Well, we have had a bit of a depressing week this week. From hope and happiness to doom and despair in a few short days!

I’ll set the scene – a promise of a whole term’s worth of salary was announced by the arrival of a payslip on Monday after several long phone calls to Payroll in Wellington the previous Friday. We should expect the money by Wednesday at the latest! Hooray! Aonghas has been patiently waiting for his Nintendo Wii (the money for which he had saved up from Birthday and Christmas) since we got here. But as we had no television and we had spent his money (dreadful parents that we are!) we said that he would have to wait. The television problem was solved when his friend Hong’s Mum and Dad lent us their old one but we still had no money! We promised him that we would buy it when I got paid which we thought would have happened weeks ago!! So he was very excited when it looked like he would be able to have his Wii this week for the holidays. Not so! No money on Monday, no money on Tuesday, checked the bank account just about every hour but still no money on Wednesday! On Thursday I phoned Payroll who said that the money had gone from there and should be in my account, so they suggested I phone school. On phoning them and checking my payslip more carefully we found that the account number was wrong by one digit – so my money was somewhere in the ether – possibly in someone else’s account! Several frantic phone calls later by the wonderful accounts staff at school to Wellington and I now have a promise that the money will be in MY account by the end of today. I won’t hold my breath!! Just keep checking the account….

We have spent a few pleasant mornings in the museum this week keeping busy and being entertained. What’s wrong with that, I hear you say? Well, nothing really except when you come out and go back to the car to find that someone has got into it and stolen all your CDs! No apparent sign of forced entry (I had checked that it was locked before leaving it but as it has central locking I only checked the drivers door trusting that the central locking worked), and fortunately no damage to the car. They also took the registration documents and the insurance details from the glove compartment. What else was in there I don’t know – my sunglasses, and other bits of junk. My guess is they just tipped the contents of the glove compartment in a bag and ran. Not sure if it is worth making a claim but when you count up the cost o 20 or so CDs you suddenly realise that that is quite a lot of money. Had to phone the insurers to ask them to send out a new policy document so will see what our excess is and work out whether it is worth claiming.  Spent the next hour at the police station reporting the theft and getting the car brushed for fingerprints.  Nothing positive came up so I’m guessing it’ll just be another one to put down to experience!

As I have already blogged we have spent the last couple of weekends getting excited about looking at houses and even found one we think we could put an offer in for once our sale comes through. But – yes, you’ve guessed it! Six weeks after making an offer our buyer has pulled out – SIX WEEKS!! He claims it is because builders reports state that there is too much work to do. However he had builders round there BEFORE he put in his offer. We know that because in the course of doing that he switched the water on, left it on and as a result caused a leak which luckily our friends found when they went to open the windows to air the house. It resulted in our friends having to fit a new water tank and clean up all the mess. It also caused our next door neighbours problems, but I won’t go into that as it is far too complicated! We suspect that he has had problems getting a mortgage and is using building repairs as an excuse. He was already getting the house for considerably less than the market value even given the depressed state of the market. How can he decide now after 4 or 5 months (he first viewed it back in Feb.March) that it is not what he wants? Grrrr! VERY frustrating! Okay, rant over ….

So if anyone out there knows of anyone who wants a substantial Victorian family home in Ingleton North Yorkshire please make us an offer. (3 bedrooms, large living kitchen, large living room, copious amount of boarded out, dry cellar space, mature garden (probably quite overgrown by now but it is lovely underneth!!), 2 garden sheds, outdoor ex-toilet now shed! Off road parking. It is the former mine manager’s house from when Ingleton was a thriving mining village. The three cellars are dry, centrally heated, and used by us as a children’s play room, a study and a storage area for all our caving, climbing, camping, walking gear so there is plenty of space! The kitchen is the hub of the house – we unearthed a big hearth and stone lintel before we left but had no time to do anything with it so there is scope to devlop that. But the kitchen is big enough for a large dining table so we spent most of our time in there! The sun pours in in the afternoon and late evening making it a really sunny spot to be. The living room is the same size as the kitchen and again the light comes in afternoons and evenings. Upstairs there are three bedrooms and a bathroom, the master bedroom has fully fitted wardrobes. All looking a bit sad now that no one has been living there for six months so it desperately needs a happy family to keep it company again! We look forward to being inundated with offers!!