Fiendish Games

I am sure none of you are wondering what has inspired the sudden improvement in form by Tottenham Hotspur. Nevertheless, I am going to tell you. I have just started backing against them. Not against Everton, of course. Only a crazy fool would back Everton to beat Spurs, although they did win at White Hart Lane earlier this season for the first time since decimalisation was introduced in this country (spurious “fact”). No, it started with the FA Cup when Spurs, who were on a terrible run at the time, were drawn away to Fulham.

Now, Fulham were unbeaten at home in the preceding 9 games, and Spurs had beaten only one Premiership team away all season (Manchester City, the north-west’s underachieving equivalent to Spurs). Spurs had just been knocked out of the Carling Cup semi-final, been thrashed 0-4 at home by Manchester United and had thrown away a 1-0 lead away to mighty Sheffield United. £50 to win £58 (plus my stake back) seemed a very sensible investment.

So I felt a bit foolish when they won 4-0. However, football is rife with superstition so I now felt compelled to bet against them at home to Bolton Wanderers. Even when they were a lower league team, Bolton used to make a habit of inflicting comprehensive defeats on Spurs. On the first day of this season I remember sitting alone in a bar in Greece watching Bolton brush Spurs aside with ease, so I thought I’d lay Spurs to win (on Betfair) as I was only obliged to offer 5/4, which I thought was stingy (looking at it from a punter’s perspective; I was laying them, so I was looking at it from a bookmaker’s perspective). I also laid Spurs to keep a clean sheet, though I could not get much business for this, as Spurs clean sheets are as rare as a sex-crazed teenaged boy’s clean sheets.

I didn’t have as strong a feeling about this game as the Fulham bet, so I could watch the game on Match of the Day with a certain amount of sang-froid about the money lost; thanks to the clean sheet saver, I barely lost a tenner. Yet again, Spurs scored 4 in a match where I bet against them.

Coming up soon is the away game against Chelsea in the FA Cup. Chelsea ought to be about 2-5 to go through I reckon, so I’ll have to lay a large sum to derive any sort of satisfaction from winning a bet at the expense of Spurs’ cup ambitions. Not that I know yet whether I will derive any pleasure, as I have not won a bet yet betting against Spurs. Long may it continue.

I sent out details of my new address to the family recently and received an interesting reply from my niece, which I repeat below:


I've just fed your postcode into my marketing segmentation database and apparently you're now classed as an 'Upscale New Owner'. You like high tech gadgets, you have 'common sense values' and your neighbours are most likely to be called Graham and Alison. You also have a higher than average liking for theme parks.


Er ...

Well, I like the bit about being an upscale new owner and having common sense values. So common sense are my values that I regard this as mostly bollocks. The bit about high tech gadgets and theme parks makes us sound like a pair of overgrown kids. And anyway, our neighbours spell their names Graeme and Allison...

Somewhat intrigued, I asked my niece to plug in my old Enfield postcode into her database, and this was the result:

You lived among households called ‘Original Suburbs’ – white middle aged families with children of school age, broadsheet newspaper-reading, big fans of shopping via the internet and doing lots of research before making major purchases. A good market for skiing and snowboarding holidays and your neighbours were most likely to be called Gregory and Deirdre (?)

Worryingly, this is a much closer fit to our profile if one overlooks my abhorrence of any holidays featuring snow. I wonder if Graham and Alison are secretly sneering at us behind their blinds?

Let’s hear it for the weather forecasters. They certainly got it right this morning. I awoke to find a thick layer of snow over the back garden. A quick check on number 3 son’s school web-site elicited the information that there was no school for him today. Minutes later, a personal phone call from the head teacher of number 2 son’s Education Support Centre confirmed there was no school for him either. Minutes later, another phone call from the Education Support Centre reconfirmed there was no school for number 2 son. Well, you can afford to ring up pupils individually when there are only 18 pupils in the entire school.

