Wednesday, 11 November 2015

HOME HUNTING PART 16: SOLICITORS' WORLD

For a long time the process has been stuck. In my naive mind, I think I had imagined a Victorian dining club with mahogany panels and a vast library of legal books, leather bound and stacked to the ceiling. I'd pictured cigar smoke and twirling moustaches, a roaring fire and a globe that opens up into a drinks cabinet.

It turns out the world of solicitors is a bit more modern, and a bit less sociable. I'm only inferring this of course, because they seem to have quite the difficulty talking to each other. From my observation in fact, it must be a very lonely profession indeed, conveyancing - estate agents grit their teeth when having to deal with them ("bane of my life!" exclaimed mine today on the phone) and even their own clients seem to get 'twitchy' (or so I hear anyway) from time-to-time. I'd have thought a glass of brandy and a chat at the club would have been just the thing for getting down to business. Instead they seem to prefer only talking to each other when they absolutely have to.

Despite hermitic solicitors, it turns out that my estate agent is fairly confident that contracts will be exchanged next week and that I will be a homeowner by the end of November! I had a feeling the end of the process would be the swiftest bit. I was suddenly thrown into a whole series of complex emotions - I'm actually close to moving, to leaving the Intrepids and to figuring out what living alone looks like. Is there a word for scared-and-exhilarated? If there is, I could use it a lot.

How do you spin one of those globes if it has drinks inside it? I've never thought about that before, but it's just occurred to me. It wouldn't be much use as a globe if you couldn't rotate it and stick a bony finger on Uzbekistan for a wager with a chum in a leather wing-backed chair. Similarly, a lazy susan with a patterned map for a lid would be a terrible place for six bottles of sherry and a carafe of Beaujolais Nouveau.

Anyway, I guess I should leave things like that for the solicitors to figure out. But only once they've got on with my paperwork.


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