The Roquefort Files

I am now a landlord, and also, having moved into our new flat in Edinburgh (RFHQ VI?), a tenant again. I think—I hope!—that these cancel out, and that this makes me a normal person rather than a society-destroying property developer. Rather than move in one go, we’ve sort of dribbled in fits and starts over [...]

Sorry we haven’t spoken in a while. Honestly, it’s not you, it’s me. We’ve just never bonded, and lately I feel like we’ve been growing apart. But mainly, it’s because Ash just got a contract in Edinburgh and I never found the right job in the west. So, the great Glasgow experiment is coming to [...]

Your eyes do not deceive: that is indeed a temporary shower cubicle, rudely fashioned from plastic dust sheeting and overpriced Homebase lumber. After the orgy of tile destruction, we had a plasterer take a look at the hollowed-out shell where the bathroom used to be. He quoted us a hefty price for a two-day job [...]

We’ve been in the flat in Glasgow for about ten months now, and Ash’s tolerance of some of its interior “decoration” has finally cracked. Some grouting around the shower—that’s the shower in the bathroom with sky blue walls, dark blue ceiling and pale blue wood-grain laminate flooring from some alien tree—had of late started to [...]

We inherited a washing machine from the woman who used to live in the flat. It was so old that the dial had been worn smooth, and the only perceptible markings on it were a green line, a blue line and a red dot. “It used to belong to my Mum,” she told us. “I [...]

I’m trying very hard to see as “opportunities” rather than “glaring faults” those little surprises that continue to crop up in relation to the flat. The other day I had got round to booking an electrician to refit the light fitting in the kitchen. He scaled the stepladder to the rarefied heights of our vaulted [...]

for failing to organise my screed of notes from Venice into something suitable to post here. In my defence, since we got back I’ve been dividing my time between looking for a flat over in Glasgow and fretting that once I found one I’d be in hock to the bank for the next 25 years. [...]

It’s not every week one hangs on a knife edge between solvency and debt to the tune of £100k. In other words, having given up on buying a place in Auld Reekie (it’s not so much a property ladder here as a greasy pole), I’ve put in a note of interest on a flat over [...]

last week had been an exact clone of the preceding one. We viewed flats and episodes of 24 with more or less equal frequency, the latter compensating to a degree for the former. Then, out of the blue, we got a phone call from the landlord of the most promising flat, offering us a lease [...]