Because I’m so nosey, I join online property sites to find oot the prices of hoosies sold nearby.
Fascinating. But not such great fun the other day when I got an email from Zoopla informing me their latest calculation was that my place had dropped in value by a whopping £50,000 since – wait for it – November.
Losh min, fit an amount in just a pucklie weeks. I’d heard the Aberdeen property market was bad, but hidnae realise it was that knackered. Just as well I’m nae on the market for selling. Thanks to ha’in’ a bungalow, I fully intend bein’ cairried oot feet-first.
Some folk I ken have been caught in a right snorrel, having bought a new place and stuck with their unsold old one.
It recently clicked with me this is the 20th anniversary of my move into this place, which is where I’ve been happiest for longest.
Looking back, I now also realise you can be deeply miserable in the most magnificent mansion and gloriously content in a basic butt ’n’ ben.
I’ve moved six times in my nearly 77 years, frequently nae for bigger and better. When I was aboot nine, went from a big, posh hoose in Culter to a two-bedroom attic flat in Watson Street wie the cludgies two flights doon. Nae wonder I’ve a bladder like a steel vault.
I should have loathed it, but I loved every second during my wonderful adolescent years. How lucky were we to be teenagers during the Swingin’ Sixties and Beatlemania?
Just married, into the tiniest flat in the Neest, bought by my man as a bachelor pad before I persuaded him to propose. At the end of Wallfield Crescent, attic again.
Get this, one room had a kitchen sink and cooker at the window while at the back a six-foot platform with a double bed on the top – nearly touching the ceiling – our only storage underneath.
I was sure the hoose was a curse
Where I got dressed, I’ve forgotten because the shower room was the size of a phone box. How I tholed it, I’ll never know.
But it was blissful. Young love? Unsurprisingly, it was eventually a curse to get sold. I wonder fa’s livin’ in that queer place the day.
Nothing’s simple in Mo’s housing history.
On to a semi in Braeside that we bought in a roup for about £7,000 in 1975, which hadn’t been lived in for seven years and then by an ancient craiter who’d done zilch to it for donkeys. Spik aboot a state nae half. The toilet made me cowk; bath sunk through the wet-rot ridden floor boards. The lavvie bowl … oh mummy, daddy, soo mingen. It wasn’t habitable for six months and then only barely.
On to another semi nearby which was graced with the pigeon fancier next door’s birdies tap-dancing on my bedroom roof every morning at dawn. Then the biggest, most expensive one of the lot off Springfield Road. A gadgie I knew who’d worked on the build, revealed someone was crushed by a cement mixer in the back garden.
The day we moved in I smelled this overpowering stench of what seemed like rotten fish. Later, when so many awful things happened there – including the invasion of a huge hive of bees through a wall, later ants on the kitchen work surfaces and my eventual divorce – I became convinced the place was jinxed by a bad spirit.
At the end, good news; loads of folk were interested in buying. My ex, determined on a quick sale, insisted on accepting the first offer. A few months after we moved, it was on the market once more – another divorce. The spook strikes again. Bad news for me was that it sold for more than £100,000 the price we’d accepted.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal and started her journalism career in 1970.
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