Flat Madness
Currently Listening To: Feeling Groovy from the album "Feeling Groovy (Single)" by Saint & Campbell
For the past week the flat hunting has simply been a case of telephone wrestling with the landlord. Quite a scrum in fact so I'll fill you in now on all the events.
First of all we had to try and get a 10 month lease.
The landlord wasn't having any of that so she offered a 10 month lease in exchange for a bump in payment which seemed about as economical as having an 11 and a half month lease at the normal price.
With the bump in price Richard announced that he was in the poor house and hence wouldn't be able to afford the place.
Lee went spare because he was right royally screwed as he didn't have a place to stay, I obviously had the flat so I attempted to organize some sort of tenancy for Lee there whilst we stayed and looked for a new place (virtually impossible at this time of year).
Anyhow at this point the landlady softened her position and returned to the normal rent with a lease of 10 months. All seemed good.
Lee got in touch with her to confirm the offer and it was decided that he would go and sign the contracts on Friday.
However guess what happened today? Some random guy came and saw the flat immediately put down the deposit. After we had confirmed that we would be doing so on Friday the proprietor leased it from under our noses! What a sleazy piece of Landlordery.
So anyhow we're royally screwed because its bleedin' impossible to find accommodation now. Thankfully the same place has a flat below the one we saw which isn't quite finished which we'll put an offer in for as soon as Lee has finished swearing. That was the most sleazy trashy and dishonest action I have ever seen perpetrated. Its just as well I chose a third year module concerning the legal relationship between tenant and landlord (yep its a whole third year module).
Whinney
In other news I had to wake up early this morning to feed the frikkin' horses.
It was really cold, I wore 3 layers and am normally cold in the mornings anyway so you can imagine what it was like to be thrust out there after only 5 hours sleep and 3 minutes of waking time (enough to walk the length of the house and dress).
However feeding horses is not a 1 man game by any means. In fact its normally performed by 2. One to distract the horses and the other to drop the rubber food buckety-plate things. However with 1 man you need to use the rail buckets which are hooked onto the fences.
Now for some of the horses this is ok, they get up, they wait for the nosh patiently and they eat politely. However for some of them eating just isn't enough so they have to kick the feed buckets off the wall whilst they eat, hell yeah that's showing them plastic food recepticals boys!
Consequently for some of the horses you have to sort of pour the feed over the fence into the bucket below because not even I can reach it.
There are 3 horses who do this. One of them is a winsucker.
What is a winsucker I hear you ask? Well its another quite ridiculous horse term which refers to horses who get hooked on biting onto wood and, get this, sucking. Apparently its the horsey equivalent of crack or something because nobody wants their horse to do it and the perpetrating horse tends to get others to do it through a combination of peer-pressure and looking cool (in the way that only sucking on a block of wood whilst exposing your big ol' Horse teeth can make you look).
This all ties into another theme which I've been acutely aware of lately. Horse people have really weird names for both themselves and things. A person was supposed to be looking at our land a few days ago, his name? "Brian Downer". Downer? What sort of a name is that!? There is this trainer who is über interested and is training in this incredible horse we bred from Sillery (now an ex-horse) because we perviously bred 2 others. The first was Score, he got sold and became the a ridiculously successful racehorse who earned $9 million (not for us you understand ;). The second was Sillerant (ours) who seemed just as good as Score but who had an unhealthy obsession with getting himself injured as much as was possible :). The next brother and the final one since Sillery is now in the big paddock in the sky (probably the big glue factory in Dover) is unnamed as of yet but apparently has the fabled "6 Gears". Most horses have 4 gears but some are able to just go completely mental if you put your foot down (Corvette the horse who's family we breed, had 6 gears and came from behind to win the us Hong Kong Derby).
Anyhow I naturally heard about this trainer dude a lot and he was referred to by his nickname "huffer". That was until I found out that his name was in fact, Huffer. I mean for pete's sake! Do people with stupid names just gravitate towards horse breeding/racing!?
Leavin' on a Jetplane
My dad just went back to Hong Kong for another 'tour of duty' so to speak. It'll be a shame not having him around as I really enjoyed the past 2 weeks with him but then I'm used to him having to fly back off to HK for work so its not too bad.
Being in the same house as my grandmother and no-one else on the other hand, is indeed bad. Thankfully she won't be down till tomorrow so I still have time on my own, hopefully I can convince Conrad to head down or something.
Right time for some sitting around
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at September 10, 2003 03:04 PM