THE PREVIOUS OWNERS

At the moment, I feel a bit like I’ve been kicked around by an angry horse. I don’t know why I chose horse there; I could have said donkey, bull, sheep, universe, or Tyson Fury. Horse it is. Never mind.

The point is that I’m feeling bruised and battered by all this house stuff. It’s been six weeks now of unbearable disruption, of emotional upside-downiness, and steadily leaking savings account. A year ago, we were desperately trying to live here - a year later, who’d have believed we’d still be trying to live here, and that the house itself would turn out to be the problem.

You should have seen my face when Steve the Plumber told us that our system basically needs replacing. He’s done a patch-up; we’ve got hot water but he can’t change the valve because of where it’s positioned. He doesn’t want to risk splitting the tank. As ever, some cowboys or other were to blame - years ago probably, found by the previous owners. Ah the previous owners…

I’m having difficulty extending grace to the previous owners. They refused to move out of this house when they could have, then just a few months after they did, all these problems suddenly started happening. They were here with an ageing boiler. They were here with a slowly constricting pipe under their extension that had been built over a drain cover. They never had any whiff of any of it. No sewage, no blocked drains, no obvious damp in the walls, nice central heating. We know people who know them, and so humiliatingly, they’ve also found out about all these troubles from their warm, new house.

Now. They’re nice people, and I need to choose the most generous explanation. So, let’s say that they’re relieved (and we all would be, wouldn’t we) but also that they could not have known any of this was about to happen. There was no way to know about the blockage building steadily in their pipes. And the boiler, though old, was working perfectly nicely for them with no reason to suspect it had been bolted up by cowboys. If you don’t know, you don’t know, right? And who knows, perhaps they’ve had huge issues with their new house too? Perhaps a lot of people do.

So I release the previous owners, even though grace is difficult to extend if I think about it for too long. We have to keep walking forwards in disappointment, otherwise we’ll just get stuck.

And anyway, there are no such things as ‘owners’ anyway. We’re all stewards, caretakers, temporary holders, of everything. It’s what we do with what’s entrusted to us, how we invest what we’re given, and what story we can tell at the end of it that counts in this world.