The Boxer

4th April 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

I am just a poor boy, though my story’s seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles.

Such are promises – All lies and jests.
Still a man hears what he wants to hear,
And disregards the rest


The Home Stretch, maybe (pun not intended). Three more appointments, and further developments.

Appointment 1

The second house we saw last Saturday, second viewing. We’re late because we’re expecting the estate agent to turn up and he doesn’t. The vendors don’t mind too much – they’re friendly people and they answer all my questions. It’s a very nice house, and since it’s been marked down it’s maybe within the realms of negotiation to our price point. Depending on what we see later, we’ll probably make an offer.

Appointment 2

Starts fantastically when we can’t find anywhere to park nearby – it’s all residents’ bays. We end up parking 5 minutes’ walk away, which isn’t so much of a problem. Quite useful to have done so – on the walk back there’s a very rough-looking pub and a 1960s council tower block on the verge of collapse, no more than 100 yards away. When we get to the house, the estate agent’s already there waiting. Unfortunately when he comes to let us in, his key doesn’t work. Cue twenty minutes waiting outside while the vendor rushes back from the shops. House is nice enough, but I don’t like the way the space is divided up – it’s been significantly remodelled, and there’s the parking and neighbours to think about too.

Appointment 3

The second house we saw on the first day of viewings. Pretty much as I remember it. Still nice enough to make an offer on but we liked the first house more. Still a very nice place, mind. If the offer on the first house isn’t accepted (and, being realistic, I’m not really expecting it to be) we’ll be happy to make an offer on this house.

More Conversations with the Damned

Once again I call the absentee estate agent from the first house of the day. “Are you willing to make an offer?” he asks. As it happens, I am. I give him my terms and he says he’ll call the vendors and get back to me. So far, I’m in limbo. As I said above, I’m not really expecting the offer to be accpted, but given I haven’t had a call back yet, I don’t think it’s an outright refusal.

So – might have found a place, might not. Let’s see what happens over the next few days.

HIPs don’t lie

30th March 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

You know my HIPs don’t lie
And I’m starting to feel it’s right
All the attraction, the tension
Don’t you see baby, this is perfection

Ahem. Not my usual choice of accompaniment but the pun was too delicious to resist. The ongoing saga goes on, and I’m beginning to wonder what some estate agents do for their cash.

Saturday, Appointment 1

A house. Seriously the most nondescript house that I’ve seen so far. Good-sized kitchen  and big combined lounge / dining room, reasonable sized rooms upstairs. Apple trees in the garden and a garage. If houses were foodstuffs, I’d probably describe this one as the equivalent of a boiled potato. Sure, it’ll keep you alive, it’s got some stuff in it that’s good for you, but by about the first three days you’ll be desperate for something with a little more flavour to it.

Saturday, Appointment 2

A house. There’s been some mix-up at the estate agent, and he can’t meet us, so he calls us to give us directions. I don’t even have a house number for the place, so we have to walk along the road until we find the house from the photograph I have in front of me. It’s a decent house, mid-terrace, good size, and the current owners are decently friendly. Garage at the back, loft conversion – the place is certainly big enough, and well-looked after. The problem? It’s £20k over our top budget. The estate agent thinks the vendors will budge. I’m not so sure.

Conversations with the damned

So, feedback for all those who we went to look at houses with. I set up two second viewings for next week, and give the rest of the people I’ve viewed with a polite “thanks, but no”. The agent for the second house on saturday repeats his beliefs that the vendor will shift on price. I say I’ll think about it but won’t promise anything. I ask for a cop of the HIP for both the houses I want to see again (HIPs, I’ll grant, are mostly a waste of time, but the land registry and future planning bits are kind of useful, which is why I’m getting hold of them.) The first agent sends it there and then. The second says he will, then doesn’t bother.

When I phone him up the next day to chase, he apologises and tells me the house was taken off the market this morning, and he’s going to have to cancel my second viewing. Nice of him to be proactive and tell me. Funnily enough, this is the same agent that tried to get me to take out a mortgage with him too. Any more houses, I’m going to go out of my way to avoid dealing with him.

