Thursday 17 December 2015
Mild 16 degrees
The most amazing winter weather - don't think we have known it this mild in all the 12 years we have been out here. The negotiation over the Windermere property continues. We rang at 10.30 yesterday, only to be told that the negotiator was having a day off, consequently nothing was done. The owners live in Oz so that seems to put a day onto each reviewed offer. This morning, we receive a curt email saying that the owners will accept 220000 with furniture included. OH rings the Agent and asks him if he has actually spoken to the owners, as they indicated that they would accept this amount days ago. The agent says he is fed up of showing this house. People find it grubby and go and buy elsewhere. Perhaps they haven't the time to put into getting it up to scratch? OH suggests that the agent tries for just under 2220000 euros and the agent says he will ring the owners tomorrow morning. I just want to get on with this now. OH didn't do as I told him and ask the agent what were the arguments he had presented. Perhaps they are so mown out with people offering, that they just let the figures speak? In France you need the eloquence of Shakespeare to get people to put pen to paper and sellers to see reason.
We were just about to go out when there was a knock on the door and a very sad man stood there. A former client and now good friend, NS had come over for a quick pre Christmas check on their holiday home and his wife, back in Scotland, had rung the Previous Evening and told him that their dog had died. An ornery Jack Russell who loved me and mine, and tolerated dog. Cola was their baby and NS looked like he didn't want to spend the day on his own without having someone sympathetic to talk to. He said he and his wife had cried together the previous evening over Skype. We cried for a week when our last dog died. She was 14 and had recovered from a stroke but then developed a huge tumour which, somehow, she hid. It was only when I discovered it one day that she gave up trying to live and we had to say goodbye to her just a couple of days later, when the vet said it was too far gone to do anything about. I still have a patch of her fur, shaved from a foreleg before the injection to oblivion or perhaps heaven. I wonder if, when I shuffle off this mortal coil, she will be waiting for me and lead me to all my dear departed loved ones and if it is dark, I can follow the white patch of her tail like we used to do when in Cornwall and gone to the pub and not sure of the way home. J always knew the way home. Current dog would just take us off the cliff.
Spent two hours in the doctor's waiting room and had my flu jab. Told him about my recurrent and terrible tiredness. He suggested I may be snoring and have sleep apnoea. He gave me a prescription to see a pneumologue and another for a blood test. That will be for 2016. Came out as the light was fading and the Christmas lights were just beautiful on the leaden evening skies.