By this time both of the aforementioned sons were already up, and when I emerged from the bathroom it was to find them lying on the bed having a cuddle with Mrs. Fiendish. Now they are teenagers, we don’t get a lot of opportunity for family hug sessions like we used to, so I took the opportunity to squeeze on to the bed for a bit of family bonding. Aaah, bliss.

For someone who was not convinced of the idea of having children, I sure do enjoy these family moments. Before long we could hear Scratch, our dog, outside in the back garden, enjoying her first experience of snow. As one, except lazy old me, the family leapt out of bed to peer through the window at the dog gambolling around the garden like the Fool on the Hill. Magic stuff.

Mrs. Fiendish wandered off downstairs to make some coffee, while I checked out the web site of the railway operator for the Hertford North line. Disappointingly, they had been remarkably efficient, running empty trains throughout the night to prevent the track freezing over, and gritting the platforms. As a result, they promised a full service but with some delays. Oh well.

The promised cup of coffee never made its way back to the bedroom so I went downstairs to put my boots on and to check out whether it was viable to cycle to the station. The snow was so thick down our street that it was impossible to cycle on it, but I was hopeful that the main roads would be OK, though I did not fancy cycling down the steep hill at the end of our road.

I moved to the kitchen and there was another memorable family scene. Mrs. Fiendish, her parents, sons 2 and 3, sitting around discussing Christmasses past. The kids had already been in the back garden and made a 4’ high snowman, though it was lacking features (carrot, buttons, hat, scarf and so on). Some of the most memorable photos from my youth are of the big freeze of 1963, with my brother and sister posing in front of a rather spending snowman they had built and I advised Mrs. Fiendish to dig out the video camera. Meanwhile, Granddad and Grandma were laying it on thick with the memories of playing in the snow when they were young. "When we were young, snow were red! Much better than t' snow you get these days. Our Margaret kept some in her scrap book for twenty years."

Outside in the street there were fathers shovelling snow off driveways, mothers dragging children in sleds, kids bombarding each other with snowballs. Had I just walked on to the set of a film? I must have done, as people were actually talking to each other – something that rarely happens in Britain in real life, although to be fair, they are a friendly bunch down my street. I introduced myself to Maurice, across the way. He’s a bluff and hearty Irishman whose parents were flying in to Stansted to visit him. Ah, the luck of the Irish, eh?

“They were going to get the coach but I’ll probably have to go and pick them up,” he said. Well, best of luck mate, because the hill that forms the only exit from our street was closed to traffic when I trudged down it this morning.

As hoped, it was possible to cycle on the main road. Two grooves had been worn in the road by the wheels of cars but of course the gap between the grooves was pure slush. Not a problem for the car drivers, but every time one of them pulled out to overtake me on my bike, they showered my right trouser leg with slush. To avoid this hazard I took to one of the back streets, pausing only to watch a bloke in a Jag make a hash of a left turn, his expensive car drifting to the right as his wheels lost grip. Luckily there was no parked car where he slid into the kerb. I began to understand why the hill near our road had been closed.

At the station I rang Mrs. Fiendish to suggest the boys take the opportunity to make friends with the other kids down the street, all of whom seemed to be out throwing snowballs at each other. She said that some lads had already called at the door to invite them out. Number 2 son was dithering over whether to accept, as his best mate from Enfield had invited him over to Enfield, and said mate is a right persistent little nag who would probably ring number 2 son every 5 minutes until he agreed to go to Enfield. So, I happily told Mrs. Fiendish that they were trapped and that if number 2 son wanted to travel to Enfield, he’d have to walk to the station; I’d be surprised if that was not enough to deter him.

I think I was probably the last person in my office to arrive. Just about everyone had made it in, but then the team does consist entirely of old lags who have been with the company for donkey’s years and who would probably regard a thermo-nuclear strike on the building as a minor inconvenience, so long as the coffee machine still worked.

