7 APRIL 2007, Page 51

Lonely planets

Jeremy Clarke

We love this old house and can’t imagine living anywhere else. But needs must and we’ve finally bitten the bullet — the house is on the market from today. Twenty years we’ve been here. For 15 of these it was a home for nine elderly residents run by my parents. Now everyone’s dust except me and my mother — and she reckons she’s not far off it. We’re two lonely planets orbiting in a house on a cliff with seven bedrooms and 11 lavatories to choose from.

It’s a long walk just to answer the phone. If it’s someone for my mother, the caller might hear the receiver being slammed down on the telephone table, receding footsteps, irritable shouting, doors banging — then prolonged silence. Then fainter, more distant shouting, more doors slamming, then an even longer silence, during which the caller is probably saying, ‘Hallo? Hallo?’ Then the sound of returning, defeated footsteps and a panting, irritable voice saying, ‘She’s not in.’ We’re advertising the house first on the World Wide Web. My suggestion. To sell this house via an estate agent at one and a half per cent plus VAT would cost in the region of £15,000. To advertise on a tailormade website until the place is sold, withdrawn, or falls down, costs about £150, or as much as an estate agent’s Fred Perry sweater. Working on the theory that a house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, you can name your own price, take your own pictures and write a description without using all that horrible estate agent’s technical and legal rhetoric. Or, as many people advertising on property-for-sale websites seem to be doing, you can simply fly a kite by asking silly money and seeing what happens.

Serious suggestions of mine are usually laughed off as the ravings of an idiot. But like all credulous technophobes, my mother attributes supernatural powers to the ‘internet’: powers to pervert, mainly; but also powers to enrich an individual far beyond anything that can be achieved under the temporal laws of economics. She promptly awarded me the job of taking the photographs and writing the description. Given that she thinks I’m incapable of writing ‘f—’ with my finger on a dusty Venetian blind, the writing job was a real feather in my cap.

I really went to town. I described how the great swathes of light from the lighthouse sweep the bay at night and illuminate the photograph of Bobby Moore that hangs on my bedroom wall, and how the lighthouse always seems to say ‘yes’. (I can’t believe I said that.) I told about the pair of peregrine falcons that raises a ‘raucous’ brood of chicks every year in the field opposite, and how buzzards ‘soar like eagles’ on the thermals of warm air that rise from the cliff. I enthused at considerable length about the ‘historic’ nudist beach at the foot of the cliff and how wonderful it is to strip right off and feel the breeze down there. I said what a great craic is to be had in the Post Office and General Stores.

Concerning the house itself, there are no discernible ghosts, I said, which is surprising considering how old it is, and how many people have died, some unwillingly, some in agony, in the past 20 years. The spirit of the house, I said, was wholly benign. My most prized item of furniture, my chopping block in the old pigsty, I would be leaving behind. Its criss-crossed surface, I said, is a testimony to 20 winters of elderly residents staring nostalgically and apprehensively into my dangerously large log fires.

I posted nearly 2,000 words of this stuff on the website. Estate agents’ words like exceptional, luxurious, attractive, superb, charming, substantial and spacious didn’t get a look-in. But I could afford the creative approach. It’s the sea view that will sell the place in the end, which initially, at any rate, is the photographs’ job to convey. But I thought it was too much to ask to be given final editorial authority on the description. My mother asked a friend to look at what I had written, on the grounds that he used to be ‘in the property business’.

This genial Brummie wearing mustardcoloured plus fours came round and I was ordered to get my description up on the screen. He read the piece first with quiet astonishment, then with undisguised derision, snorting and chuckling to himself. To begin with he merely pruned and rearranged. ‘Historic nudist beach’ became ‘long-standing naturist facility’, for example. Then he said the whole thing should be scrapped and rewritten by himself. He dictated a 200-word description, beginning: ‘Truly exceptional and substantial Georgian residence with superb sea views situated in the most attractive village of . . . ’ The shortened version stands.

We’ve filled the hall with cut flowers this week — tulips, roses, lilies — as a kind of farewell to the house. My mother is being cheerful.