in a damp and dour atmosphere of despair that only serves to heighten the on-screen debilitation. Aguirre tracks the titular explorer as he rises from amongst a band of explorers to become leader of their party, an accomplishment that proves to be less successful than it sounds. Charting the increasingly disastrous mission of an ever diminishing band of explorers, Aguirre is definitive in its portrayal of an insane commitment to absolute futility. If the increasing barriers put up by both man and nature didn’t make success seem a bright prospect for Herzog’s explorers there is the underlying knowledge for the audience that the place they seek, El Dorado, doesn’t even exist.

   In its vision of a band of raft-riding, defeated men descending into the heart of darkness, Aguirre draws obvious parallels with another ‘70s classic, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Indeed, Coppola sighted Herzog’s film as an inspiration, and the debt is obvious even without Coppola’s humble recognition. As Aguirre, his men, and one horse, slip deeper and deeper into the heart of the jungle, it is apparent that the atmosphere of Coppola’s Vietnam was informed by Herzog’s film. Utilising the hostility of the landscape and its natural sounds as backdrop, Herzog creates as astounding a portrait of the oppressiveness of nature as any he would follow with.

   Klinski plays Lope de Aguirre with a quiet and building intensity through to the explosive speech near the end to which the title refers. He may be the earthly wrath of god, but he is still minuscule presence amongst the vastness of the natural world. In the most remarkable scene of the film, Klinski stumbles around the raft, attempting to scare away a horde of monkeys who have overtaken the vessel, whilst the camera loops around him, emphasising the overwhelming futility of it all. Only Herzog could come up with such a fantastically bizarre way of showing the utter hopelessness of attempting to defy nature as staging a monkey invasion sequence.

   Aguirre is not perfect, working with a single camera setup against a tide of difficulties does pay a toll on the technical side of things, and the fact that the story was more or less ad-libbed does come through, but these quibbles are side-lined by the remarkable aura of the film. The setting, the troubled production, as well as Herzog’s skill with the camera and Florian Fricke’s fantastic score, give the whole thing a tinge of oppressiveness and mystery that remains timeless.

   Herzog’s behind-the-camera escapades have become as well-known as his cinematic contributions. Aguirre marks the start of the BFI’s Herzog retrospective, and whilst not his debut, it is his first real touchstone, a film that is entirely impossible to emulate. Aguirre marks the first time where everything came together against all odds, as it would many times for one of the world’s most enduring “soldiers of cinema,” to use the director’s own term.
2. OH thought this film was the bees knees.  I was relieved when the electricity went off at 10 pm and we escaped to our early beds.

Why my man can't work a hotplate

Saturday 17 January 2015

Wet and windy 4 degrees - some sun later

Imminent arrival of guests drove us down town to rental unit this morning - me to clean and OH to fit new shelving.  Old shelving bowing in scary manner.  He unpacked the new hotplate, purchased yesterday, and took out the instruction manual.  In typical fashion, he then just pressed buttons.  The hotplate made a piercing beeping noise.  Nothing else happened.  I read the manual - you have to select the temperature and then the time and then press go.  It is an induction plate and heated a pan of water in truly amazing time.

Back home for lunch and I rang some suspects (unqualified prospects).  Most of them were out but talked to charming couple who are over soon and who are just looking for a straightforward holiday home.  Saints be praised!  Holiday home buyers are a mountain less difficult to please than people who intend being resident all year.

Rain lashed down and had to pin back the shutters.  Decidedly nippy.   Skies cleared later so I took the dog out and armed myself with dog bashing stick.  All was quiet - no barking even.

Made lemon meringue pie and fixed appointments for next week.  Felt very tired.

Ghosts, love and tristesse

Tuesday 13 January 2015

5 degrees  crisp and clear skies

Mail out two new properties which have just come to market - the old church house with the scary cracks and one that has been bubbling under since before Christmas, and the owner has finally got around to signing the permission to sell document.  

The latter house is in a gorgeous village with an excellent restaurant, a chateau which opens its gardens for visitors and a beautiful river.  The owners are a couple who came together after having had children with other partners.  They then had some more children. The living room and kitchen are massive and the bedrooms are like cubicles as they all have been divided up.  The garden has been intensively trampled, mined with small plastic objects, and has seen many parties. Each house has its own resonance. This house resonates love from every stone and beam. 

It is interesting that some houses sell immediately and yet others stick.  They can be similar in size and location and condition.  They can be similar in price.  And yet the properties which stick sell for significantly lower prices and take much longer before someone is ready to take the plunge and go for it.   I used to have for sale the house of a notary.  He had left his wife and moved in with his secretary.  The ex wife and the surly children were left in the house.  It was in great condition and a great location and a reasonable market price.  Did it sell? - not for nearly three years.   The basement had the worst feeling about it - the notary kept his guitars there and I felt that he had spent many hours, strumming sad tunes down there.  People would see the house from the outside and see the garden and get really excited.  This feeling would dissipate within 2 metres of entering the front door. They would come out and look confused.   The French summed it up in one word  'triste'.  This was a sad house.

Other houses are eery in the sense that it looks as if the owners just upped and left.  Their knitting is still in the basket at the side of the fireplace, their clothes are still in the wardrobe and, in the cases of the larger old houses, the beds are still made.  There is a certain kind of lumpy old bedding which creates the look I call 'dead people beds'.  Yellow, stained pillows and staring china dolls complete the look.  These houses are as cold as the grave, doors open with a small scream as they scrape on the mouse droppings, floors creak when no one is standing on them.

My one experience of a spirit is when I was showing a house to an English couple.  The lady and I were upstairs looking at the bedrooms.  The man was downstairs, looking at the boiler. We both heard footsteps on the stairs.  The lady shouted out that we were in the end bedroom.  Silence.  I was looking out of the window and saw her husband in the garden. There was no one in the hallway or the stairs or the landing.  We closed the shutters very quickly and went back downstairs.

I attempted to fill in an application form for WF for an insurance apprenticeship.  Was defeated by the 'describe a memorable customer experience' and 'what is your motivation' parts so emailed them back to WF.  Dog attempted to run off with group of walkers so OH took him out.  I went into town and had coffee in McDonald's and met couple of partner agents and showed them a country house with three acres of land.  It is a lot better on the outside than the inside.   The animals had better housing than the owner but you can always change the inside is what I tell clients.  Glorious day with wind up from Sahara and 19 degrees.  Snowing in UK where I used to live.  It is grim up East.

Met with owner of property I had spied on the Internet the other day.  The much vaunted 360 degrees in the ad were, sadly, marred by a number of close neighbours and an ugly half built garage.  The owner spent an entire hour talking and showing the house before telling me that (a) he had just received an offer of 6 percent below the asking price and he had refused it and (b) he didn't intend putting it back on sale until April.

I told him that first offers were often the best and he dismissed this.  Oh dear.  He may well live to regret that decision.

It was phenomenally hot in the house and I had to keep on taking off layers of clothing.  I could feel my eyes drying out.  Escaped after an hour and a half and went to big shop and had coffee and biscuit stuffed with white chocolate.  OH birthday Thursday - got chocolates and Armagnac for him.  OH not in good mood when I got back as I had been out nearly three hours.  He had made me a very long list of people to ring but had, in effect, shot himself in the foot as he had to make supper.

He made Cajun black stir fry chicken with stir fry potatoes and tomato sauce.  Yum!!  Dog then ran off into the night.  OH set off in the car and came back 20 minutes later to find the dog sitting by the back door.   He is in the dog house (metaphorically speaking).