Pam continues from her last article... House Hunters Beware

At last we had found the house of our dreams and we had been given three weeks in which to come up with a deposit. The compromis was all prepared and waiting for our signatures. Somehow we had to get things moving.

The following day it came as a shock to me to see that the house had not been taken off the website as promised, but was now described as the “coup de coeur du mois”. When I phoned to ask why this was, I was assured that this was “normal” under the circumstances.

There exists a difference in the usage and translation of the word “normal” almost as wide as the English Channel itself. What we would term as subversive behaviour is described as “normal” thus acceptable to the French with just the merest Gallic shrug, but when they are offended and or put out, the situation quickly deteriorates to “pas normal”. If your parking is deemed to be “pas normal” so that others are greatly inconvenienced you are not allowed to forget it quickly. The scream of “pas normal” is used to describe everything from being short changed in a restaurant to being abandoned by an unfaithful partner.

I was not happy so decided to have a little dig of my own by asking about progress on the missing paperwork.

The owners reassured me by calling to say that no matter what happened they were not going to allow anybody in to view the property until the end of the month and that they hoped I could sort something out by then. They were not the only ones.

As the days went by I realised that it was a lost cause and that the likelihood of my prospective buyers selling their house in a matter of weeks was as probable as winning the amount necessary for the deposit on the lotto. In desperation I decided to make an appointment for them with my bank manager who was young, full of ideas and exuded energy from his spiked up hair to his shiny shoes. It was after all in his interest to gain another client so we could move forward.

By a strange twist of fate the appointment at the bank was at the beginning of the following month, but because of holidays nothing could be done to bring it forward. I received a call from the vendors to say that the visits had resumed as agreed. Of course the little weasel of an estate agent had programmed three on the first and two on the second of the month. By this time I was reduced to a nervous wreck but the day before the bank appointment the vendors informed me that no one had put their money on the table as yet so we still had a chance.

The trip to the bank went swimmingly. The mortgage was agreed but the deposit still presented a problem although feeling quite euphoric I tried to ignore this and decided that we had progressed enough to report back to the weasel. With this news I hoped he could hold off for a little bit longer. With bated breath I dialled the number of the agency. His secretary greeted me in a tone of badly disguised pity and quickly passed me over to her boss. Something was afoot, but what exactly. “Ah chère madame”, he said. “ I wanted to join you in urgence this morning”. Strange, I thought as my phone hadn’t rung and even though I may have gone to pieces over the past few weeks I didn’t appreciate or need his offer to put me back together. However there was more. In the honeyed tones of victory he announced the lethal blow. “We signed the compromis for this property last night with another buyer. I am very sorry for you but you are too late.”

I cannot remember the end of the phone conversation but although he was only an estate agent doing his job; I wished him to many different places, none of which ressembled his plush, meticulously arranged office on the top of the hill.

Time is a great healer and my husband and I tried bravely to persuade each other that it wasn’t really that wonderful but it still took three months to find anything else to raise even a spark of interest. Then one morning while trawling the net I saw a familiar swimming pool and low and behold, our beloved property was back on the market. I telephoned the agency, a different one near Paris, to be assured that our dream had come true. It was for sale again. However, our jubilation was short lived when I was later told that they had made a mistake. The house had in fact just been sold but they were happy to propose something which was extremely inferior, not at all what we wanted and more expensive into the bargain. In these situations it is difficult to remain calm but this practice of using an attractive property as bait to arouse interest is quite widespread. They couldn’t know how cruel their advert was.

Never mind. This morning I saw something with a tower which has potential and if I ………..(to be continued maybe)