Chain reaction

The last thing you want to hear just as you’re leaving work on a Friday afternoon is that the top of your chain has been gazumped. My dream of moving my family from a gardenless duplex into a mews with a postage stamp backyard has all but disappeared, and nine months of viewings, searches, solicitor’s phone calls and estate agent banter has gone down the drain. We are now clinging on to the hope that the person we’re buying from sees sense and moves into rental to hold the whole shebang together but as a self employed builder, our seller doesn’t seem to want the risk of remortgaging.

It’s depressing stuff, not least because this house represented our last chance of being able to buy in the Hackney suburb where our kids have grown up. House prices have gone through the roof, and this place – 12 years old and a little tired, but backing onto a football pitch and the ecopark – was something of a bargain, and meant the kids would not have to move schools.

I responded to this news the only way you can on a Friday night after two weeks of sickness and one stress or other, by getting rollicking drunk with two of my work colleagues, forcing down G and Ts for shits and giggles, because, well, there was nothing else I could do.

In the cold light of day, however, I am frightened. We’ve outgrown this flat, and we need to move on. Jonah, stick-limbed and hurtling towards adolescence needs his own space to be a boy, and I want both of them to have the chance to grow up in some semblance of the comfort that I enjoyed as a child – with a house, garden: normal stuff, it felt to me, growing up.

The thought of beginning the whole horrid process again is overwhelming and we’d optimistically started putting stuff in boxes – just books and bits and pieces, but we’d mentally moved out, planning our holidays and social life around the fact that we were due to move in two weeks time.

At this juncture, hungover and numb, I can’t see past the weekend, to Monday when we will be told our fate, but I’m expecting the worst, and our hopes and dreams for the next stage of our lives will be shattered.

It’s pointless ranting about the system, although it isn’t fair that this can happen when we’ve all ploughed money into our purchases, that will not be recovered.

All I can do is hope that our sellers will see sense and want to forge ahead with our purchase. Let’s just say I’m not holding my breath.