Is there a name for that experience when you forget for a moment that somebody’s dead?
For a year or so after my dad’s death 11 years ago I’d routinely have that moment:
when I’d go “I should tell my dad about this!”, followed immediately by an “Oh… no, I can’t, can I?”. Then, of course, it got rarer. It happened in 2017, but I don’t know if it happened again after
that – maybe once? – until last week.
Last week I took our eldest up Cairn Gorm, a mountain my dad and I have climbed up (and/or skiied down!) many times.
I wonder if subconsciously I was aware that the anniversary of his death – “Dead Dad Day”, as my sisters and I call
it – was coming up? In any case, when I found myself on Cairn Gorm on a family trip and snapped a photo from near the summit, I had a moment where I thought “I should send this
picture to my dad”, before once again remembering that nope, that wasn’t possible.
My dad loved a good Munro: this photo of him was taken
only about a kilometre and a half West of where I took my most recent snap on Cairn Gorm, as he ice climbed up the North face of Stob Coire an t-Sneachda.
Strange that this can still happen, over a decade on. If there’s a name for the phenomenon, I’d love to know it.
I’ve a rare opportunity today to expand my Minesweeper grid by reaching a hashpoint in 52 -2. Also, to engage in my established tradition of “getting outside and exploring” on 19
February (in memory of my father, the most “get outside and explore” person I ever knew, who died ten years ago today while, you guessed it, getting outside and exploring).
I’ve booked some accommodation nearby with a view to seeing some of the Wye valley while I’m here.
Expedition
It’s become traditional that I mark the anniversary of my father’s death with an outdoors adventure: he was a huge fan of
getting outside and exploring the world (and, indeed, died during a training exercise for a planned expedition to the North Pole). Sometimes (e.g. 2014-02-19 51 -0, 2021-02-19 51 -1) this coincides with a geohashing expedition; today was one of those days.
I’d originally hoped to spend a long weekend on this, the tenth anniversary of his death, trying to clear two or three of my three unfinished corners of the minesweeper grid centred on my home graticule. This would have involved a possible quick day trip to this graticule followed by a camping expedition along the South coast to try to pick up the remaining two. However,
it was clearly not to be: for a start, all of the weekend’s hashpoints on the South coast graticules turned out to be at sea! But even if that weren’t the case, I was hardly likely to
go camping on the coast during the “red warning” of Storm Eunice! So I revised my plans
and changed my expedition to find this hashpoint (still gaining one more part of my grid), then stay over in the graticule before possibly heading East for one or two more over the
coming day(s).
I drove up to the village of Kinnersley and parked at (52.253611, -3.0975) in the car park of
the Church of St James. From there, I walked up the footpath to the North, through three fields, until I reached the edge of the orchards near which I’d surveyed the hashpoint to be.
The fields were incredibly muddy following the recent heavy rain. It soon became apparent that the hashpoint was on the near-side of the hedgerow and thankfully not in the orchard
itself, so I walked along the edge of the hedge until I reached it at 15:45:07.
Returning to my car, I drove on to my accommodation, took a walk around the village, then pressed on in the morning to the 2022-02-20 52 -1 hashpoint!
Tracklog
My GPSr kept a tracklog of my entire two-day expedition:
My partner fleeblewidget and I are celebrating 14 years together as a couple with a glamping holiday near Sawley and took the opportunity to
climb up Pendle Hill this morning. I’ve many fond memories of taking this route with my father, when he was alive, and it’s interesting to be able to see how, just on the timescales of
my own life, the shape of this hillside has changed owing to smaller landslides. Lower down, for example, human-caused erosion (picture attached) has damaged our destroyed paths I used
to take, and new fences encourage climbers onto alternative routes. We also observed evidence (picture attached) of an older landslide, with a cliff of relatively new earth exposed
where there clearly used to be a grassy/rocky slope.
Views were very good today and we could just about make out what we assume is the Ribble estuary in the distance from near the summit. A great and enjoyable expedition. Picture of the
two of us at the trig point attached. TFTC.
While I was traipsing off around the countryside to commemorate the anniversary of the death of my dad, one of his
former colleagues uploaded to YouTube a video that he originally produced for the UK Bus Awards Presentation Ceremony 2012.
As his son, it felt a little weird for me to be marking the occasion on what: the ninth anniversary of his death? It’s not even a nice round number. But clearly I’m not the
only one whose mind drifted to my father on 19 February.
Fun fact: this photo – extracted from the video – was originally taken by me:
My dad’s crouching to make sure he’s in the frame, because I was less than half his height at this point. The horizon is wonky because I’m crouching too, in order to imitate him, and
I’ve lost my balance. Altogether, I rate this piece of photographic art… umm: not bad for a preschooler?
Maybe I should be asking for royalties! Or at least, using the video as an excuse to springboard my career as a professional photographer.
Field behind Hill Barn, near the Gom’s Hole public footpath, in the valley beneath the hamlet of Clapton-on-the-Hill. About 4km outside the village of Bourton-on-the-Water,
Gloucestershire.