I’ve just come back from a girly lunch with the members of my old team – practically everyone in my old department was female – and they’d all made it in too. Morale can’t be that bad then, if people are rejecting a cast iron excuse not to turn up for work.

Or maybe it is just that snow, as opposed to ice or sleet, is just fun. It applies a magical coating to the landscape, and gives us a chance to have a good natured moan, and to speculate about global warming.

Pity the snow could not have fallen last night on Old Trafford.

Americans are different

I may have touched on this subject before, with my examples of hyper-excited “management speak”, but I am always suspicious when I read a missive from a nerdy management big-shot in a suit claiming to be “really excited” about some reorganisation or release of some deadly dull accounting software or similar. So it was today, when I read that Bill Gates said: “I am so excited to see what people will do with this new software.” – the new software in question being Microsoft’s new operating system and their new offfice suite.

Well, I can tell you what people will do with this new software, Bill. They’ll hack it and pirate it, if they can. They’ll install it and grumble at all its new features and how things aren’t where they used to be. They will moan that, whilst 98% of the people they know would be perfectly happy to use Office 97 for their general word processing and spreadsheet duties, the fact that 25% of the people they do business with will immediately upgrade to Office 2007 makes it inevitable that the remaining 75% will be forced to upgrade before long.

I think very few of them will get “excited” about using it, but I could be wrong. By and large Microsoft has thrived by successfully incorporating other people’s ideas into their software; who can now imagine a spreadsheet (OK, a “workbook”) without the tabbed interface introduced by Quattro Pro? Are users amazed at the Zoom feature in Internet Explorer 7, unaware that Opera had this feature in the last millennium? Ditto tabbed browsing?

No, I don’t think people get excited by Microsoft software. In fact, if they are wrestling with the concept of streaming files via the network from their PC to their X-Box 360 they get very, very annoyed by Microsoft’s software [/FONT] (or is that just me?); I suppose that is a form of excitement. They’ll just get used to its quirks, take for granted the many amazing things it can do (it’s incredible how much my typing has improved since the introduction of “correct as you type”) and, if they have to pay for it themselves, grumble at the cost of it.

So, will I be upgrading? Probably. To Windows XP. The bottom of the XP resale market should just about be ready to fall.

Good things/bad things about the new house

2a: Things I like about the new house: As I lie abed on a Sunday morning – the only morning when I really have a lie-in – I can gaze out of the bedroom window at a number of tall, thin, tree trunks waving gently from side to side. I don’t know why this gives me a feeling of well-being, but it does. It’s like having a gigantic executive toy in the back garden – you know, those things with the swinging balls that bang together and bounce off each other.

I can get a good view of birds roosting, and squirrels performing gymnastic feats, all whilst lying in my bed, propped up on one of those V-shaped pillows, the name for which I do not know (V-shaped pillows, perhaps? Or bolsters?)

2b: Things I don’t like about the new house: The drainage in Hertford is generally appalling. Is it fen territory? When it rains, the lawn in our back garden takes forever to dry out. This is not a problem for me, as I only tend to go into the back garden two or three times a year, but our dog regards the lawn as her own personal fiefdom and loves to bound out to scare off the squirrels. Whilst it is amusing to see her gallop back and forth like Alexander inspecting his troops, as she barks her head off (was Alexander barking too?), it is less amusing when she re-enters the house with muddy paw prints.

Those of you who know Mrs. Fiendish well will realise that there must be at least one major improvement project in the offing this year and paving over the lawn is certainly one of the contenders, but so is converting the loft and converting half of the double-garage into a study. Which one makes it to the top of the list could all be a matter of random timing: has the dog just pissed her off by traipsing mud all through the house, or is she vexed by the lack of storage space for her massive collection of fantasy books? She intends to re-read all of these one day, even though reading a new one must be like re-reading the previous one (“Our hero goes on a fantastic quest with a band of dwarfs, elfs and other legendary creatures, to do battle with the evil overlord, Bill the Warlock.”) So says the man who reads nothing but first-person hard-boiled private eye novels.