On a cheerful note, the estate agent from Saturday has come through – he’s texted me to say the vendor’s knocked £15k off their asking price. Still over our limit, but maybe there’s some maneuvering room here now. Hmmm. Needs more thought.

The Old Apartment

26th March 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

Broke into the old apartment
Forty-two steps from the street
Crooked landing, crooked landlord.
Narrow laneway filled with crooks
This is where we used to live.

Seconds out, round two.  Four more houses down, some good, some not so good. So without further ado:

Day 2, Appointment 1.

A victorian semi. Looks good from the outside, though the front garden’s a bit overgrown. The estate agent’s a local independent and he turns up on time. Inside, the hallway immediately reminds me again of old houses full of students, though in this case besides the chipboard wallpaper, there’s little actually in common. The current owner is apparently a widow – an impression I’d already got from the pictures in the particulars. The front room is lovely, as is the dining room. Kitchen is a little messy but in decent nick. Downstairs bathroom needs refurbishing but not urgently, there’s no window that opens so there’s a little damp where water has splashed from the sink. Nothing too bad. Upstairs, the two smaller bedrooms are fine. One is only single glazed but the frame looks to be in a decent shape. The shower room’s been more recently updated, and again looks fine.

The problems? The master bedroom, where the current owner’s stripped off the old wallpaper and not got around to replacing it (helpfully showing a patch of water-damaged plaster, which I’m told was due to a burst pipe which is fixed). The other issue is location – it’s on a Red Route, meaning parking is in a side street a couple of minutes’ walk away.

Appointment 2

Unexpected super bonus appointment! The agent from appointment 1 has another house he thinks I’d like. It’s 2 bedrooms, terraced, but pristine. I meet him after lunch, and he’s not kidding, it’s very nice inside and had been well looked after. It’s a bit further from the station but who cares? The only real issue is the size – 2 bedrooms is a bit on the small side, but it’s otherwise excellent. Needs more thought. But after the unexpected super bonus appointment, we have:

Unwanted Interlude

I met the next estate agent in their offices in Sutton. They were going to show me two houses – they very nearly didn’t show me any, and it was only because neither of them were available with other agents that I didn’t walk out there and then. Apparently they really, really, want me to ditch my current mortgage broker and go with their in-house one, simply because he’d advised us to hold back on getting an AiP until absolutely necessary. Fat chance. I spend twenty minutes getting the hard sell on why the mortgage I’m considering is the wrong one (it’s quite obvious they get higher commission on certain mortgages) listening disinterestedly to the absolute wanker behind the desk who doesn’t seem to want me to get a word in edgeways, much less listen to what I have to say. Eventually he loses interest (half an hour later!) and releases me to his colleague who’s going to show me the houses. He looks barely out of school, and doesn’t exactly scream competence or experience to me. However, he takes me to:

Appointment 3

A repossessed house. It’s a lot bigger than anything we’ve seen so far – 3 bedrooms, loft conversion, “sun room” at the back, and much bigger than I was expecting. And there’s damp. Lots and lots and lots of damp. Rough reckoning tells me it’d be about £3k to fix the damp alone. The roof on the sun room needs replacing too, as does the bathroom interior in its entirety. It’s a definite “nope”, even more than the place we saw last Saturday.

Appointment 4

Another (smaller) victorian semi. Bloody well looked after, period features, nothing to do. It’s a really nice house but there’s not much to differentiate it from every other nice house I’ve seen. Might well go back for a second viewing, was that kind of place. The Astroturfed back garden was a bit strange, though, makes me wonder why it wasn’t real grass.

So – six down, three more tomorrow. If I had a favourite, it’d be the first one I saw today, I think. Not perfect but then anything that’s too perfect makes me suspicious.

Rule the world (with Love)

21st March 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in 2 Comments

It didn’t happen to us overnight.
Just ’cause it happened doesn’t mean it’s right –
To our embarrassment we lost the fight
To rule the world with love.

As some may be aware, we’ve finally managed to scrape together enough money to finally get a mortgage and buy somewhere of our own. No mean feat in London – the flat just below ours went recently for a cool £335k. A third of a million pounds! for a flat that has a single double bedroom, a tiny box for a second bedroom and a kitchen barely big enough to swing a cat in!