(Retro) Participants
Dan Q (as a retrohash on the same date but 19 years later, on 2021-02-19)
(Retro)Plans
On the second anniversary of the death of my father, a man who loved to get out into the world and get lost, I undertook my
first geohashing expedition. As this seemed to be a good way to remember him I decided to repeat the experience on this, the ninth anniversary of his death, but the actual
hashpoints for the day didn’t look interesting… so I opted to make my way to what would have been my nearest hashpoint on the day he died.
(Retro)Expedition
The weather looked horrible and the COVID lockdown (and working from home in general in recent years) has put me out of practice at
cycling, so I thought a 40-50 mile round trip through the rolling hills of the Cotswolds was just the thing. This may have been a mistake, as my aching legs were able to testify for
several days.
Cycling through Witney, over the hills behind Burford, and then across the Windrush valley and into Gloucestershire was a long, arduous, and damp journey, but what really got me was the
wind picking up in the afternoon and giving me a headwind to fight against all the way back home.
Near the hashpoint I was able to lock my bike up at the junction between Sherbourne Street and Bourton Hill – a place shown on my map as “Gom’s Hole” which sounds exactly like what a
D&D dungeon master would have a goblin would name his bar. From there I followed the footpath towards Farringdon. As the hashpoint drew closer I began to suspect that it would be
unreachable: tall walls, fences, and hedges stood on both sides of the (flooded) footpath, but at the last minute they gave way to wide meadows. I turned off the path and crossed a dyke
to the hashpoint, where I had a great view of hares and deer in the valley below. Minutes later, the owner of Hill Barn came over with her dog and asked what I was doing around the back
of her land and why I was taking pictures, so I explained that I’d strayed from the footpath (true) because my GPS had told me too (technically true) but I was heading back down to what
I could see was the path, now (true, if misleading).
She continued to watch me all the way back to my bike, so I changed my plans (which had been to eat a sandwich lunch and drink a pint of Guinness: my dad’s beer of choice) near the
hashpoint and instead I cycled away to a nearby layby to have my lunch.
After a 48.3 mile round trip I got back home aching and exhausted, but pleased to have made it to this damp hashpoint.
@scatmandan I’ve just been in a meeting with with some people who were saying some very positive things about the legacy of work your
dad (I think) did with buses in the North East
That seems likely. Conversely: if people are still talking about my work 7½ years after I die it’ll probably be to say “who wrote this bit of legacy code this way and what were
they thinking?”
I’m not sure that I process death in the same way that “normal” people do. I blame my family.
My sisters and I have wished one another a “Happy Dead Dad Day” every 19 February since his death.
When my grandmother died in 2006 I was just in the process of packing up the car with Claire to
try to get up to visit her before the inevitable happened. I received the phone call to advise me that she’d passed, and – ten emotional
minutes later – Claire told me that she’d “never seen anybody go through the five stages of grief as fast as that
before”. Apparently I was a textbook example of the Kübler-Ross model, only at speed. Perhaps I should volunteer to stand in front of introductory psychology classes and feel things, or
something.
I guess there isn’t actually a market for Happy Dead Dad Day greetings cards?
Since my dad’s death seven years ago, I’ve marked Dead Dad Day every 19 February a way that’s definitely “mine”: with a pint or three of Guinness
(which my dad enjoyed… except if there were a cheaper Irish stout on draught because he never quite shook off his working-class roots) and some outdoors and ideally a hill, although
Oxfordshire makes the latter a little difficult. On the second anniversary of my dad’s death, I commemorated his love of setting out and checking the map later by making
my first geohashing expedition: it seemed appropriate that even without him, I could make a journey without either of us
being sure of either the route… or the destination.
Eating cornflakes together in the garden was a tradition of my dad and I’s since at least 23 years before this photo was taken.
As I implied at his funeral, I’ve always been far more-interested in celebrating life than
mourning death (that might be why I’m not always the best at supporting those in grief). I’m not saying that it isn’t sad
that he went before his time: it is. What’s worst, I think, is when I remember how close-but-not-quite he came to getting to meet his grandchildren… who’d have doubtless called him
“Grandpeter”.
We all get to live, and we’re all going to die, and I’d honestly be delighted if I thought that people might remember me with the same kind of smile (and just occasionally tear) that
finds my face every Dead Dad Day.
I’ve just listened to Robert Plant’s new album, Carry Fire. It’s pretty good.
A long while after my dad’s death five years ago, I’d meant to write a blog post about the experience of grief in a digital age. As I’ve clearly
become increasingly terrible at ever getting draft posts complete, the short of it was this: my dad’s mobile phone was never recovered and soon after its battery went flat any calls to
his number would go straight to voicemail. He’d recently switched to a pay-as-you-go phone for his personal mobile, and so the number (and its voicemail) outlived him for many months. I
know I’m not the only one that, in those months, called it a few times, just to hear his voice in the outgoing message. I’m fully aware that there are recordings of his voice elsewhere,
but I guess there was something ritualistic about “trying to call him”, just as I would have before his accident.
