The home-buying system in England has to be among the stupidest in the world. You need chill pills to handle it. For a country with such a well-developed legal system it's a disgrace. So we are interested in this house. As we always do we make a point of meeting with the sellers to show them that we are serious. It's also a chance to get to know more about the property. London is not cheap. One measure is the ratio of London prices to the rest of south-east England (itself not cheap). This ratio is a couple of standard deviations high for the past 20 years. Anyway, the sellers like us and we put in an offer. They accept. But.... they too are buying and their seller is very uncommunicative. He will only take emails. So our deal just hangs. In the meantime another buyer could come along and outbid us and the same could happen with our sellers: another bid could come in for the house they want. There is no contract yet, it's all in the air. No one is legally bound. It's great for the solicitors and surveyors: they get involved and if the deal falls through, too bad, they get paid anyway. Infuriating. So we got out of town for the weekend and went to Brighton, staying in a beautiful flat close to the sea. Luckily there was no traffic pile-up on the highways so we whizzed through in 2 hours. The QSL is from Mid-Downs Hospital Radio in Haywards Heath (just north of Brighton) using 1 watt, one of a bunch of low-powered AM stations heard in Kent over a decade ago.
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