It was about 2 months after we had moved my Dad into a care home in Enfield to be nearer us that we decided we wanted to leave Enfield. Ah well, forward planning has never been my forte. Obviously, number 2 son being expelled from school had a lot to do with the decision. In an ideal world we’d have yanked him out of his school before he got expelled and transferred him to another school, except that thanks to chronic overcrowding in schools in Enfield, there are no free places available. I can’t say we were surprised when it emerged that the government had underestimated the population of Enfield by 30,000; nor were we surprised when Enfield council claimed that the figure was larger than 30,000. What with the overcrowding, the swarms of police on the street, the remodelling of the shopping centre, the exit from the M25 being closed for almost two years and that bloody stalker who lived round the corner from me, it was time to move.

It's all Ken Livingstone's fault
Which is not to say that Enfield is a total hell-hole. There are some very nice parts, and the bit we lived in was pleasant, but we felt the atmosphere had changed in recent years. Mrs. Fiendish’s theory is that Ken Livngstone’s decision to make bus travel free to everybody under sixteen years of age, whilst admirable as a way of imbuing the next generation with the public transport habit, made it easy for unsociable elements to travel from their normal stomping grounds to shit on somebody else’s doorstep. As I typed that, I realised how horribly NIMBY it sounds; “Yes, I’m all for social mobility, Letitia, but I always thought I would be the one moving on to better places, not gangs of yobs coming to Enfield Cineworld to harvest mobile phones from the indiegenous pre-pubescent population.”

As it happens, my own kids routinely used to take advantage of free bus travel, trekking all the way to Camden market to get aerosol cans of paint and then, no doubt, discharging said paint on somebody else’s doorstep (Barnet man: “It’s those bloody yobs from Enfield again, I tell you.”) It’s quite scary when you ring them up as their curfew time approaches and ask where they are and back comes the reply “Ealing” or some God-forsaken place.

Having gone through the enormous hassle of selling my Dad’s house earlier in 2006, I can’t say I was enthused by the prospect of moving house, but we bit the bullet and started looking for places to live. In the main, we checked out St. Albans, Ware and Hertford. St. Albans was very nice but presented difficulties for our progeny who maintained that they would never ever ever ever make new friends and would be constantly travelling back to Enfield to stand on street corners and participate in gobbing contests. Hertford and Ware, however, are just a dozen or so miles up the A10 from Enfield; Hertford even has two rail lines both of which run through Enfield (or near enough).

I want a new new house
Mrs. Fiendish had had enough of tarting up houses and wanted to move into a new house where everything worked. This presented a difficulty, as there are not that many new houses in and around Hertford. In order to get a new build, you have to move a bit further out into something which I understand is known as “the country”. This, we decided, would be too much of a culture shock for our street-rat sons, and we were resigned to settling for an older house when we spotted a house for sale that was only 4 years old. It was right at the top end of our budget range but had been reduced in price for a quick sale.

We arranged a viewing and, unusually, took the boys with us. This we did because my brother was visiting with his two sons and we wanted to go out for Sunday lunch to bid farewell to his eldest son who was scheduled to leave the next day to spend a year in Australia. So, we dined in Hertford and after the meal was over we visited the house and, despite themselves, the boys took a shine to it. First, it was new. Second, all the bed-rooms were double-sized. Third, it had a double-garage which we speculated could become a den for the lads when they had their friends round (so much for buying a house that did not require anything doing to it). Fourth, it was a town house, which made it easy for people to get a bit of privacy – not easy in our old open plan house.

The people selling this 4-bedroom townhouse were about 30, I would guess, with only one child, and a dog. I could not for the life of me work out why they needed such a big house or, for that matter, how they could afford it. He was a manager of a car radio shop in Ponders End (a suburb of Enfield) and she, so far as I could tell, was a lady of leisure.