No, we’re looking somewhere a little less pricy. Somewhere we can get a 3-bedroom house given the kind of deposit we’ve got saved up. So far we’ve had appointments to view three houses, on a rainy Saturday.

Appointment 1:

About an hour before

*ring ring* “Hello there, it’s the estate agent for <address> here. I’m dreadfully sorry but the vendor’s having to cancel your viewing; her children are sick”.

Fair enough, a bit more notice might have been fine, but  understandable. Skip ahead to:

Appointment 2:

Setting off in the car with an hour to get there (should be a 30-minute drive) we eventually find the place and are 5 minutes late. From the outside, the house looks OK. I ring the bell. After no reply for several minutes, I knock instead. The vendor answers, and immediately I’m taken aback. He’s still wearing his threadbare dressing gown, in the mid-afternoon, and even in that he looks scruffy. I’m here to look at the house, I remind myself. Unfortunately the house isn’t any more impressive than its current owner. It’s a victorian semi-detached, and while on the outside looks to be in good nick, the inside is a different story. The place doesn’t seem to have been decorated in years, and even when it had been, it’s paint that’s been thrown over the old wallpaper. At the joins with the ceiling, the paper’s coming away, probably caused by damp. The extension at the back, containing a kitchen and a bathroom, shows signs of a leaking roof, and the way it’s been built means the dining room gets no light.

Upstairs is pretty much the same. More signs of peeling wallpaper, I can’t even get in the third bedroom to take a decent look at it, there’s so much stuff been shoved in there, but from what I can see there’s little to convince me the place is worth the cash. It reminds me of the sorts of houses we used to rent back when we were students and couldn’t afford any better. The vendor tells me he’s had it on the market for “a couple of months”. Google disagrees, and I now understand why. Maybe if he dropped the price by 20% he might, just might, stand a chance.  A few notes in the notebook, to the effect of “no chance” (a shame because on paper it looked excellent) and we make our merry way to:

Appointment 3:

Is a couple of miles from appointment 2, so we end up arriving 30 minutes early. Not a problem, though, the vendor is out and we’re meeting the estate agent. We park up and given we’re so early, take a walk around the neighbourhood. It seems OK, mixture of older terraces and a few newer builds, people looking after their gardens. And then the heavens open, and so, soaked to the bone, we sit in the car, shivering, waiting for the estate agent to turn up. In some bizarre act of karma, he’s late this time – though when he turns up, having phoned ahead, he apologises and shows us the house.

It’s the same asking price as the last one, but what a huge difference. Well looked-after, no obvious signs of anything problematic. It’s a house we can imagine ourselves living in, so I’ll be asking for further details from his office on Monday (though I didn’t say so at the time). The only two problems – it’s near a busy road (though even at the end of the garden the noise wasn’t too bad) and the train will take about 45 minutes to get to central London. I can live with those.

Come Friday, I’m going to see some more. And I’m sure I’ll have more tales of the weird to share…

The End of the Tour

6th February 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

There’s a girl with a crown and a scepter
Who’s on WLSD
And she says that the scene isn’t what it’s been
And she’s thinking of going home.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on trains recently, travelling up and down the country for various family-related reasons. And you know  what? I’m starting to believe that British railways aren’t even in remotely as bad a position as might be supposed.

A couple of summers ago I was in the position to take an Amtrak train from Chicago to Sandusky, Ohio. Sandusky isn’t a big town. The only notable thing there is the Cedar Point amusement park, the reason I was visiting.

The first thing to notice about Union Station in Chicago was the squalour. It felt like a neglected version of a Greyhound bus terminal, which is saying a lot. On board the train, though, things were rather better. Spacious seats, a friendly train conductor, and space downstairs for the luggage. The trouble is, they’re needed.

Amtrak’s top speed trains do about 50 miles per hour. When you consider the sheer scope of the geography involved, that isn’t very fast at all. Almost all trains run overnight. The train I was taking arrived at my destination at about 1am, supposedly. In fact it was nearer 3am local time when it finally pulled in, not exactly the most social hour when the local cab companies (and I use this in the loosest possible sense; there are half a dozen Sandusky taxi companies, all a single driver with a cellphone acting as their own dispatcher) almost all cease operation at 1:30.