The blog post would have started with this anecdote, perhaps spun out a little better, and then gone on to muse about how we “live on” in our abandoned Inboxes, social media accounts,
and other digital footprints in a way we never did before, and what that might mean for the idea of grief in the modern world. (Getting too caught up in thinking about exactly what it
does mean is probably why I never finished writing that particular article.) I remember that it took me a year or two until I was able to delete my dad from my phone/email
address book, because it like prematurely letting go to do so. See what I mean? New aspects of grief for a new era.
Thanks, Rob.
Another thing that I used to get, early on, was that moment of forgetting. I’d read something and I’d think “Gotta tell my dad about that!” And then only a second later
remember why I couldn’t! I think that’s a pretty common experience of bereavement: certainly for me at least – I remember distinctly experiencing the same thing after my gran’s death, about 11 years ago. I’m pretty sure it’s been almost a year since I last had such a forgetting moment for my
father… until today! Half way into the opening track of Carry Fire, a mellow folk-rocky-sounding piece called The May
Queen (clearly a nod to Stairway there), I found myself thinking “my dad’d love this…” and took almost a quarter-second before my brain kicked in and added “…damn;
shame he missed out on it, then.”
If you came here for a music review, you’re not going to get one. But if you like some Robert Plant and haven’t heard Carry Fire yet, you might like to. It’s like he set out to
make a prog rock album but accidentally smoked too much pot and then tripped over his sitar. And if you knew my dad well enough to agree (or disagree) that he would have dug it, let me
know.
No matter how prepared you think you are for the questions your toddler might ask (and the ways in which they might go on to interpret your answer), they’ll always find a way to catch
you off guard. The following exchange with our little one began last weekend in the car:
I’m sure we’ve all been asked “Why can’t I drink what you’re drinking?”
Her: “I read the Beano Annual at Grandtom’s house.” (Grandtom is what she calls Ruth‘s father – her maternal
grandfather.)
Me: “Oh? Did you like it?”
Her: “Yes. Did you have the Beano Annual when you were a little boy?”
Me: “Yes: I would sometimes get one for Christmas when I was little.”
Her: “Who gave it to you?”
Me: “My mummy and daddy did.”
Her: “Your mummy is Nanna Doreen.”
Me: “That’s right.”
Her: “Why haven’t I met your daddy?”
Dan and daddy.
That’s a question that I somehow hadn’t expected to come up so soon. I probably ought to have guessed that it was on its way, given her interest in her extended family lately and how
they’re all connected to one another, but I’d somehow assumed that it’d have come up organically at some point or another before her curiosity had made the connection that there was
somebody clearly missing: somebody whom she’d heard mentioned but, inexplicably, never met.
Me: “My daddy died, a couple of years before you were born. He was climbing a mountain one day when he had a nasty accident and fell off, and he died.”
Her: “…” (a thoughtful pause)
Me: “Are you okay?”
Her: “How many birthdays did he have?”
Me: “Fifty-four. That’s a bigger number than you can count to, I think!”
Her: “How many birthdays will I have?”
Wow, this went further than I expected, very quickly. Obviously, I want to be open about this: the last thing I want is to introduce a taboo, and I’m a big believer in the idea that
on I’m suddenly conscious of the fact that she’s clearly close to a minor existential crisis, having for possibly the first time connected the concepts of age and death. And, of
course, I’m trying to translate my thoughts into ideas that a toddler can follow every step of the way. While simultaneously trying to focus on driving a car: she knows how to pick her
timing! Okay…
Me: “Nobody knows for sure, but you’ll probably get lots and lots: seventy, eighty, ninety… maybe even a hundred birthdays!”
Her: “Then I’ll have a hundred candles.”
Me: “That’s right. Do you think you could blow out a hundred candles?”
Three candles was well within her grasp.
So far, so good. Knowing that, like most toddlers, ours has a tendency to make some new discovery and then sit on it for a day or two before asking a follow-up question, I briefed Ruth
and JTA so that they wouldn’t be caught too off-guard when she started telling them, for example, what she’d like for her hundredth
birthday or something.
And all was well until yesterday, when we were laying in the garden under the recent glorious sunshine, playing a game that involved rolling along the lawn and back and bumping
into one another in the middle, when she stood up and announced that she’d like to play something different.
Her: “Now we’re playing the die game.”
Me: “Oh…kay. How do we play that?”
Her: “We’re going to go up a mountain and then fall off.”
Me: (following her in a stomp around the garden) “Then what do we do?”
Her: “We die.” (mimes falling and then lies very still)
A ‘dead’ body at the bottom of a ‘mountain’. Erk!
And so that’s how I came to spend an afternoon repeatedly re-enacting the circumstances of my father’s death, complete – later on, after Ruth
mentioned the air ambulance that carried his body down from the mountain – with a helicopter recovery portion of the game. I’ve role-played some unusual games over the years, but this
one was perhaps the oddest, made stranger by the fact that it was invented by a three year-old.
