There must be hunners of folk oot there wie the same dilemma as me.
Do you stay or do you flit?
As ye get wrinklier and more dottery in body and mind, ye start to wonder if ye need a littler hoosie. Recently, a pucklie pals o’ mine have done The Big Shrink – doonsized from whoppin’ places into smaller but perfectly formed flats.
Losh, man, but they’re affa swish. Sleek and stylish, one complex even has regular community chipper suppers, card games, bingo and events to celebrate just about onything. I quite funcy that.
Trouble is, these dream apartments are in Costafortune territory, when I’m really in the market bracket for Cheap-as-Chips. After all, I majorly doonsized 19 years ago to this two-and-a-half-bed bungalow with a lovely garden, vowing I’d live to be a burden to my kids and remain in situ until I was cairried ootski feet first. Brilliant ambition, and never before lived longer in a hoose than 11 years.
Except I didn’t really, really downsize. Just take a keekie in my “this wifie’s a hoarder!” garage – where you’ll find (on both sides of the wee space doon the middle) the contents of another couple of rooms.
And there’s the general upkeep of a stand-alone hoosie. Fit’s got me in this lather is that I’ve discovered yet another leak after the rain earlier this week. As usual, water tricklin’ doon inside the big lounge window. Had it fixed before, knew it would need sorted again.
Phoned my trusty roofers – in business just roon the corner from me in Rosemount decades ago, and still goin’ strong. Sadly, got an automated voice telling me they were stowed out wie work after the recent storms, and I’d have to call back another time. Damn it. Towels to window sills…
I can’t escape the fence curse
Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned before, my beautiful garden becomes a wild wind tunnel when the gales get going. The merest gust into the 40mphs and the crashing and bashing at the back alerts me to the tornado in The Wizard of Mo.
I first discovered its proclivities when I moved in and, sadly, employed a cowboy gardener to build a fence, whose lightweight, barely-fixed panels turned the entire length into a tall ship, billowing and crashing at the first puff. Finally sorted by my darling ex-gardeners, who handbuilt me the toughest, double-panelled, affa expensive fence. Worth every penny, because it never moves.
Crack on to a’ the gales a few weeks ago, and this time it’s my neighbour’s normally trusty fence which gives up the ghost, including the wee wall below and the gates into both our gardens.
To my horror, he wis on holiday when Storm Isha struck. So, once again, I wis oot in my goonie in the dead of night attempting to stabilise (that would be right!) panels crashing so hard and loud, I suspect they aroused the inhabitants of the graveyard several miles doon the hill. My pal reckons I need to invest in a hard hat.
So, as I say, fit tae dee? Upgrade to a funcy flat? Or bide in my wind-bound, emergency-prone but beloved hoosie? No contest. For now.
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970
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