So Amtrak’s fares are reasonable, but sticking to the timetable isn’t exactly their strongest point. This is because the rails are all owned by freight companies who prioritise their own trains over the passengers’ (in violation of a toothlessly enforced federal law, but this is by-the-by).

On the other side of the Atlantic, we have the deregulated remains of British Rail. Fares are higher, per mile, but on the other hand we have daytime trains, that run (pretty much) to schedule. Compared to Japan, the lateness is terrible, but it’s bearable. I can sit back, watch a movie, and get there in about the same time as if I drove, for the cheap-as-chips price of twice the cost of petrol of I were to drive there.

That’s the trouble. If two of us travel, it’s a cost of four times that to drive. And while I’d love to take the train, it just doesn’t make economic sense for us  to do so. The ever-escalating cost of petrol will take care of that, but not fast enough. The economic argument is far and away against it and will continue to be for the next ten years at least.

Give me East Coast, Virgin Trains or even South West Trains any day over Amtrak. Just price it at a point that means I actually have a choice between the car and the train.

Rock Hard Times

29th January 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

They told me that I couldn’t come back here again
Took me for some kind of fool.
Said I was doing things that never should be done
But I don’t care about their rules!

As if I cared ’bout the little minds
In the little heads of the herd-
There’s nothing you could dream
Would be more absurd.

The Apple iPad has been released, to much fanfare, and much derision. Personally I don’t have much interest in the device, but I can see the use. Generally if I want to watch television, I’m doing so on a decent-sized screen in my house. On long journeys I prefer to read books, the paper sort. Yes they’re heavier and they take up much more space, but there’s an emotional component to lugging around a lump of dead tree that just isn’t present in an e-reader.

No sooner had the iPad been announced, though, than the Free Software Foundation weighed in with its “Defective by Design” compaign, compaining that the iPad was DRM-encumbered, wouldn’t allow sharing of media and much more of the kind of FUD that I used to expect from Microsoft ten years ago.

Now, before I go any further: I have nothing against the Free Software Foundation. They have done a great many things I find eminently agreeable. This, however isn’t one of them. The aim is lofty and agreeable, I’ll grant, allow any kind of content to be played on anyone’s device. However…

Society just doesn’t work that way. In an ideal world we would all pay for the digital media we consume, be it music, video, software programs, or anything else. Unfortunately this isn’t an ideal world. The sheer number of people who think they have a right to content for the price of pressing the disc / the bandwidth consumed by downloading it is enormous, and growing. Who’d pay for something they can get (not entirely legally) for free? I know of a large number of people, even those who by rights should be able to pay the asking price easily, who will chip their games consoles to play pirated games, download films off the less legitimate parts of the internet and not think twice about it.

The problem is the relative level of social acceptability of piracy. It’s acceptable to illegally download films, to chip consoles to play copied games, and so on. This is the problem. The DRM is just a symptom of this. It’s unfortunate, but the producers of this content need to provide some sort of mechanism to encourage people to pay for it. If it’s easier (and cheaper) to obtain it without payment to the original distributor, a large proportion of people will do so.

Unfortunately while I have every sympathy for the FSF and their campaign to make information exchange unencumbered, I’m also a realist. At present, in my experience, allowing anyone to exchange content freely will result in the return on the investment in said content to be lowered immensely, probably to the point of content costing more to produce than is returned.

My employer spends a lot of money fighting people who counterfeit its products. These are products that are marketed direct to businesses. Anything that will save a dollar here or there is often jumped upon by the people who buy these counterfeits, even when they know that someone else is not getting paid for the work thas has been put in to generate the product in the first place.

So, FSF and its supporters. I’m sorry, but I agree with DRM, at least until it’s socially unacceptable to take someone else’s work without them or their legitimate distriutor getting anything for it. Once you can assure me that the producer of a given work will get the payment they so richly deserve, I’ll be happy to join the ranks of anti-DRM campaigners. Until then, I’m afraid I have to keep living in a world where we need safeguards to make sure that the content is paid for.

