Skip to main content

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 20

Give me a break

I have everything covered. In my car are two bottles of water, a packed lunch, a flask of tea and the essential chocolate, 70% cocoa because nothing less will do. I’m off to a racing start to meet thirteen sets of viewers and it’s house to house without a minute in between.

Now, here’s the snag. I had two cups of tea this morning before I picked up all the keys, property details and the viewing list and, by 10.00 am I need the loo. Every house I get to, the people are waiting for me, or the second set arrives right after the first so I can’t sneak into the bathroom. By 12.00 noon I am thankful for pelvic floor exercises. If I’d known this was going to happen I wouldn’t have drunk one of the bottles of water in the car.

I have to resort to lies in the end, saying to one couple that I have to go back inside to check the locks on the doors and windows before I go with them to the next place. They wait outside while I tear through to the bathroom knowing that, if the water’s turned off, there should be one flush left in the cistern. One of my colleagues mistakenly flushed a loo once to check if the water was on; she had a pee, then tried to flush it again. A ha. Water not on. She had to fish out the incriminating tissue and fling it in the garden. I wonder how she washed her hands.

Getting hungry now; trying to drive and rummage around in my bag to find something to eat, but it’s useless; I can't reach. I meet the next folk, do the viewing and so on. I’m getting really cranky now, and I’m late for the next place. So I phone and whine to my colleague in the office that I need time to drink, to have something to eat and to go to the loo. She suggests that I should go and wee behind a bush next time – then adds that it was a joke because I’m not laughing. Maybe my sense of humour is located in my stomach and it needs to be full up in order to function properly. Instead it is gurgling, growling and irascible.

I try to fool it by drinking my second bottle of water – it’s pretty hot in the car – but a fluids only day is not such a good idea. I wonder if I could get a reverse Platypus like hikers and runners use.

It’s 3.15. My last two viewings are with the same family. We are sensitively exploring the small Victorian terraced property where an old lady has recently died. It feels awkward wandering round amongst her things, squeezing upstairs past her stairlift and seeing her walking stick left hanging on the banister. We are respectful, and quiet, standing amongst her possessions, aware of her grieving family because we can see their photographs on the mantelpiece and it is clear that somebody is part way through bagging up and boxing items to be taken away.

But, humans are self-serving after all, and more affecting than the sad, vacated little house, is my bladder. I think I will have my chance, when the family head off to the next place but, to my astonishment, the woman asks if they can all come in my car. My car! She does not know what she is asking. My car is my mobile sitting room, mobile office, mobile cafeteria. I change clothes in it; I often sleep in it; and anyway I need some privacy to use the facilities right here where I am. Why won’t she just go away?

I agree, despite having no company car, and no public liability insurance, which is foolhardy, and heave all the junk out of the back seat into the boot. I realize too late that I’m operating my usual double standards. I didn’t object to having the nice looking young man and his father in my car last week. I lie for the second time today about needing to check the locks on the back door etc and, apologizing to the air as I run back indoors through to the bathroom, am relieved. The water is on.

Be warned, estate agents wee in your houses.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

GLORIOUS 39. Dir Stephen Poliakoff. 2009

Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children. But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families. Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, contro...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE. Dir. Julio Medem 1998

I should have done some research before going to see this because I thought it was going to be about lovers in the Arctic Circle. Instead of being transported to the icy wastes of an unfamiliar landscape the film is set in urban Spain, but in a very cold Spain with wind, rain and everyone in thick jumpers. Shot in near monochrome, the effect is cold and the Spartan interiors of apartments provide a bleak, comfortless setting for love to blossom. Otto and Ana meet as children and are attracted to each other due to the nature of coincidence, and coincidence plays a large part in the narrative. The two children are engaging and there are some comic scenes between them when young and, later, as teenagers, with trysts in the night and their love kept secret. However, once they’re older the story loses momentum and, at times becomes surreal and confusing as the viewpoint moves in and out of the two characters’ imaginations. Otto suffers an extreme grief reaction when his mother acci...
Post a Comment
Read more