Columns
Heat and Dust
(This is the fifth instalment in a year-long series of Heat and Dust columns for the Home section of the Sunday Times.
It chronicles the renovation of our house in Crete, which gobbled up funds we should have spent curing the damp in the Lighthouse. If you’re interested in the entire tragi-comic saga, it’s related in full here.)
Watching my Nearest and Dearest walk down a flight of battered stone steps towards the Greek village house I’d fallen in love with, I could tell they were underwhelmed. Where I imagined a cosy whitewashed homestead with blue shutters and froths of cerise bougainvillea, they saw a hotchpotch of concrete-roofed rooms with ugly aluminium doors and a courtyard cluttered with decayed farm implements.
There was silence in the car as we drove back to the hotel. What little headway I’d made by appealing to the Poet’s baser nature (by mentioning the fortunes we’d rake in from letting out the separate barn) had dissipated when he examined the building in question.
A charmless little two-room hovel, it was built primarily from those peculiar Greek bricks that are filled with holes, like an Aero, and collapse into red shards when threatened with anything more substantial than a teaspoon. I called it ‘the Stable Block’. The Poet rechristened it ‘the Chicken House’ after the single glum occupant he found scratching around the dirt floor inside.
I loved it; they hated it. I cajoled; they glowered. I pleaded; they stuck out their lower lips. Faced with an impasse, I did what all great generals do: I made a List.
Our ancestors had the right idea when they employed marriage brokers. They knew how important it was to resist the temptations of fleeting physical attraction. A marriage is for life, not just for Christmas. So it is with a second home. Which is why I urge all second-home buyers to draw up a List of Basic Requirements before beginning their search. It’s the only way of keeping a clear head when faced with a picturesque ruin with no mains water accessible only by donkey.
But, but, but, I can hear you object, a second home is about fantasy not practicality. Which is why your list should include your battiest dream elements too. So though ours contained items such as cost (under £50K including renovations), distance to beach (under 20 minutes), and quiet (no pimpled youths in Amstel tee-shirts performing wheelies on small motorbikes within earshot), I added ‘owls’, ‘woodland surroundings’ and ‘night sky unstained by street lighting’. And the Poet put ‘Venetian arch’ and ‘local kafenion with four moustachioed elders propped permanently outside’.
The Daught’s truculent contribution was to ask, yet again, what was wrong with our air-conditioned hotel? We could holiday there for 25 years for what we seemed to be prepared to squander on a ‘dusty old house miles from the sea’.
Ignoring her, I took out a sheet of paper and drew up three columns. In the first was our List of Basic Requirements. The other two were headed ‘House A’ (championed by Poet and Daught, half a villa with absentee Athenian neighbour with possible alarming ambitions for condo development) and ‘House B’ (my choice, a rambling mountain farmhouse with Stable Block/Chicken House).
Taking each item on the List in turn, I ranked Houses A and B out of 5 according to the extent they measured up. All we had to do was tot up and plump for the house that scored highest.
After a genteel start it turned nasty. The Poet accused me of cheating by scoring ‘owls’ on the same basis as ‘need for hire car’. I parried with ‘whose book-deal is paying for this in the first place?’, a below-the-belt jab as a poet’s publishing contract typically consists of a couple of folding notes plus a meal at an all-you-can-eat curry-house in Newcastle.
In the end, as with most things, it came down to dosh. At £60,000, House A was already above budget and would gobble up another £5,000 before we could move in. House B, including a £20K renovation, still came in comfortably under our £50,000 cut-off point – assuming Vasilios’ blithe estimates for rebuilding the back wall could be trusted…