Interior Life of an Estate Agent. Part 11

Instructions are to take our shoes off before we go inside the house, to turn all the lights off after we have left and to make sure that the cats stay outside. If they get in we must make sure to shut them in the breakfast room. If I have any questions about these instructions then I am given a mobile number to ring. I hope that I can manage these things.

In the event the couple arrive outside and don’t really want to go in, not having done a drive-by, and only now realizing that it is on a busy main road. This should go on the details. It would save a lot of time. We have a look anyway, dutifully take off our shoes in the porch and pad cautiously over the new carpets. It’s a nice place but who wants to pay 300K to listen to traffic all day and night?

What else do we have today? A couple of nasty little modern boxes going for 186K and 194K, both nicely done out and freshly painted but still nasty little modern boxes. I try to imagine a whole family sharing the tiny sitting room. With furniture, a TV and sound system they could just about squeeze in, if they don’t suffer from claustrophobia. Maybe we need to start thinking seriously about Tokyo living, and folding away our beds and sofas so we can actually move around in the room during the day. Maybe I should leave this sardine can of a country.

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Running ‘till your nipples bleed

An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please. Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat. “I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.” I remain frozen in my meerkat position...

Ian McEwan. Amsterdam. London: QPD, 1998

McEwan’s novel about ambition, personal betrayal and revenge features Clive, a modern composer trying to complete a major orchestral work, his friend Vernon, an editor trying to save his ailing newspaper, and Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing politician on the rise. In common, all three have, in previous years, been lovers of recently dead Molly. They meet at her funeral and the story follows the next few weeks of the men’s lives. Vernon and Clive act as one another’s conscience, each infuriating the other. Which is more important, honesty, friendship and trust or Vernon’s newspaper and Clive’s symphony? The novel presents the difficulties of balancing personal and public morality, the importance of private shame and public reputation, the conflict between taking a moral decision for the greater good, or putting first ones own desires. Not just a simple exposé of a politician with a vulnerable side, Amsterdam is full of double standards and surprises, and takes a long, cynical look a...

OLD JOY. Dir Kelly Reichardt. 2005

Dropout Kurt arrives in town and calls up his old friend, earnest father-to-be Mark to suggest a camping trip out in the forest, away from the city. They haven’t seen each other for some time and the film suggests a desire for intimacy as well as a quest for peace. Something of a lost soul, Kurt is emotional and, at times, to be pitied. He lives outside society, in a world of new age type retreats and travels, which seem to have left him out on the margins. In contrast, Mark has a home and a pregnant partner, and tunes his car radio in to phone-ins with much loud chat about the state of society in America but he seems only half alive. They drive out of town, with the camera as passenger, which gazes out of the car window while a gorgeous soundtrack by Yo La Tengo sets a mellow mood. The use of extended silence makes me a little uneasy; it’s hard to get away from memories of Deliverance, and a sense of apprehension. In the city, the glass of the car windows insulates us...

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