The plot thickens

On Sunday as we were preparing to spend the last night of our mini break in the Babington Bubble, as Daughter called it, we had an email, copied to us by the people now living in our new abode in NW3. Through the correspondence going back and forth between several people we gathered there was a problem with our moving-in date. The present occupiers weren’t moving out until the evening of the day we were due to move in. Then on Monday morning we had an email from our agents in London with a title, ‘PLEASE TELEPHONE ME’. In capitals, at seven am. Husband was on his way to Heathrow, where Daughter was to board a plane to Stockholm later that morning.

OK, I thought, rapidly losing the relaxed state that the Babington Bubble had induced me into, we’ll just ask the removal company to move us in a day later. We’ll find somewhere to stay for another night. Not such a big problem. You’d think not.

‘The next available date is 28th July.’

Now, it seemed the removals company had taken umbradge with the fact that Husband had made a small comment about the events on the day we moved away from our home of 15 years. I won’t go into it, but you can read all about it below. Instead of trying to make an unhappy customer happy, they were trying everything in their power to make us angry. Or then the stroppy woman was just enjoying the power she suddenly had over our misfortune.Or as Husband  put it in his unmistakable Jack Speak, ‘She’s got me over a barrel and is now unscrewing the top of the KY Jelly’

I’m now sitting in a vast bed in a sleepy Devon manor house hotel, a stay we’d planned at the end of our time between houses. We’re here to visit friends, look at gravestones (yes, really, we know how to have fun) and then make our way via Wiltshire to London. But now I have no idea where we are going next. And it’s raining. And as Husband again so succinctly put it, ‘If I sleep another night here I may wake up in another century.’

The dog is also very confused.