Parking tickets I can cope with. Not being invited to a close friend’s daughter’s wedding is the final straw.
I am told there are complicated reasons why I have been excluded from a glittering event everyone I know is going to. One story being leaked to placate me is that the invites have been messed up by the incompetent party planners, goddam them. Yes, well. I think we all know what that means.
The bottom line is this: I have been deemed unfashionable. And when one ceases to be fashionable one must submit to the judgment of one’s peers and move on.
I have only myself to blame. I have been spending most of my time in jeans and Hunters walking the dog or riding the horses.
My metropolitan life has taken a back seat. I have neglected the circuit, ceased to cultivate the urban elite. I have disappeared beneath a wide-brimmed leather Drover hat.
The beautiful people have forgotten that I exist.
London life? You can keep it. Like Margot Leadbetter in The Good Life, I slammed the phone down on a friend whose society wedding invite did manage to turn up and shouted at the boyfriend, ‘William! We’re moving to Cobham!’
And before you say the words frying pan and fire, let me explain that our choice of location is dictated by the fact that between us we now have four horses stabled there. Yes, I realise that looking for a property in prime Chelsea footballer commuter belt that costs less than £15 million is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Yes, I am mildly appalled that Savills website calls Cobham, with no trace of irony that I can detect, ‘the Beverley [sic] Hills of the south east’.
But the fact remains that we stand to save thousands a month in livery fees by being on site and able to tend to our nags, as the boyfriend so fetchingly calls them.
And as if by magic, a possible solution has come up. It’s a gardener’s cottage right next door to our good friend Ingrid.
It used to be part of her estate, in fact, and still has a gate connecting the garden to her grounds. We’re not sure who would be Margot and who would be Barbara but there would be a lot of eccentric goings-on.
Actually, even though we would be the skint ones, Ingrid would have to be Barbara.
She went to put a rug on her horse the other morning and came back with a llama. The way she tells it she was walking past a friend’s smallholding when she noticed she was feeding a pen full of llamas and there was a baby one and the friend said she was selling it ‘and well…’ — Ingrid made a funny face — ‘…a baby llama!’ she exclaimed, as if it were obvious that seeing a baby llama meant buying a baby llama.
When we asked what she was going to do with it she said, ‘It can roam free on the lawn.’ The cogs were squeaking as she went on, ‘Oh, it will be lovely. I’ll be able to watch it from the kitchen window as it wanders about…and…oh, dear…what if it goes right to the bottom of the lawn and out on to the road…?’
As Margot, of course, I told her I disapproved. But you can see how this dynamic might be fun.
The problem is the gardener’s cottage has been subject to what you might term the opposite of lovingly restored. It has been extended by the addition of two flat-roofed, single-storey wings that make the property look like nothing so much as a drug and alcohol treatment centre.
The estate agent confidently insisted that it was still worth every penny of the eye-watering price.
But when the boyfriend rang the planning department at the council they informed us that the extensions were illegal and if we so much as touched a door knocker we would be forced to pull the whole thing down. The only thing they would let us do would be to strip it all back to the original three-roomed bungalow.
I rang the agent and told her this and she said, ‘Oh, well, there you are. It just goes to show that these things are always more complicated than they seem when you look into them.’
That’s it, is it? I wanted to say. That’s your answer to the fact that you’re advertising a property for redevelopment that cannot under any circumstances be redeveloped.
Later that day, I logged on and noted that they had taken the word ‘redevelopment’ off the description.
It just said: ‘Six-bedroomed house with potential for.’ But I think they can do better than that. For example: ‘Six-bedroomed house with potential for llama sanctuary.’
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