A brand new Rightmove Roundup

The nicest houseboat I think I've ever seen, but is it sinking? Georgian manors in Somerset with tits ahoy, a Thai beach where you can rewrite The Beach, and the story of my daughter's ghost.

Welcome to the Rightmove roundup, wherein we’ve got some weird shit going down in a Georgian manor near Glastonbury Tor, a very nice house with an Aga and a “mummified bees’ nest of terror and regret on the landing,” and a Thai beach where you can take early retirement from your own life.

Why I have not yet been offered gainful employment as an estate agent is anyone’s guess.

ONE: Six bed Georgian house in Glastonbury, Somerset, £2.15m

Before my daughter started at school, when she was a sweet little thing, I took her for a weekend in Somerset, where we paid to sleep in a shepherd’s hut in someone’s garden. We didn’t do things like this as often as I’d have liked, because I didn’t have a driving licence (despite many nervous attempts) and it took a fair bit of logistical wrangling to make it work. As a freelance journalist I quite often took last-minute commissions in those days, so if someone asked me on a Friday night if I could rattle off a quick opinion piece to go to print on Saturday afternoon for the Sunday papers, I needed to say yes. Which is quite hard when you’re in a hut down a stranger’s garden with a small child and no wifi, in the rain. It rained a lot that weekend. We made it work.

While in Somerset, I couldn’t bear to miss the opportunity to view a house that was for sale with a local estate agent. I had long been salivating over it online and it didn’t seem to be selling, so I rang them up and booked a viewing. It wasn’t like London, where they demand to know what stage you are at in the buying and selling process, evidence of your finances and if you are a “proceedable” buyer. Which is a very funny made-up word, well done estate agency. I could not have bought this house, but nobody asked.

We got there an hour early, as we had to get the only bus, so we spent a lot of time in the garden and pottering around in the babbling brook down the end of it. It was a beautiful place, falling to pieces; a big cottage that someone had presumably grown very old and died in. It seemed to have been derelict for years. My daughter wouldn’t have known any of this though, being only three or four.

“Where did he go?” she said, suddenly, as we were standing on the enormous lawn in the middle of nowhere.

Who, I asked, confused.

“The man,” she said, looking at me like I was odd.

I asked her what man she was talking about. There was absolutely nobody there.

“The man with the black shoes. And the shiny silver hair, like Yoyo,” she said, meaning her grandad.

At this point I felt a chill run through me. I asked more questions and I can’t remember exactly what she said - because I couldn’t stop thinking that she probably didn’t know that silver hair denoted old age. Did she? She couldn’t be playing a game. We were at an abandoned detached country house set in large gardens, down a country lane, very alone.

The estate agent arrived. A pleasant woman who showed us around. I think she pretty soon deduced that I was a well-meaning time-waster. But I had become convinced, somehow, that it was our destiny to live in this tumble-down cottage, now that my child was communing with its ghosts.

I couldn’t quite get the agent on board with this thrilling phenomenon (and still cringe when I think of her email reply to me, sent really quite a long time after I wrote and thanked her for the haunted viewing. Even though I seem to recall she did admit that yes, the previous owner did indeed answer that description, and had died there.) I researched it further myself too. It all added up, the house having sat empty for a few years since the man’s demise. But someone else bought the house.

But I can’t give up that estate agency because their houses are the best in the West (country), and I salivate over them still. So today we’re going to look at this dreamboat they’re selling in

the town of Glastonbury; the very spot thought to be the island of Avalon from Arthurian legend, the place where Joseph of Arimathea might just have brought the chalice that is known as the Holy Grail.

And this house is right there, in sight of the Tor! On Chalice Hill!

Thankyou Roderick Thomas!

Still, there’s nothing mystical or woo woo about it, it’s just a really nice building, look:

Beautiful staircase, flagstone floor, wallpapered living room, fireplace. Your standard English country house fare, then.

And alright there’s a sort of tree circle of logs in the garden, but they’re useful for sitting on:

And yeah there does seem to be some kind of stone circle outside what looks like a brilliant midcentury extension but - ooh - original Crittall windows? Lush.

