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News travels fast here in what the estate agents now call ‘Central North Oxford’. I waved shyly as I cycled past a woman who taught my children in primary, thinking she was unlikely to place a parent she hadn’t seen for seventeen years. She stopped, smiled and said, ‘Are you moving?’ It turned out that she now helps out at the local Mind shop, and saw my name in some of the books I had left there during my pre-viewers’ turnout. ‘One was a dedication from the author’, she added.
Guilt flooded me. Oh, yes, that one. I’d read it and enjoyed it, but knew I wouldn’t read it again. But the author lives locally. I was reminded of Ann Tredeman’s story of George Bernard Shaw browsing in a secondhand bookshop and finding one of his books with inscribed ‘To -------, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw’. He bought it, added ‘To -------, with renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw’, and sent it off again.
What about the others? Was this a tactful way of saying she had found a passionate love letter in one of them? I often stuff letters inside books, sometimes relevant ones, sometimes as bookmarks. It gives the book something to think about while it’s waiting on the shelf, and I like finding them years later and being reminded of times past. I remembered the speed and ruthlessness with which I had attacked my shelves. No browsing, just snap decisions. It hadn’t reduced it much – only made it possible to clear books off floors. I will still need space for thousands of them in my next house.
Which brings me, by devious means, to the latest news on the move. I know, I know, this is the nub of the column, and it should have been announced in para one. But who wants to admit up front that they have failed? I did indeed sell my house, but my rival upped her ‘final’ offer on hearing mine was larger, and I have not got the dream house.
To the awe of the estate agent who produced my very nice cash buyers, I have not, however, reneged on my sale. The lawyers (I have a particularly shrewd one who lives, naturally enough, in Shrewsbury) are even now crossing t’s and dotting i’s. For I do want a change and this remains a good time for me to move. And even my canny brothers approve, though they mutter of stagnant markets and the importance of my being a cash buyer rather than the great adventure of new surroundings.
So soon after Christmas I will be homeless, with a lifetime’s possessions tucked away in store and a very worried old dog to house. ‘You won’t be able to rent with him you know’, warned the agent. Scanning the lettings columns, I soon realised he was right. Nobody wanted pets. Not only are dogs barely allowed to lift their legs against lamp-posts without very hard stares from hygiene-obsessed passers-by, they aren’t even allowed to lay their weary old bones down beside the soulless gas-coal fire of a rented hearth.
Never let it be said that virtue goes unrewarded. The first person to hear about my win-some, lose-some predicament was one of my oldest friends. She and her husband moved to Oxford two years ago. As they had to get out of their old house a few months before they could move into their new one, they had stayed with me. Her immediate reaction to my wails about canine phobia in landlords was to offer us her own capacious hearth, complete with heart-warming real logs. Her husband teaches in Texas from January to May, and she’d welcome company.
So never mind the second-hand Aga I requested in last week’s column (though if it is on its way, I can of course put it in store too). What I need is a whole house. Its shape is wonderfully undefined, but it needs lots of bookshelf space. I am, at present (my thinking is distinctly volatile at the minute) against a smaller version of my tall Victorian home, even to the extent of feeling unexpected relief at failing to get the house down the road. I don’t need to live within reach of schools. I don’t even need to live in the city, as the Hearth God’s own home is a wonderfully centrally placed perch. Maybe I can find somewhere with enough garden for a turf-roofed log-cabin library. The world, or at least the world of north-west Oxfordshire, is my oyster.
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