…gang aft a-gley!

(Last night was Burn’s Night – Slainte Mhor!)

About this time last year Kickass Canada Girl and I came up with a plan. It was a good plan. In fact, we were so impressed with it that we thought it might be The plan!

We own an apartment – a sliver of an old manor house in a small village in Buckinghamshire… 16th century church – pub – cricket club… and not a lot more. I bought the apartment long before Kickass Canada Girl and I met – it being about 5 miles from where I was working at the time. Since then we have both changed jobs and I suddenly found myself commuting into west London – a round trip of about 50 miles. The Girl had to endure a 45 minute drive in the opposite direction.

We were both getting pretty depressed at the amount of time we were spending sitting in traffic rather than being with each other, and we were also becoming seriously exhausted. We needed a plan.

The plan was this… We would sell the apartment and purchase a property in BC. As we wouldn’t be able to move to Canada until my retirement we would let the new house and use the income to fund a rented apartment in the UK – in closer proximity to at least one of our places of employ. When the time came to move we would no longer need to co-ordinate purchases on two continents but could simply terminate rental agreements and move into our house in BC. Genius!

We staged the apartment and put it on the market. We saw somewhere that we liked in a small village in Berkshire… 12th century church – pub – cricket club… you get the picture! We signed the lease.

That was when things started to go awry.

The market collapsed. Eight months and two price reductions later we still hadn’t had an offer on the apartment. With help from good friends we very nearly purchased a house in Victoria during the summer, but without the capital from the sale of the apartment we couldn’t make the numbers work. Having moved into the new apartment in Berkshire we were now having to pay rent on that. Finally, in November we had to acknowledge that we were unlikely to find a purchaser over the winter. We took the apartment off the market and found a tenant for it instead. Not quite according to plan…

Since then Kickass Canada Girl has landed her splendid new job in Victoria and will be moving back there in March. As she is 5 years younger than me (and looks 10 years younger than that!) she will have to work beyond my retirement in any case, so it does all make sense. Unfortunately, though the Berkshire village is pretty close to where she currently works, it is even further away from where I do. My round trip is now 68 miles!

I’m sure you know the Woody Allen quip: “If you want to make god laugh, tell him about your plans”…

Har, har, har!