And alright there’s something in the middle of this large blue drawing room that looks like - a shrine? A mystic divining circle? A tarot table? But probably not.

And then there’s this windowless room with a very small skylight and - oh.

Oh.

Do you have a house with a terrifying connection to the undead and the afterlife?

Sell it with Roderick Thomas now!

TWO: Six bed house with barns and boobs, near Wedmore, £1.5m

I’m only being silly. I’m sure they have some normal houses at that estate agents- like this absolute charmer, with six bedrooms and cosy magic in a village called Blackford (where there are a pub and a school both called Sexeys.) Now this Elizabethan and part Georgian property has six bedrooms, three receptions, plus a load of barns and billiard rooms, and it was the home of the original publisher of Harry Potter, “where all the magic began,” says the listing. So it’s a bit awkward that it’s called Yew Tree House, but hey ho.

The house itself has got me swooning from the off. Look at this lovely cosy kitchen with the flagstone floors and a real mottled table instead of a kitchen island. (I do not like kitchen islands. Give me big old mottled tables or give me death. )

And look at the inglenook (which means a fireplace you can step inside) with a porthole onto the garden behind the Aga!

And this lovely sort of mummified bees’ nest of terror and regret on the landing:

And this bear:

And this titty lady, on the left, with the hat:

And this games room with another titty lady taking a breather on the right. I do hope her hands are comfortable:

And oh look there’s even a pool. Which also appears to have a breast on the side of it. Unless the whole thing is shaped like a - my eyes.

THREE: 6 bed maisonette, Hampstead, London, £4.5m

Now if you prefer your psychic hauntings to occur in the heart of London, then we’ve got just the 4.5 million quid crashpad for you. Look at this gothic masterpiece in Hampstead. It’s a 6 bedroom maisonette on Lyndhurst Terrace, NW3, right beside the Heath. And it has two circular windows over there inside the bigger window, which appear to be googly eyes. Watching you think. Watching you eat. Waiting for you to laugh, before devouring you.

Oh here they are again, close up:

And here they are again from the outside, trying to blend in with the wall.

It’s a no from me

FOUR: 3-bed houseboat in Kew, West London with mooring £250k

It’s a 3 bedroom Dutch barge on a residential mooring! With a residential mooring! On the motherfunking River Thames!

Cash purchases only, it says though, which, while not the most unusual thing for a houseboat, still makes me wonder what is wrong. That price is cheap. Too cheap? Is it sinking? Do you care? I’d very much like to sink here:

(NB: Just seen the mooring charges are £1700 pcm. That could be it.)

BARGAIN OF THE WEEK: Studio flat in Thailand, £22,620:

Look I don’t pretend to have much knowledge of how buying an apartment in Thailand works, so there could well be leasehold conditions, property taxes and hidden fees involved in this. But what it appears to be, as listed on Rightmove, is a studio flat of over 400 sq ft, with a communal gym and swimming pool, near the beach in Pattaya. For under £23k sterling.

Here you will live like a simple man, eating fresh fruit and swimming every day, and write the most amazing novel of your era. You’ll be the new Alex Garland. The new James Baldwin. The new Hemingway.

Or, more likely, the new William Burroughs, only, without the books, just all the drug addiction and questionable behaviour.

And there’s something here on the listing that says “The apartment is from the foreigner quota and can be vacated quickly if necessary” which is a sentence that doesn’t actually need to elicit a feeling of panic and a quickening of my heartbeat. It just does.

Still, look at the view. My daughter will understand when I leave her behind to walk herself to school down the pissy canal in Camden every day. Mummy has studio flat in Thailand needs.

LINKS:

How to live in a nice house in London for only £180 a month - by sharing with a pensioner architect. “Maria Matei, 27, has lived in the city for eight years and is currently studying at University - however last year, she feared she would have to drop out due to rising costs…”

This abandoned park-keeper’s cottage in Notting Hill is for sale.

This East Village Penthouse comes with a Cape Cod rooftop cottage.

On what it’s really like to live in a mews house

Watching Youtube videos helped us build our dream home in Devon.

I spent 40 years transforming ‘boring’ cottage after buying it for just £30,000 – but now it’s unsellable