I love the cycle ride to the gym. It’s all downhill. Whooosh!! Especially exhilarating is the particularly steep bit near the school. I hadn’t really appreciated that our house was at the top of a hill, although that does explain the views. However, I’m less keen on the cycle ride home from the gym. It’s all uphill. Growing up in the fens doesn’t prepare you or build the required muscles for tackling hills. I have to get off and push at the school when the wheels are almost vertical. My fitness target for the year won’t be in the gym it’ll be getting home without resorting to walking past all of those kids.
We were both home from work fairly early on Monday so Marianna suggested a trip five doors down the street to visit the neighbours. I was thinking more of five minutes sitting and resting. So, we went to visit the people who have extension option number three; the pitched roof. Since we were in our best work clothes when opening the door the woman clearly thought we were the police informing her of a tragedy or the earthly representatives of Jesus wanting to save her from tragedy. She might have preferred both of these to ‘Hello, we’ve just moved into 129 and wanted to ask about your extension’. It was a bit like a mugging she and her husband were just too polite to resist but they gave up all of their information, only with less love than Eddie and Mary. She said ‘Go on and have a look around’ about five times before we did so. We muttered “If you insist” and “Are you sure?” but that was what we’d gone for. The extension was very nicely done, smaller than Option A (Eddie and Mary), but that was to be expected and not as beyond the realms of consideration as I’d expected. They’d kept a nice Monica-Geller-Bing-like file of every stage of the building with architects designs and quotes. The lot. He told us how much it all cost too. It was several thousand more than the first house we bought in Hull just to add on two rooms. Instead of grabbing the file and running we were allowed to borrow the business cards of the builder and architect. I’m not saying they weren’t friendly people but they said ‘Just stick them through the letterbox when you’ve made a note of the details’. Not ‘Hey, lets hang out’.
From there we went to see Becky, our shared-wall neighbour. I realise that we’ve got used to the level of attention we were receiving and now that people have ceased to visit the house we’re forcing ourselves on others. We’re clearly not very subtle. Within the first couple of minutes she asked ‘What can I do for you?’ and ‘What brings you over?’ which we largely ignored but did propose some socialising at a later date. Obviously we discussed the legend that was Basil. She paints a sadder and more deviant picture than the one we’d invented for ourselves. More Sir Les Patterson than Leslie Phillips.
He had been married, to the mother of the four daughters, but his wife died shortly after beginning divorce proceedings. Becky had heard both that it was suicide and that she’d choked on a fish bone. A combination of the two isn’t impossible. In her childhood one of the daughters woke in the night to witness a swinging party; mum having sex with someone in the garden and dad entering someone in a handstand position in the hallway.
Also, some photos of him in bondage gear had been found at his company at some point. He appeared to be a man preoccupied with sex since reference to it made up 50% of his conversation. He had once, after Annie left, asked Becky to make some orders from a website which turned out to be porn site. She was clearly disturbed by these things as well as being able to hear his porn films through the walls.
There were some nice things though in that he used to decorate his garden with fairy lights at Christmas and invite people over, taking donations for charity (Ann Summers). And some sad things in that he was with Annie for 26 years before she left him five years before he died for the man who’d mended the fridge. Becky described Annie as a strumpet/floozy/dolly bird type who was wearing skin tight shorts in public when approaching sixty years of age. Imagine that famous '70's poster of the girl in the tennis outfit with an exposed buttock. Now substitute her for her gran and you're pretty much there. Shortly before Basil died Becky helped him write a letter that was effectively a goodbye letter to her.
We had a tour around her house, of course. Her loft extension has the stairs in a different, better position to ours. She pointed out that our wandering vine wanders considerably onto her garden and also, visible from her side, has wandered onto the flat roof above our extension and is finding its way under the flat roof.
Bhupinder returned on Wednesday evening with some plans which were no better than the ones we’d done. He remains a very likeable man, although he was turning into more of a salesman this time and he’s likely to lose the job if that continues. I was worried before that he appeared to be a jack-of-all-trades but he seems to be tackling even more now, inspired by our ecological hopes for the work on the house. The estimate prices also seem to be a long way below those of others.
