This turned out to be an interesting day for reasons that will become apparent. But being a Thursday, it was my normal ‘shopping’ day but I must say that things seemed extraordinarily quiet this morning, for reasons I cannot immediately discern. As we intend to go away in the middle of next week, I made the shopping into a very ‘light’ week as I hate shopping for food only to throw it away a few days later. The shopping having been done, I returned home for a quickie breakfast and then wrote a quick note to Meg’s Uncle Ken in North Wales to remind him that we were due to visit him in a week’s time. When we started to think about our walk, it was evidently a very indeterminate type of day, weatherwise, and we were unsure whether little spots of rain were threatened and whether we were due to experience a more serious downpour. By the time we got ourselves ready for a walk in the park, it had already stated to spot with rain so we had to reluctantly dive back inside the house and don some outerwear. By the time we were firmly seated on our park bench, it started to rain quite steadily so I did what I have never done before. I took our poured out coffee and put back into the flask. Then we headed for the bandstand, knowing that it would give us respite from the rain for sufficient time for the rain to blow over. Sheltering under the bandstand roof, there was a motley crew of individuals all sheltering from the rain. We had small children and dogs as well as an adverising board for a local radio station and a presenter who was awaiting a person running across England to raise money for diabetes research. When the rain ceased, we struck out for home and I previously prepared some veg to have with our quiche at lunchtime. I had pre-prepared some little sticks of carrots and parboiled them with some petit pois. Then, when we got into the house, we finished off the cooking of the veg and then gave them a quick stir in some hot olive oil, to which we added a spoonful of runny honey. This makes a fairly boring vegetable mix a bit more exciting and we enjoyed it very much with our quiche.
In the afternoon, I knew that I needed to send a long and detailed reply to a solicitor who was representing the relatives of our neighbour who lived ‘across the green’ from us and died last August. The solicitor had submitted a lengthy list of questions on matters generally related to the ‘drainage field’ and associated access pipes and roadways. A lot of these questions could have been answered if the relevant documents had been supplied to the solicitor in the first place. But this involved sorting through historic files and then the computer to see if I had these documents as a PDF. The documents were quite various and included things such as the legal agreement that we and a couple of our neighbours had signed giving us a mutal purchase of the drainage field, the Klargester BioDisk and all of the associated roadways and fences. In addition, we had been gifted a long sliver of land by the previous owner of the field upon a new mini-estate has been built. Several years ago we had needed to establish exactly where our boundary line lay because it had been very vague in the past (‘following the tree line’) but once we had been gifted this land, it needed a trust agreement establishing joint ownership and then registration with the Land Registry. So all in all, I needed to supply a variety of legal instruments, location maps, Land Registry TP1 forms and the like so that the conveyancing could go ahead. But the lady across the green from us who had died had all of these documents in her possession but it looked as though they had never been bundled up with the rest of the legal documents or handed over to the solicitor. So it ws evident from the list of questions that the old lady’s relatives did not really know what they were selling so it took several hours of work for me to indicate who owned what and in what proportions. This whole venture took several hours of concentrated work and I was not best pleased, particularly as I had offered to discuss any practical details of these deals with the neighbour’s relatives but they brushed off us off indicating that they knew all that they needed to know (which was evidently not the case) So at end of the transmission of several documents to the vendor’s solicitors, I did indicate my displeasure at having to spend hours of work to establish who owned what when it was not my place to do so. But at least, the hard work is now done and I await a response from the solicitor with interest.
© Mike Hart [2022]