This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Spoke too soon. Sigh. To recap, I put our (admittedly rubbish, IMO) house in Maida Vale on the market, via a private listings agent. My initial motivation was the £500 voucher I was offered for doing so, and the excellent LED mask I bought with it.
Then, in a wholly unexpected turn of events, a couple who I have now come to despise with every collagen-depleted fibre of my being, made an absurdly high offer. Rather insultingly, they said they were downsizing (we have six bedrooms).
But obviously I chose to be the bigger person; we exchanged, and a survey was duly booked.
Meanwhile, Will was incandescent that I had “taken this step” without consulting him (he loves to revert to corporate language when he’s upset). I said I didn’t have to ask his permission, which threw him (poor man), as he obviously felt that I actually did need to ask his permission, and yet he knew also he couldn’t use this phrase without sounding like a sociopath. One nil to Claudia.
Eventually, after a few enjoyable Rightmove searches for massive houses in the shires, he came round to my point of view.
Viz, our house has been an albatross for years, and even if you call our patch “St John’s Wood” (like I said, it’s Maida Vale) there is a distinct sense of tumbleweed along its two-mile roads of red brick.
Many a time I have hallucinated, on Elgin or Randolph Avenue, that I have seen a new Gail’s only to find it was actually another random vape shop. In other words, I realised that I’ve been in denial for years, and that Will was right about NW8’s shortcomings.
We even went so far as viewing a place in Oxfordshire
Obviously I didn’t say so. But the truth is, if I’m not on Acacia Road or Hamilton Terrace I want out.
So there we were, in an uneasy truce, me wearing my LED film mask at every opportunity to avoid eye contact, Minnie mercifully at boarding school, and Lyra and Hector merrily oblivious to the entire house-move saga.
We even went so far as viewing a place in Oxfordshire, but getting stuck behind a tractor on the way there had incensed me to the point that it was difficult to see past the “I’d rather be drinking a G&T” sign by the Aga.
Still, I pushed on nobly, reminding myself that the signs would go. That maybe even I, Claudia, could handle the countryside. Could possibly even do some tractor-acceptance meditation. We also stopped at Soho Farm House for lunch which helped.
And then … the bloody downsizers told us that the survey had revealed “damp” in the utility room. I KNOW! Not rising damp, I should add. Just common or garden mugginess. What do they expect, in a room devoted to the washing and drying of five hundred items of games kit?
Clearly never done a day’s emotional labour in their lives (laundry is emotional labour, right? It sure as hell makes me emotional).
So we’re now back to square one … in a mere three thousand square feet of semi-detached hell. UGH. But a weird thing has happened. Will and I are back on track. Possibly it’s the Mounjaro (his not mine, what are you implying?).
Or possibly it was bonding over the tractor’s slow progress … or just the prospect of new, hedgerow-filled horizons. But I literally feel completely different about him. Oh and his ancient cousin Jonty has just died at 98, leaving us everything. So that doesn’t go amiss either. Still, bloody annoying about the sale. FML as per.