Toddlers process new information in strange (to adults) ways, sometimes.
I recently finished reading a novel called Ice & Lemon, which was given to me by my mother for Christmas (my reading list is quite long at the moment; I’m only just getting
close to catching up!). I could tell you about what I liked about the book – and I will, in a moment – but before that I’d like to mention what makes this book personally so
spooky to me, as a reader.
Ice and Lemon, by Pete Hartley
My mother got it for me because the coincidences apparent on the front and back cover appealed to her:
The author’s name, Pete Hartley, is remarkably similar to my father’s name, Peter Huntley.
The strapline contains a date, and that date is my mother’s birthday.
The protagonist of the story is called Daniel, which is – prior to that point in the late 1990s when I started going by Dan among virtually everybody – my name.
The front cover shows a picture of a baby’s hand, and Ruth‘s expected delivery date of New Year’s Eve was thus a hot
discussion topic for us all around Christmas-time.
Okay, so – that’s a handful of quirky coincidences, certainly, but I’m sure if you looked at every volume in a bookshop – in the right frame of mind – you’d find a dozen other
novels that seemed similarly fortuitous. But as I began to read the story, I discovered that I shared a lot more in common with the story’s Daniel than I could have possibly predicted.
It was almost as if I were reading an alternate-history version of my own life – it’s incredibly easy to see how believable choices made in the early 2000s could have lead to a
reality that even-more closely paralleled with my own:
In 2006, I won an award of dubious value for my stand-up act: a gold-plated banana nailed to a plank of wood hewn from the funniest tree in town.
Daniel’s partner is called Claire. In 2005, when the story is set, I too had a partner called Claire.
Daniel grew up in, and lives in, Preston, near to the football stadium and his local supermarket, the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys. I grew up in Preston, and my
parents houses are both within sight of the football stadium. My father used to, and my mother still does, do their shopping at the Deepdale Road/Sir Tom Finney Way Sainsburys.
Some time after an apocalyptic event takes place, Daniel joins a group of survivors who call themselves “Camp Q” (no explanation is given for the choice of name). Some time
after the date of the event as it appears in the story, I changed my surname to Q.
Before the apocalypse, Daniel did his shopping here. Before I moved to Aberystwyth, so did I.
There are about a hundred smaller coincidences in Daniel’s story, too, but after a few of them you stop looking objectively and you can’t help but see them, so I’ll spare
you the list. If I wanted to, I’m sure I could find plenty of things that definitely didn’t fit me: for example, Daniel’s significantly older than me. That sort of blows
the alternate history idea out of the water. But nonetheless, it was a disturbing and eerie experience to be reading about a protagonist so much like myself, travelling around a
post-disaster area that I personally know so very well. I feel like I ought to reach out to the
author and check that he’s not just pranking me, somehow. His son features in the book, but somehow the coincidences that naturally occur as a result of
this are less-impressive because they’re pre-informed.
The book itself is pretty good: a soft science fiction story full of a thorougly-explored post-apocalyptic grief. Very human, and very British, it exemplifies that curious sense of
humour that we as a nation exhibit in the face of a disaster, while still being emotionally-scarring in the sheer scope of the tragedy it depicts. The science of the science-fiction is…
questionable, but it’s not explored in detail (and it’s only treated as being speculative by the characters discussing it anyway, who aren’t scientists): this is a story about people,
suffering, and survival, not about technology nor futurism. There are a handful of points at which it feels like it could have done with an additional pass by a proofreader; while
occasionally distracting, these typos are not problematic. Plus: the book contains the most literal deus ex machina I’ve ever encountered (and thankfully, it doesn’t come
across as lazy writing so much as general wasteland craziness).
It’sunder £3 in ebook format, and if I didn’t already own a paperback copy, I’d be happy to pay that for it. Even if it didn’t make me feel like I was looking at an alternate version of
myself.
To commemorate the second anniversary of the death of my father – a keen hiker and cyclist, who was
killed during a hiking accident while training for a trek to the North Pole – I
thought the best thing to do would be to strike out somewhere random. And where could be more random than a geohash? This was also my first ever geohashing expedition, although I’d been
meaning to do it for a long, long while. And so began the Peter Huntley Memorial Geohashing Expedition!
I cycled from Kidlington, near Oxford (in the next graticule over)
via National Cycle Network Route 51, through Bicester and towards Milton
Keynes. Early on, I had to ford a river which had broken its banks and flooded the cyclepath (and even saw a minnow swimming across the cycle lane – quite surreal!). Later, I had a
minor whoopsie when I stayed on the cycle route too long and ended up in Steeple Claydon, on the wrong side of the Padbury Brook valley, but soon corrected it. I’d anticipated having to
hop a fence to get to the hashpoint, but it turned out that the field – which had been left to fallow – didn’t have a fence, and I only needed to walk about thirty paces into it in
order to reach the hashpoint.