As an aside, I recently bought a film on DVD. Rather than the usual “Piracy is against the law” line, there was a simple, short sequence that simply thanked me for supporting the producers of the film by paying for it. I was very pleasantly surprised. I approve of that message.

Apple Trees

21st January 2010 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

We were on this car trip
And I was looking at these rows and rows of trees
All along the highway
I don’t know what kind of trees –
Apples or something.

There were just like thousands and thousands of rows
Of a thousand trees each.
And I picked one tree that I could see
About eight trees back
In this one row in the mddle.

Just one in a billion.
That’s how I felt.

A Little Respect

29th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

And if I should falter,
Would you open your arms out to me?
We can make love not war –
And live at peace in our hearts.
I’m so in love with you,
I’ll be forever blue.
What religion or reason
Could drive a man to forsake his lover?

I’ve written my foreword, I’ve produced a PDF of the (un-)finished article, and very shortly I’l be sending it off to the printers, for a very limited print run of two copies, much as I have for each of the three other completed NaNo Novels.

Tomorrow I get to kick back, relax, and most importantly, not write anything. It’ll be marvellous.

In case anyone is interested, while I’m not ready to release the text of Thinner than Water to anyone other than myself as yet, you can read the foreword, which I hope gives a clear indication of what I’m doing, here: https://www2.sleepawaytheafternoon.org.uk/foreword-to-thinner-than-water/

Another Universe

29th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in 1 Comment

It’s a strange way down from the cradle to the hearse,
Take me back, oh, put me in reverse.
‘Cos you’ll never be the last one and you’ll never be the first.
Maybe we’ll all meet again in another universe.

Yay! NaNoWriMo over for another year. Just got a foreword to write, explaining how my world was conceived and I’ll be chucking it in the direction of Lulu, to gather dust for 12 months or so until I decide if it’s worth doing something with. Of the previous three I’ve finished, I have one I want to clean up, one I never want to see again and one I’m not sure about.

This year I’ve been particularly annoyed by OpenOffice.org. What I’ve written this year has been particularly dialogue heavy, and there’s a bug in OOo’s wordcounter that counts opening quotation marks as words. So, having carefully planned my last 5,000 words, I wrote my ending paragraph, was over 50k and rejoiced. Then I copied and pasted the manuscript into the word count validator. 48,800. At that point I was ready to explode. How do 1,200 words disappear? Cue frantic skimming through the manuscript, find bits here and there that could be extended. Two hours later, it verifies as 50k. That two hours was the worst of any NaNo experience I’ve had to date, but at least it’s over now.

This was all complicated by the fact that what I’ve written was originally intended to be a prologue of about 5,000 words to a completely different story, so with regard to plotting it’s very tight and there isn’t a lot of space for adding waffle. In terms of setting up the next part, it’s all done very well, but I suspect that part 2 will never be written (I’ve tried sequels before; I become too attached to the characters and have trouble doing things like killing them off).

Ah well, I have 50,000 words of fiction, telling a story. It’s just not the story I originally intended to write.

Fresh Feeling

24th November 2009 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in No Comment

You don’t have a clue what it is like to be next to you.
I’m here to tell you that it is good, that it is true.

Birds singing a song, old paint is peeling,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.
Words can’t be that strong, my heart is real,
This is that fresh, that fresh feeling.

Ahh, bliss. As is traditional every November, I’m in the middle of a week off work ostensibly to catch up on my NaNoWriMo word count. This year, though, there isn’t much catching up to do. By the start of this week I was bang on target (and I’m now 500 words ahead, and will probably get some more down before the day is out). I’m satisfying my “primary” reason for this time off, but there’s an important secondary reason.

Since January 2nd this year, I’ve had two short breaks away from work and that’s it. A couple of long weekends away, a couple of odd Fridays (which were spent travelling up north for family reasons) and the strain is beginning to take its toll. So I have ten straight days without having to go to work and it’s bloody fantastic. There’s some stuff that I need to get done, but just doing bits and pieces as I get to them rather than trying to fit them around work and everything else that’s going on, it’s lovely just to do one at at time, no pressure, chilling the rest of the time.

So, yes. Rest is fantastic. A break from everything is just what I needed, and I’m enjoying myself immensely. May my newfound chilled-outness follow me back to work on the 1st.