The Daily Novel

It has taken many months to ‘sell’ the house which has caused me aggravation and has deprived anyone whoever reads The Daily Novel of their daily fix. But now I feel grateful to those other would be purchasers who decided to pull out. Because the buyer whose removal van will pull up outside on the afternoon of 1 August shares some of the same feelings about the house. What he likes about the house and the neighbourhood are not exactly what I like. But it seems right for him for the next stage of his journey through life.

So perhaps he would like to know some the things that were not in the estate agent’s brochure. This street is on one of the ley lines, that are supposed to have mystical importance, and affect the lives of human beings. This information is contained in some of the New Age literature and is based on their readings of the devotees of the old pre-Christian religions. I have no way of knowing the truth of this. But I do know that I had the most profound religious experience of my life in the room above a year or two after I moved in.

And I am not religious in the usual sense. I do not believe, like Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles, that my life is under the control of a President of the Immortals having his sport with mere human beings. What I feel is more like what Don Maclean felt when he wrote that song from American Pye.

All roads lead to where I stand

No matter what I planned.

Yesterday I spent four and a half hours in the gleaming 21^st century glass palace that houses University College Hospital on the Euston Road in order to have ten minutes attention from the consultant who is looking after my prostate. So I was pleased when I arrived home and learnt from the evening news that the health minister, Patricia Hewitt, had fallen on her sword. But I am not in the mood now to write about the woes of the health service and the effects of Gordon Brown’s reshuffle.

While I was waiting at UCH I bought myself a small notebook and wrote down a few of the key events of the last few days. I was just righting a sentence reporting that the house sale was going through just as soon as the buyer got written confirmation of his mortgage offer. At the moment I had written ‘mort’ my mobile phone went. It was a text message from him telling me he had sent me by email a copy of the email from his insurance broker reporting the verbal offer. This was in response to my telephone call of the previous night, when I was telling him to hurry up the exchange because my Dorset vendor is threatening suicide and tells me that her vendors are having a nervous breakdown.

It was of course a co-incidence that his text message arrived just as I was in the middle of writing the word ‘mortgage’.

Later on Wednesday afternoon when I joined the queue at the pharmacy to collect my prescription at UCH I was given a ticket with the number 651 on it. That was the number of the house in which I was born and spent the first seventeen years of my life; 651 Stafford Road Wolverhampton. I did not much like the house and I did not much like Wolverhampton. But it was the first staging post of my journey through life.

What I like was climbing the sycomore tree at the bottom of the back garden. From there I could see over the house to the trees on Bushbury Hill and on the other side, across the fields to the canal. From there I could dream of the far more interesting places I would escape to as soon as I was old enough.