In memory of my dad, I pulled out a drawing of him and drank a bottle of Guinness (his preferred drink after a long day’s cycle), and began to head back. But disaster struck! Somehow,
raptors must have gotten to my bike tyre while I wasn’t paying attention, because it was completely slashed. Being that I was now at the furthest point from home in my planned journey,
I pushed it to the nearby village of Hillesden in the hope of finding a shop that might sell me sufficient supplies to repair the puncture, but was without luck. I was now faced with a
choice: I could continue pushing it home, and try to get to Bicester (a little over three hours walk away) before the bike shop there shut, or I could turn and walk
the wrong way (away from home) towards Buckingham (only about an hour’s walk away), and hope that I’d be able to find supplies there.
I headed for Buckingham, but the students I spoke to when I passed the University campus suggested that there wasn’t a bike shop in town, but suggested a hardware store that might sell
a bike pump (I’d since found a patch kit at a corner shop, although it was of course useless without a pump). But while looking for the hardware store, I discovered quite by
accident Solstice Cycles, a wonderful little bike shop right in the heart of Buckingham (at the
time, Google Maps on my phone had been completely unable to find me a bike shop at all). The man there switched out my inner tube in a jiffy (he agreed that it could well have been a
raptor attack that had damaged it), and set me on my way.
Unwilling to add further to my diversion, I took a more-direct route back to Bicester, straight down the A4421, and I’m sure I must have agitated the motorists who weren’t used to
seeing cyclists on such a major road. In Bicester, I ate the remains of my packed lunch before getting back onto the cyclepath home.
Total distance travelled: 57.75 miles; mostly cycled, but more than I’d have liked on foot. And a spectacular first geohash.
This blog post is the fifth in a series about buying our first house.
In the third post in the series, we’d contracted some lawyers and applied for a mortgage, and in the fourth post we asked for help with the upcoming move. If you feel like we weren’t telling you the whole story, that’s because
we weren’t: some of the bits we can now reveal were things that we needed to keep close to our chest while we were negotiating over the sale…
Things were continuing apace with our new house purchase, and that was the way that we wanted it. We’d had an offer accepted, applied for a mortgage (of which we’d been provisionally
accepted already; this was just a paperwork affair), and our solicitors had gotten started with the searches and drafting the contracts. So long as the surveyor’s visit didn’t turn up
any problems, we were on a roll.
Our new house, up in Kidlington.
Courtesy Google Maps.
Unfortunately, a few things did seem to be conspiring against us. The first was that the two sellers – a married couple who were in the middle of what appeared to be
a… messy… separation – didn’t seem to be very communicative either with one another nor with their solicitor: or else, their solicitor was incredibly slow at relaying information back to our solicitor.
I made a point of visiting the property a few times, to see how things were progressing. On this occasion, I got to meet with our surveyor and one of the owners.
This posed a problem, because Ruth, JTA, Matt and I had already arranged with our letting agents
that we’d be vacating our current house by the 5th of August. We’d left two clear weekends of possible “moving” time, but they were rushing up fast. Before the exchange of contracts, we
couldn’t really let the sellers know how important it was that we complete the sale in a hurry, or else we’d be in a very weak negotiating position (and they’d be free to move the
goalposts, knowing that we were running out of options). On the other hand, we really wanted to push to get the last couple of issues sorted out as soon as possible.
Yeah… that’s gonna be a problem, mate.
This ties in to the second thing that conspired against us: there were two particular issues with the house that we didn’t want to go ahead without resolving. The first was that the
boiler hadn’t been serviced in a long time, so we insisted upon a gas safety inspection being carried out before we would exchange contracts. The second was that the front door was more
“hole” than “door”, believed to have occurred during some kind of fracas between the owners (did I mention that their divorce was a little unpleasant?).
The sellers were keen to re-home a number of pieces of furniture along with the house.
The gas safety inspection got sorted out after a while, but we went back and forth over the front door for what felt like an age. Who should repair it? Who should pay? We were told that
the sellers were having cashflow problems and weren’t sure that they could pay for the repair of the door prior to the sale, but we weren’t happy to agree to the sale without a
commitment that the door would be repaired by the completion (our insurer, answerable to our mortgage lender, wasn’t keen on us moving in to a house will a hole in it): we were at an
impasse. So when the sellers produced for us a list of furniture they’d like to offer to sell to us, we noted with some suspicion that the total value of the furniture was remarkably
close to the value of the quote for the repair of the door: clearly, they planned to offer to give us the furniture for “free” in exchange for not repairing the door.
The sellers were particularly keen to sell us this enormous pair of wardrobes, but -m for the price they were asking – we weren’t biting.
Which might have been fine, except for the fact that we didn’t want about half (by value) of the things they were offering. Having been living in unfurnished
accomodation for several years, we’ve already got a sufficiency of wardrobes. We were keen to take their appliances off their hands (including a gas cooker and a very large
fridge/freezer), but we weren’t willing to buy something that we didn’t need just so that they could find it easier to repair something that they broke! We made a number of other
offers, such as lending them the money to repair the door (which they’d be able to pay us back following the sale), but they weren’t keen.
