(I'm too glum to even try to come up with a snappy title. Sorry.)

Haven't the heart to do much posting to le blog at the moment. As you may have gathered by the non-title of this entry, I am seriously mired in the dumps. Not just the usual "wish I'd a job I loved with all my heart" dumps, either; nope, they're being kept company by the "oh, my dream house just came on the market and I'm not minted enough to buy it" dumps.

Rubbish.

It's this period semi-detached gaff in my hometown that I've been in love with since I was about 5 years old. It's just fabulous. Loads of character, oodles of period features, bursting with potential (hmm - maybe I could be an estate agent when things pick up again? Let's see... "deceptively spacious"... "bijou"... well, I can talk the talk anyway. Must put it on The List.) As I've mentioned a time or three, we're doing a spot of house-hunting at the moment, and this gaff to me is a real "forever" home. It's pretty big, has a decent back garden (which gets sun early morning AND in the evenings, swoon), proper side entrance, and a bit of ground out the front, and is probably the only house we've looked at that I can really see myself in for the long-term.

So it's an absolute crying shame that it's about €170,000 over budget. Personally, I think the vendors are being unspeakably greedy buggers with the asking price they've stuck on it, given that they bought it about two decades ago and probably paid a bag of apple drops and a copy of the 1985 Golden Pages for it.

Blub.