The bloke seemed very chatty, a bit spivvy and indiscreet (“You say you are from Enfield? I am not surprised you are moving; I work in Enfield, and it is a shit-hole”) and we later found out that, at 3pm in the afternoon, he was still pissed from the night before when his neighbours had thrown him a birthday party.

My other car's a Porsche
Mrs. Fiendish asked him if it was possible to fit 3 cars on the forecourt and he replied that it definitely was “Because last year I had a Porsche as a little runabout and we used to park all three cards in front of the garage.” I can’t say I was warming to the bloke but I liked the house a lot, as did Mrs. Fiendish and, with some reservations, the little Fiends.

So, we returned home and put in an offer. We liked the house so much, we didn’t even offer the standard £5k below the asking price. A couple of days later we got a phone call from the owner (let’s call him Darrrell, because that’s what his amazingly appropriate name is – and, yes, he did move to Essex). Would we mind popping up one evening for a chat about our offer?

This was decidedly unconventional and I began to suspect that as he had dropped the price of the house below a critical stamp duty threshold, he was going to suggest that we make an ex-gratia payment to secure the house. All night long I sat there with my stern face on as he and Mrs. Fiendish chatted away until it slowly dawned on me that he wasn’t after a bung at all and that when he said he wanted a chat in order to gauge how serious we were about the offer, he was being sincere. It was then that he made a startling pledge, of the sort that Pete Birks is inclined to make during a board game (“I’m gonna do you a favour here”) except that it genuinely did seem to be a good deal for us, unlike some of Pete’s favours.

Darrell’s situation was that he had put a deposit on a new house that had just been recently completed. He needed to move in to that house by the end of November, otherwise he would not be able to take advantage of the constructor’s offer to pay his stamp duty; furthermore, there was a risk that someone else could come along and buy it if they had the cash available. So, whilst he would have liked to have accepted our offer, he explained that he could not do so, as we had not sold our own house. He did, however, pledge that should he receive an acceptable offer from someone else he would hold off for two weeks from accepting it in order to give us a fortnight in which to sell our house.

Seems like I had misjudged the guy. Far from being spivvy, he seemed a man of honour. Though, as we were to find out, a pragmatic man of honour.

This just in: Estate agents are crap
So, we went away, cut the asking price on our house, bought a new stair carpet, tarted the place up a bit, all to no avail. A few weeks went by and we got a phone call from Darrell. “How’s it going then?” he asked. We mentioned all the efforts we were making to sell the house but confessed that a sale was not imminent. “Do you think you will get an offer before the two weeks is up?” he asked.

Pause.

“What two weeks?”

This confused Darrell. “Didn’t the estate agent get in touch with you and tell you we had an offer on the house last week?”

Obviously not. So, Darrell – bless him – gave us another two weeks to sell the house. Unfortunately, we had no joy, and so he accepted the other offer.

Just after the nick of time, Mrs. Fiendish had the brilliant idea of putting some fencing along the wall that separated our house from next door’s dilapidated death trap of a garage. We knew from the number of questions we had received from viewers along the lines of “Is that your garage next door?” that this crumbling eyesore looked like it belonged to our house, and so it probably was not creating a very good first impression. The first week-end after we put the fence up, we received three offers for the house. OK, they were all well below the asking price but one was from a chain-free buyer, so we accepted that offer and returned to house hunting with renewed vigour.

As luck had it, another newish house on the same estate as Darrell’s house came up for sale. We went to visit it. A number of things put us off, not least the attitude of the seller, who gave every impression that she was heartily pissed off with the whole house-selling process. “We’re moving out at the end of this month. My husband’s got a job in South Africa – he’s already over there …” (no wonder she was pissed off) “so feel free to wander around while I sit here on the sofa and have a glass of wine.”

The house was £25,000 more expensive than Darrell’s and whereas Dazza’s back windows had a nice view of some woods, this house’s back view was of other people’s washing lines. It just didn’t feel as big, either, despite being more or less the same design as Darrell’s house.

