Not a good day

Today I travelled to North London and found the perfect flat, right where I wanted to be. Close to several old friends, two minutes from my old GP's surgery (excellent), with a south-facing garden and lots of storage. I knew the lease was only 72 years but the vendor assured me she'd consulted a leasehold value advisory bureau and been told it would cost £16,000 to lengthen it to 120 years and that once I'd lived there for two years, I could renew it.

I put in an offer, it was turned down. I upped it £5,000 and it was accepted. Whoopee! Then came the bombshell: I had to exchange within ten days. My friendly surveyor is on holiday and comes back in... eleven days. That meant forking out £600 or so for a survey. I texted him to see if he knew anyone who could do it cheaply and he rang me from Paxos and as soon as he heard about the lease situation he said walk away, because in two years' time the lease would be down to 70 years or less, and the freeholder could ask for considerably more than £16,000.

So I rang my solicitor, who agreed and said that I could always go to arbitration to get the freeholder to charge less, but that would cost a lot of money. Which I don't have.

In the space of half an hour, I had gone from euphoria to total depression. I rang the estate agent, who was abominably rude and patronising, told me I had been badly advised and that the vendor was wrong and she could assign her right to extend the lease to me, so I could do it right away, and that it cost nothing to go to arbitration. He muddled my thinking so much that in the end I snapped, "Forget it, I'm withdrawing my offer, that's that," and terminated the call. I found I was shaking as I stood outside Kings Cross station, being deafened by traffic and roadworks. The slimy agent had treated me like an idiot when all I was doing was trying to protect myself from future huge outgoings. B******d!!!

Then I got off the train at the far end of the line and got caught in a cloudburst. I dripped into the house, to find a letter waiting for my from Scholastic Books telling me their were dropping my book, Love Cheat as it hadn't sold enough (it's the only one I have still in print) and the rights would revert back to me, apart from in several foreign countries where they extended until 2015. Fat lot of good that is. I'm not even free to re-publish it myself. It was definitely not my day.