Given that at least one of the sellers was a smoker, we didn’t really want to buy any soft furnishings from them, such as this sofa. Besides, we thought, my dad’s house already
contains a perfectly fabulous couch that nobody’s using!
We put into place our emergency plan, and made arrangements to go and start viewing rental properties, in case we ran out of time and needed somewhere to live. JTA and I played “good
cop, bad cop” with them in a spectacular tag team, leveraging this situation as a threat to pull out of the purchase entirely… and just like that, they caved. Within a day or so, their
solicitor had agreed to the terms of our contract, and the sellers agreed to sort out the front door prior to completion of the sale, and we made sure to get it in writing. Our
solicitor had already requested the money from our mortgage lender, so we agreed upon a completion date later in the week.
Gradually the kitchen, hallway, and living room became completely full of cardboard boxes.
We popped open a bottle of prosecco and celebrated the successful exchange, and redoubled our efforts to fill our house with boxes, prior to the move.
Went up the PYG track this weekend with the TransAid team, raising money in memory of my father (who was killed when he fell from a cliff last year, while in training for a sponsored
trip to the North Pole). Whlie the stragglers made their way up to the summit, I whipped out my GPSr and found this wonderful little cache (pretty sure it wasn’t here when I last came
up Snowdon, in early 2006).
A glorious day, marred only by the ludicrous number of walkers that had come out to make the most of it – the top was heaving with people!
Didn’t have a pen with me, and there wasn’t one in the cache. I’ve taken a photo of myself holding the cache (which I’ll provide on-demand, but in order not to spoil the cache for
others I’ve not included it: instead see attached a photo of my group at the summit – I’m the guy at the front with his arms out; I’ve just run up from where the cache is in order to
get into the picture at the last second!).
This blog post is the second in a series about buying our first house. If you
haven’t already, you might like to read the first part.
When Ruth, JTA and I first set out to look at
houses, we didn’t actually plan on buying one. We’d just gotten to the point where buying one felt like an imminent logical step, and so we decided to start looking around Oxford to see
what kind of thing we might be able to get (and what it would cost us, if we did). Our thinking was that, by looking around a few places, we’d have some context from which to
springboard our own discussions about what property we’d one day like to own.
One of the first places we looked at seemed at first to be perfect. But the more we looked at it, the more we became convinced that it really wasn’t for us.
There’s something about “window shopping” for houses that’s liberating and exciting. We don’t need a house – we’ve got somewhere to live – but we’re going to come
and look around anyway. Once you’re on their lists, estate agents will bombard you with suggestions of places that you might like, and you feel a little like they’re your servants,
running around trying to please you (in actual fact, almost the opposite is true: they’re working on behalf of the seller… although it’s certainly in their interest to get the property
sold promptly so that they can take their cut!).
The garden at this place stretched about 35 meters (115 feet), among its other charming features. But sadly, it turned out to be out of our price range.
But as we got into the swing of things, we discovered that we were ready to buy already. Between our savings (and, in particular, boosted by the first parts of
my inheritance following my dad’s death last year, as we’re finally getting
his estate sorted out), we actually have an acceptable deposit for a mortgage, and our renewal on our current place was looming fast. None of us having bought a house before, we did a bit of reading and decided that our first step probably ought to
be to work out how much can we borrow. You know, just to make our window-shopping a little more believable. Maybe.
This place is a lot like where we live now, but laid out in a more-spacious way. Hopefully you’ll be seeing it again in a future blog post…
Picture courtesy Google Maps.
One of the estate agents we dealt with introduced us to a chap called Stefan Cork, a mortgage broker working as part of the Mortgage Advice Bureau network. We were still only window-shopping at this point, but hey: if we were going to be allowed some free,
no-commitment mortgage advice, then we might as well work out how much we could potentially borrow, right? After checking his credentials (the three
questions you should ask every mortgage broker), I spoke to Stefan on the phone, and talked him through our situation. I described our unusual relationship structure (which he took in his stride) and the way that we means-assess
our household contributions, alongside more mundane details like how much we earn and what kind of deposit we could rustle up. He talked us through our options and ballparked some of
the kinds of numbers we’d be looking at, if we went ahead and got a mortgage.
Stefan’s really lovely, and didn’t panic for a moment when I said “By the way, I’m blogging this: can I take your photo?” If you’re looking for mortgage advice, get me to give you his
number.
And somehow, somewhere along the line, our perspective switched. Instead of looking at houses just to give us a feel for what we might buy, “maybe next year”, we were genuinely looking
to buy a house now. We re-visited some of the places we’d seen already, and increased our search of places we hadn’t yet seen. Over time, and by a process of elimination
(slow Internet area; too many hills; too narrow staircases; too expensive; too wonky), we cut down our options to just three potential properties. And then just two. And then we came to
an impasse.
