4 The Worse for Wear


New arrivals in Milltown always attract attention. Whether we’re neighbourly, or just plain nosy, is open to question. No matter: we’ll accept any excuse to knock on a door, extend the hand of friendship and check out the newcomers’ tastes in soft furnishings.

We were flabbergasted when Roofe Leakes, the town’s foremost eatate agents, found a buyer for Fallingroyd House. It had stood empty for years - due to a catalogue of structural defects - and every year that passed only made it less likely to sell. It had been on the market for so long that the ‘For Sale’ sign had almost disappeared beneath an exuberant growth of ivy. The winter winds were loosening roof-slates; leaf-choked gutters had begun to sag like a saddle-backed horse.

Fallingroyd House had oodles of what the estate agent called ‘character’; the locals prefer ‘tumbledown’. You wouldn’t have touched the place with a six-foot barge-pole... unless you wanted to be the proud owner of a six-foot barge-pole with dry rot.

Convinced, like P T Barnum, that there’s a mug born every minute, the vendor bided his time. So it seemed like Christmas had arrived early when Mandy came to town, saw Fallingroyd House featured in the 'slums for sale' section of the Milltown Times, and immediately fell in love with the place. Love is blind: a condition that’s not improved by wearing rose-coloured glasses.

Mandy has a trusting nature, and she doesn’t like to be on the receiving end of bad news. She missed the explicit warnings in the surveyor’s report, despite them being flagged up with a fluorescent highlighter pen and strings of exclamation marks. The report made such depressing reading that Mandy tossed it into the bin. She decided to back her feminine intuition instead, which proved to be an expensive mistake. Though attractive at first glance, Fallingroyd House is a black hole of a house. It could suck in as much money as anyone would think of throwing at it, and still be barely habitable. But Mandy had a warm feeling about the house; it had a welcoming aura. All it needed, she reckoned, was a lick of paint, some wind-chimes and a few dozen house-plants.

A recent divorce settlement had left Mandy with money to spend. Too excited to remember to haggle, she bought the house for cash. The vendor accepted the cheque with an expression that combined relief and astonishment. He stood outside his bank the following morning, half an hour before it opened, with his paying-in book clutched tightly in his hand. He didn’t believe the cheque was good until a reassuring row of naughts showed up on his next bank statement. The hardworking staff at Roofe Leakes got a fax from head office, congratulating them on selling the least desirable property on the agency’s books. Christmas bonus were hinted at. The staff bought a couple of bottles of plonk to celebrate, and threw an impromptu office party that lasted the whole afternoon.

Mandy and her cats moved into Fallingroyd House, thus beginning a battle with subsidence and rotting timbers that has lasted ever since. It’s what can happen when you take decisions based on something as insubstantial as the turn of a tarot card or the juxtaposition of the planets. Alas, the warm feeling that Mandy experienced turned out to be nothing more than heartburn.

Mandy’s a big fan of feng shui, the venerable Chinese art of stating the totally bleeding obvious. So, in a doomed attempt to make her delapidated home more tranquil, she avidly consults her collection of feng shui books. In truth, though, most of the suggestions seems self-evident. We already know not to leave a laden cat-litter tray outside the bathroom door. And, yes, moving a half-built motorbike and tandem combination out of the master bedroom and into the yard will almost certainly help to revitalise the sexual side of a lacklustre marriage. Living near running water is reckoned to bring good luck. Unless, of course, the water happens to be sluicing down the back bedroom walls, as it tends to do in Fallingroyd House whenever it rains.

Conversely, it’s inauspicious to choose a house that faces out onto another house. This was good advice, no doubt, in ancient China, but hardly applicable here in Milltown, where the rows of terraced houses rise steeply up the hills that hem the town in on all sides. Houses stare unblinkingly at one another - across cobbled streets and across the years of industry and decline. But this is new-age thinking in a nutshell: that mumbo-jumbo is more palatable when it’s dressed up in Eastern robes. Why bother with intellectual rigour, when superstition is so much more appealing? Why wrestle with the questions that have taxed mankind for centuries, when all we need to do, apparently, is to rearrange the furniture? If this doesn’t create order out of chaos, as promised, we can always light a ‘smudge stick’ and just fantasise that grime away. And if this doesn’t do the trick either we may have to resort to the English version of feng shui: doing a little light dusting.

It’s pleasing to see woodsmoke curling lazily from the chimneys of Fallingroyd House once again, and we hope that Mandy will settle to life in Milltown. Though she sees herself as part of a universal consciousness, to the untrained eye she just seems to be away with the fairies. By giving herself 'time to be', she never has 'time to do'. This, in turn, means that essential jobs around the house have to be postponed yet again. We hope the fabric of the house will last another winter without major renovation, but we won’t be putting any money on it.

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