Forcing a Rethink

For years my mother has been trying to persuade me that I should sell my little house in High Wycombe and transfer my property portfolio to Dorset. There isn't much connecting me to Wycombe anymore, certainly, nothing more than a couple of friends and a residual affection for the Museum where I used to work, but so long as my house continued to be let there was no compelling reason to sell it, either. It isn't the house I used to live in: I sold that in favour of a slightly nicer one a mile or so away while I was at St Stephen's House. The agents I've always used are a small independent local company from whom I rented before I bought my own place, and over the years I've watched the couple who ran it and with whom I used to deal gradually take a seat further and further back in the firm. I told myself for a long while that my signal to sell would be when they finally retired.

What with one thing and another, though, I decided to move in advance of that and at least think about selling the house. This is not least because (forgive the middle-class topic) property is declining in value in Wycombe and rising in West Dorset where I would like to live one day. Curiously I kept overhearing conversations in which people discussed moving that way themselves, and eventually decided I would act - at least when my current tenants move out. I wrote to the agents to tell them, even if no sale was imminent.

And then, strangely enough, yesterday I had a letter from Mr & Mrs Bennett to say they were, in fact, retiring and had sold their interest in the agency to another local firm: their connection with the company would cease completely in a couple of months once everything was tidied up. The staff are staying on, but the atmosphere had already changed and the new owners are themselves a smaller brand within the gigantic LSL Property Services. How peculiar that my decision and the Bennetts' should coincide. I've written to them to say thank you for their service over the years. 

I have a streak of deep sentimentality in my makeup which I know makes me want to hold on to things, people, and organisations, after the conditions which made them genuinely important in my life have moved on. That shapes even what is basically just a commercial relationship between a landlord and a property agent. It's a silly thing, perhaps, but not entirely a bad one.