So… we put offers on both. Under the law of England and Wales, a property purchase isn’t binding until the contracts have exchanged hands. Sellers benefit (and buyers suffer) from this
all of the time, because it permits gazumping: even after the buyers have spent money on
lawyers, mortgage applications, surveys and searches, the seller can change their mind and accept a higher offer from a different prospective buyer! But this legal quirk can
work for buyers, too: in our case, we were able to put offers in of what we were willing to pay for each of two properties (different values, at that), and let them know
that the first one of the two to agree to our price would be the one to get the sale!
Let’s pull the old switch-a-roo! Making competing “lowball” offers on two properties at once and offering to purchase from the one that accepts first turns housebuying into a
reverse-Dutch-auction.
Haggling for a house in this way felt incredibly ballsy (I’d been nominated as the negotiator on behalf of the other Earthlings), but it played against the psychology of our sellers.
Suddenly, instead of being in a position of power (“no, we won’t accept that offer… go a little higher”), the sellers were made to feel that if they didn’t accept our offers (which were
doubtless lower than they had hoped), they’d have a 50% chance of losing the sale entirely. When there are hundreds of thousands of pounds on the line, being able to keep your cool
and show that you’re willing to go elsewhere is an incredibly powerful negotiating tactic.
True to our word: when one of them came back and accepted our offer, we withdrew the offer on the other house and began the (lengthy) paperwork to start getting the purchase underway.
But that can wait for another blog post.
This is the first in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January 2013,
but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.
2012 was one of the hardest years of my life.
My retweet of JTA’s sentiments, shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve, pretty much covers my feeling of the year, too.
It was a year of unceasing disasters and difficulties: every time some tragedy had befallen me, my friends, or family, some additional calamity was lined-up to follow in its wake. In an
environment like this, even the not-quite-so-sad things – like the death of Puddles, our family dog, in May – were magnified, and the ongoing challenges of the year – like the
neverending difficulties with my dad’s estate – became overwhelming.
My sister Becky with Puddles, both younger and more-foolish than they eventually became. I don’t know why Puddles is wearing a t-shirt.
The sudden and unexpected death of my dad while training for his Arctic trek, was clearly the event which had the
most-significant impact on me. I’ve written about the experience at length, both here on my blog and elsewhere (for example, I made a self-post to Reddit on the day after the accident, urging readers to “call somebody
you love today”).
My dad, climbing Aladdin’s Mirror in the Cairngorms.
In the week of his death, my sister Becky was suffering from an awful toothache which was stopping her from eating,
sleeping, or generally functioning at all (I tried to help her out by offering some oil of cloves (which functions as a dental contact anesthetic), but she must have misunderstood my instruction about applying it to the
tooth without swallowing it, because she spent most of that evening throwing up (seriously: don’t ever swallow clove oil).
My dad’s clothes for his funeral. My sisters and I decided that he ought to be dressed as he would be for a one of his summer hikes, right down to the combination of sandals and socks
(the funeral director needed reassurance that yes, he really did routinely wear both at the same time).
Little did she know, worse was yet to come: when she finally went to the dentist, he botched her operation, leaving her
with a jaw infection. The infection spread, causing septicæmia of her face and neck and requiring that she was hospitalised. On the day of our dad’s funeral, she needed to insist that the “stop gap” surgery that she was given was done under local, rather
than general, anasthetic, so that she could make it – albeit in a wheelchair and unable to talk – to the funeral.
Five weeks later, my dad finally reached the North Pole,
his ashes carried by another member of his team. At about the same time, Ruth‘s grandmother passed away, swamping the
already-emotional Earthlings with yet another sad period. That same month,
my friend S****** suffered a serious injury, a traumatic and distressing experience in the middle of a long and difficult period of her life, and an event which caused significant
ripples in the lives of her circle of friends.
The notice of Ruth’s grandmother’s death, as it appeared in the online version of her local newspaper.
Shortly afterwards, Paul moved out from Earth, in a situation that was anticipated (we’d said when we first moved in
together that it would be only for a couple of years, while we all found our feet in Oxford and decided on what we’d be doing next, as far as our living situations were concerned), but
still felt occasionally hostile: when Paul left town six months later, his last blog post stated that Oxford could “get lost”, and that he’d “hated hated 90% of the time” he’d lived here. Despite
reassurances to the contrary, it was sometimes hard – especially in such a difficult year – to think that this message wasn’t directed at Oxford so much as at his friends there.
As the summer came to an end, my workload on my various courses increased dramatically, stretching into my so-called “free time”: this, coupled with delays resulting from all of the
illness, injury, and death that had happened already, threw back the release date of Milestone: Jethrik, the latest update to Three Rings. Coupled with the stress of the 10th Birthday Party Conference – which thankfully JTA handled most of – even the rare periods during which nobody was ill or dying were filled with sleepless nights and anxiety. And of
course as soon as all of the preparation was out of the way and
the conference was done, there were still plenty of long days ahead, catching up on everything that had been temporarily put on the back burner.
My sister Sarah and I at the christening of a bus named after my dad. Click the picture for the full story.