We came out of that viewing feeling depressed. “I really want that other house,” said Mrs. Fiendish. “Shall we go round there now and tell him we’ve got a buyer? Maybe offer him more than the other buyer is offering?” she asked. Why, that’s gazumping! A disgraceful and dishonourable practice.

On the other hand, with Christmas approaching and the housing market as flat as the proverbial road-kill hedgehog, we were looking at another 3 months of life in Enfield. Neither of us thought that would be beneficial to number 2 son.

So, we did it.

This just in: Estate agents are crap
Not right there and then. We went home, slept on it, and then contacted the estate agent to ask them to inform Darrell we now had a buyer and would he consider selling to us. Disappointingly, the estate agent informed us a little while later that Darrell was proceeding with the sale to the other buyer. About two days later Darrell rang to see how our sale was progressing, which naturally confused us. Seems like the estate agent had cocked it up again, and Darrell was interested in our offer, not least because his buyer was dragging her feet; his deadline for moving into his new house was approaching fast. “She’s had three weeks to get a surveyor over here to get a survey done and she still ain’t done it. To be honest, she’s pissing me off.”

A glimmer of an opening. Mrs. Fiendish had an idea which she discussed with me. It involved punting £700 (the cost of a survey) on changing Darrell’s mind.

We called back Darrell. “We can have a surveyor round there next Monday, and we’ll pay you your original asking price” (which was £5,000 higher than his other offer.

We could tell Darrell was itching to accept but he was, you remember, an honourable man, and said he’d like to think about it. We still went ahead with the survey and after it was completed, we didn’t exactly wave freshly printed fivers under his nose, but we did contact him to see whether he had made a decision. After about three days of vacillating and hyperventilating he said he’d give the other buyer two days to get in touch with him (she was not returning his calls) and if she didn’t do so, he’d accept our offer.

Two days passed, the other buyer carried on doing a fantastic impersonation of Greta Garbo, and the house was ours!

Hoorah!

Get in there, my sons
Now all we had to do was get the mortgage sorted out, sort out the legal stuff and exchange contracts within 3 weeks to protect Darrell’s investment on his new house. Three weeks! Not even Anneka Rice could have helped us hit that deadline and it turned out even tougher than that; after Darrell had read the small print on his house purchase, it turns out that he needed to move in by the deadline, not just exchange contracts. The poor guy was apoplectic with stress but we made sure we communicated regularly with him to keep him in the picture.

Inevitably we missed the deadline, after which Darrell’s stress levels dropped off. We managed to move in before Christmas, having employed some wonderfully relaxed (read: slow) removal men. You know that advert for Lilt, where the gag is that Caribbean people start acting like hurrying-scurrying Anglo-Saxons? Well, if Red Bull ever need a marketing campaign for the Caribbean, they could feature our removal company in it. We were supposed to be out of our house by 11:00am; we finally left at 6:00pm, and when the guv’nor turned up to collect the money we weren’t entirely surprised that he was Jamaican.

The aforementioned stalker (see paragraph one) has mentioned that he is still waiting to see pictures of the house; his stalking abilities must be slipping, as by now I’d have expected him to have done his own home video of the place and cracked my network encryption key to boot, but suffice to say that as soon as I find out where we packed the digital camera I will take some photos and you can all start wondering what all the fuss was about.


I have previously threatened to keep track of things I like and dislike about having moved to Hertford, so here goes

1a. Things I like about having moved: The plumbing. What a pleasure to not have to wait 40 seconds for hot water to emerge from the hot tap, and what a joy it is not to need the hands of a safe-cracker to get the shower temperature right.

1b. Things I don't like about having moved: The bloody buses. Timetables and routes seem to be virtually random. Take the 395, for instance, which runs one route on a school day and another on a non-school day. After 8pm the route runs up the hill at the bottom of the road, but prior to that it goes to Ware. All the buses are request stops (a good idea) but none of them have arrival indicators on them (a bad idea).