Sunny day, bright day. Sittin' in the office, just gone 1.15. Just wolfed down a cheese sandwich. Homemade with home baked bread that I did last night. Pretty tasty. Always good to bake bread; there is something nice, something wonderful about knowing there will be fresh bread at the end of an evening. I guess at the moment I'm doing around 2-3 loaves a week. Goes in phases. Question of finding the right flour. At the moment I think I've got the mix right. Combination of Dove's Farm organic wholemeal and Hovis granary. I like it, like it a lot. So does Tamdin. We use a breadmaker. Had it a couple of years now and it is a pretty reliable chunk of machinery. Basically it is like a little oven, well in fact it is a little oven. Gotta be careful when ya take the loaf out when it is done or else you run the serious risk of burnin' ya pandies. Everything is piping hot at that stage I can tell ya. Believe me I've had a few close ones but so far so your Bread Warrior has come through unscathed.
Well just like I said in the post prior to this one I did manage to get into town on Sunday and pick up a bunch of CDs. The 2 Doobies on Japanese import just like I described them, at an unbeatable tenner a piece; a cheap edition of The Boss's Greatest Hits which has come out in a new flip pack format for only a fiver, unbelievable. Same goes for an a copy of the Definitive Johnny Cash that I bought for a fiver as well. Again in a flip pack. These flip packs come with the minimal amount of packaging but in actual fact I think I find them more attractive than normal CDs. Especially when they are so cheap. Finally I also got the JJ Cale Anthology I mentioned previously for just 8 quid. Double CD.
All in all then five top quality CDs for 41 squids which I don't think is too bad at all. Just can't see how the CD is gonna fade away in fact I'm not too sure about this whole downloadin' business I have to say. Still recovering from my Minimum-Maximum experience which I went through a few posts back. Didn't go for Tunnel of Love by the Boss in the end. They had it there on the racks for eight but the Greatest Hits package at three quid less was just too good ta resist, and I have to say that after playing it in the car yesterday and today I think I made a good decision.
From out of the 2 Doobies I have given Stampede a run through and I have to say the remastered sound on it is simply excellent. Really really went way back into the dim and distant past to remember the tracks from when I first heard them which was over 30 years ago now. That is incredible you know; over 30 years since I heard Stampede by the Doobies!! Used to have the album on vinyl in the mid-70's when I was a tearaway teen living in Plymouth but for one reason or another I didn't manage to hold onto to it for very long.
At that time me and my friends had record swaps virtually every weekend where we would all meet up and swap records. It was an incredibly exciting and pleasurable thing to do, and I guess it is from those sessions that I can trace my roots of being not a particularly good or ruthless business man. Always seemed to feel that in the eyes of others I was gettin a bum deal. Probably I was doing not too at all of course but that was not my perception.
We used to meet up in the house of my friend Keith Jenkins. Junks. He was a great guy, son of a garden shop owner in Plymstock. He was an only child with a mane of curly hair whom his parents affectionately called Pogles after Pogles' Wood. If anyone else called him Pogles he went completely mad. Anyway whilst his folks called him Pogles we had a crueler nickname for him in the form of Puffballs, a reference to the fact that he had a big pair of balls which we all got to see when we camped in a tent in his back garden during the summers of the mid 70s.
Nicknames in Plymouth were a rough an' tumble business. The one which stuck on me was Basil. Fuck knows where it came from but throughout my years there I was more often than not known only as Basil. Variations on that were Basil Wasil which I think must have had something to do with the Bowie song Rebel Rebel which came out in '74 although it is a bit hard to remember now. Plymouth, oh man oh man I've lost contact with all those guys decades ago. Junks, Deano, Fordy, Robert Field. I used to live there from 1971 - 1976 and then we moved on to Lowestoft. My dad was in the docks you see, chasing a career in dock management, not only chasing a career but damn well succeeding in making one in fact. So for me it meant an itinerant childhood being shunted from one coastal town to another from one end of the country to the other. But all that is in another life now. Another life in the long and distant past. A life not always so fondly remembered.
Evening now and feelin tired. Had another talk with the landlords regarding the boiler and this time I didn't come away from the conversation feeling so positive as I did a few days ago. Maria Holgate told me that the bolier and the possible renewal of the lease were 2 separate issues and should not be lumped together. In other words they want us to commit to them doing the boiler repairs without them necessarily giving anything up as far as the renewal of the lease is concerned and what the possible new rent might be.
So any chance we had of thinking that getting the boiler done and being able to reap the benefits for a few more years beyond the remainder of this current lease has now been taken away from us. If, in fact, that chance was ever there. It is quite possible that we end up letting the landlords do the work for a cool 14 grand and then have nothing in the way of guarantees that we will be able to stay in the property beyond the end of the current lease.
The reason we will not be able to stay there is simply because the price will be too high. So this is the situation as it now stands. After my last meeting with Maria I was under the impression that they might do us some favours but now I am sure this is not going to be the case. I'm getting tired of all this, I think we might as well just take the pill and swallow it no matter how bitter it might end up tasting.
If we don't let the landlords do the work we are only going to be looking at a nightmare situation in getting other people in to do the job as everything they do will have to be run past the landlords anyway due to issues with the lease and access to the property. So, there we are.
Why did I give myself the illusion that my sweet talking was going to be enough for them to do anything for us that might be seen as a favour? Sad illusions. There is simply no chance. There is a strong possibility we will end up getting stitched up by this whole episode. When I spoke to Maria today she was business like and fairly abrupt. She told me as far as the lease renewal is concerned she had contacted a surveyor and was waiting to hear back. That is bad news as we know full well the price we currently pay for the place is under the going rate and therefore if a surveyor is going to get involved it means she will be seeking the full market value upon renewal.
This was something we were hoping they wouldn't do. In our minds we feel we have been quite good tenants and therefore we thought this might have been able to swing things a little bit in our favour. That really does not look likely in any shape or form. So, here we are; facing the prospect of forking out all this money for the new heating system and then not being around very long in order to enjoy the benefits. The only good point to all this is that the landlords have offered an interest free payment schedule on the bill which means we can probably stretch things out for about a year from now in regard to paying the full whack for what is due. But what a bummer of a situation the whole thing is. Just goes to show, if you can, buy the place you're either livin' in or working from. Otherwise it is like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
No comments:
Post a Comment