When I was first appointed executor of my dad’s estate, I said to
myself that I could have the whole thing wrapped-up and resolved within six months… eight on the outside. But as things dragged on – it took almost six months until the investigation
was finished and the coroner’s report filed, so we could get a death
certificate, for example – they just got more and more bogged-down. Problems with my dad’s will made it harder than expected to get started (for example, I’m the executor and a beneficiary of the will, yet nowhere on it am
I directly mentioned by name, address, or relationship… which means that I’ve had to prove that I am the person mentioned in the will every single time I present it, and that’s
not always easy!), and further administrative hiccups
have slowed down the process every step of the way.
On the first anniversary of my dad’s death, I cycled up a hill to watch the sunset with a bottle of Guinness and a Mars bar. And sent this Tweet.
You know what would have made the whole thing easier? A bacon sandwich. And black
pudding for breakfast. And a nice big bit of freshly-battered cod. And some roast chicken. I found that 2012 was a harder year than 2011 in which to be a vegetarian. I guess that a nice steak would have
taken the edge off: a little bit of a luxury, and some escapism. Instead, I probably drank a lot more than I ought to have. Perhaps we should encourage recovering alcoholic, when things
are tough, to hit the sausage instead of the bottle.
It’s been a while, old friend. A while since I used this delicious-looking photograph in my blog, I mean! This is the sixth time… can you find them all?
Becky’s health problems weren’t done for the year, after she started getting incredibly intense and painful headaches. At first, I was worried that she was lined-up for a similar diagnosis to mine, of the other year (luckily, I’ve been symptom-free for a year
and a quarter now, although medical science is at a loss to explain why), but as I heard more about her symptoms, I became convinced that this wasn’t the case. In any case, she found
herself back in the operating room, for the second serious bit of surgery of the year (the operation was a success, thankfully).
The “F” is for “Fuck me you’re going to put a scalpel WHERE?”
I had my own surgery, of course, when I had a vasectomy; something I’d been
planning for some time. That actually went quite well, at least as far as can be
ascertained at this point (part three of that series of posts will be coming soon), but it allows me to segue into the topic of reproduction…
Because while I’d been waiting to get snipped, Ruth and JTA had managed to conceive. We found this out right as we were running around sorting out the Three Rings Conference, and Ruth
took to calling the fœtus “Jethrik”, after the Three Rings milestone. I was even more delighted still when I heard that the expected birth date would be 24th July: Samaritans‘ Annual Awareness Day (“24/7”).
One of the many pregnancy tests Ruth took, “just to be sure” (in case the last few were false positives). Photo from Ruth’s blog.
As potential prospective parents, they did everything right. Ruth stuck strictly to a perfectly balanced diet for her stage of pregnancy; they told only a minimum of people, because –
as everybody knows – the first trimester’s the riskiest period. I remember when Ruth told her grandfather (who had become very unwell towards the end of 2012 and died early this year:
another sad family tragedy) about the pregnancy, that it was only after careful consideration – balancing how nice it would be for him to know that the next generation of his
family was on the way before his death – that she went ahead and did so. And as the end of the first trimester, and the end of the year, approached, I genuinely believed that the string
of bad luck that had been 2012 was over.
In Ruth’s blog post, she’s used kittens to make a sad story a little softer, and so I have too.
But it wasn’t to be. Just as soon as we were looking forward to New Year, and planning to not so much “see in 2013” as to “kick out 2012”, Ruth had a little bleeding. Swiftly followed
by abdominal cramps. She spent most of New Year’s Eve at the hospital, where they’d determined that she’d suffered a miscarriage, probably a few weeks earlier.
Ruth’s written about it. JTA’s written about it, too. And I’d recommend they read their account rather than mine: they’ve
both written more, and better, about the subject than I could. But I shan’t pretend that it wasn’t hard: in truth, it was heartbreaking. At the times that I could persuade myself that
my grief was “acceptable” (and that I shouldn’t be, say, looking after Ruth), I cried a lot. For me, “Jethrik” represented a happy ending to a miserable year: some good news at last for
the people I was closest to. Perhaps, then, I attached too much importance to it, but it seemed inconceivable to me – no pun intended – that for all of the effort they’d put in, that
things wouldn’t just go perfectly. For me, it was all connected: Ruth wasn’t pregnant by me, but I still found myself wishing that my dad could have lived to have seen it, and when the
pregnancy went wrong, it made me realise how much I’d been pinning on it.
I don’t have a positive pick-me-up line to put here. But it feels like I should.
A few days before the miscarriage became apparent, Ruth and her dad survey the back garden of the house he’s rebuilding.
And so there we were, at the tail of 2012: the year that began awfully, ended awfully, and was pretty awful in the middle. I can’t say there weren’t good bits, but they were somewhat
drowned out by all of the shit that happened. Fuck off, 2012.
Here’s to 2013.
Edit, 16th March 2013: By Becky’s request, removed an unflattering photo of her and some of the ickier details of her health problems this year.
Edit, 11th July 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s personal details have been obfuscated in this post so that they are no longer readily available to
search engines.
Edit, 26th September 2016: At her request, my friend S******’s photo was removed from this post, too.
