Be Excellent To Each Other

oh, me too. Because water often means ducks.

Bonus points for: little bridges (luckily often near water), occasional swans, tea shops, tomato and/or red pepper soup with a crusty brown roll, boutique indie craft shops, small art supplies stores and toy shops. A stretch of grass to enjoy public where people smile is an obvious must. Every bicycle with a wicker basket earns an extra 2 points.

Have you been to Hay on Wye? Outside of the Festival period it's about as close to heaven as one can get - your list plus all the second hand bookshops you can shake a stick at.

No, I've heard of it due to the festival but never been. Five more days at work and I have a week off, Autumn approaches and I need to get outside so I think that sounds like a must-do. Thanks x

Mortgages are really fucking annoying!

House move is still possible, but depends on whether I can get the mortgage, but the house up north is making things tricky...

Can't you part ex that as well?

Doubt they would like that, they don't really want one part ex let alone two! Plus the dude in it has the lease till April.

The part-ex part isn't the issue, it's getting a 95% mortgage on a new build with another property in the background.

Yes they are.

The best offer we got was for an 80% mortgage, the rest would give us anything up to 60%. The property is only worth £227,000 but over 15 years the repayments are quite a lot. The affordability test they do these days tripped us up, they were strict with the percentage of your income they like you to have left after everything goes out of your account, and got hung up on the fact we'd have less than 15% of our net income left a month after all our outgoings. They didn't seem to take much account of the fact that that percentage equated to over £800. I thought a +£800/month buffer was pretty bloody good! We reduced our savings and holiday budget per month to zero in order to secure the 80% mortgage after going through the process with the first bank we spoke to.

In my case the tame mortgage broker for the builders is insisting that it is impossible to get a 95% mortgage on a new build unless you go with either NewBuy or Help-to-buy, and I can't do either of those schemes due to either the second house or the want to part-ex. Apparently they are whole-of-market brokers and there aren't any mortgages out there for me in the whole marketplace. Which is strange as my broker has a couple he is going to put me forward for, and another broker I called up to check has 5 different mortgages on his system that would work in my situation too!

At least their broker has confirmed my affordability, now I just need to get a mortgage offer in principle before I can get back into negotiations with the builders, as they are understandably jittery due to the moronic advice they have been given by their broker. Unfortunately my broker is off on hols till wednesday, so it's all on pause for now.

Worst case is that I try and do a private sale and then go through NewBuy, but the part ex offer is actually more than I expect to be able to get on the open market, and with NewBuy the builder can't top up the deficit with money, as that isn't allowed on the scheme.

I didn't think Help to Buy was bothered about owning a second property? When I was buying this house I was still the owner of my flat (well, still am) and the mortgage companies were falling over themselves to give me 95% Help To Buy mortgages.

(well, until they realised my credit line was knackered thanks to the M5 )

Strange, did you tell them about the other flat? It's one of the first conditions of Help-to-buy, that you don't have interest in more than one property.

Maybe it's because it was up for sale at the time that they ignored it.

If they expected you to sell it to get the house, then that's normal. If you hadn't sold it by the time contracts were exchanged, they wouldn't have allowed you to proceed!

Managed to come down with man-flu this weekend, right before I'm about to spend a week covering our Dublin office. I'm currently sat in Departures at Terminal 2 in Heathrow waiting for my flight. All the other people here are wearing coats and jumpers and I'm in a t-shirt sweating my nuts off. I get the feeling this could be a long day.

Over the weekend I started playing Fallout 1 again (the Fallout Classic Collection was going for 3 quid on Steam)...it really is marvelous, like going back somewhere you've not been for years, fearing it won't be the same but on your return you find it's not changed a bit.

Splendid all round.

It really is so good.

Been off work for a week; now back at work. I don't like work.

Check out the wallpaper on Bing today. It's lovely!

Same here. Had the best week off too, spent nearly all of it in Langdale up in the Lakes in September sunshine. First weekend with Zardoz, Wullie, Pupil and other mates at a music festival up there then home for a few days and went back for a few days more with my wife and daughter. You know you've had a good time when you can get all dewey-eyed with nostalgia for things that only happened a few days ago.

Why aren't the rocks moving?

Bing wallpaper is always lovely. Its my favourite thing about bing and us synced across all my desktops and phone lock screen.

Bing wallpaper is always lovely. Its my favourite thing about bing and us synced across all my desktops and phone lock screen.

It must have been a pretty awful feeling at Tesco: "boss, you know that profits warning? It's um, £250MM over stated"

Bloody fanboys.

That's quite interesting. I was watching a documentary about foxes the other day, and it mentioned that snow foxes line themselves up with the magnetic field before pouncing on mice hidden in the snow!

Malc

Ah, not just arctic foxes:



http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notro ... CBkPleFmSA

Malc

I am rather enjoying Cilia on ITV.

Sheridan Smith with red hair doesn't exactly hurt, either.

Being the old fart that I am, I remember that era very well. And I know it makes me SOUND like an old fart, but the whole music scene seemed much more exciting and original at that time.

Is Facebook broken?

Zio?

Just had a doctor ranting on the phone that the referral system I made was calculating BMI wrong, connected to his machine and took great joy in asking if his patient is really 3.2 metres tall weighing 44 kilos.

Mr dave

This liklihood just increased dramatically.

Event invite incoming!

[edit] Oh, you already have an invite. Score!

Work are sending me to Brighton for all of next week!

Will you be coming through London on your way home next Friday?

Will see what I can sort out. Last train is 2035 from King's X to get me back to Saltaire at midnight.

Yes of course you can stay the night at ours. Not a problem.

I would have been if I had been traveling by train, but my colleague has offered to drive us both.

My work are sending me to Toronto for all of the week after next!

You win. This time...

We shall see! A hotel in the suburbs of a large city isn't actually that nice!

Quite. I started the overseas trips with work about 5 years ago and was much excited. Now I spend about four weeks a year in exciting overseas climes (stuck in a five star hotel with no prospect of seeing town other than maybe the first or last day of the flights permit/force me to have spare tine) and I'd give it all up overnight if my career wasn't now virtually wholly dependant on it.

5* hotel? Jesus, I'll be lucky with a travelodge

The strange thing is (for me) that the nicer the hotel, the worse it is. You spend the whole time thinking of things you could do if you weren't working the whole time you're awake or or if you were there with people you actually wanted to be with. You get no such conflict in an IBIS

Yes yes. First world problems.

Potentially off to South America in three weeks..

That's exciting, where? Is it Tierra del Fuego? Because that would be cool.

Back to Germany next week... hopefully for the last time.

Fuck you all. I'm working in the same shitty place I have for the last nine years.

Oh, once, I went to Manchester for a course. Woop-de-fucking-doo!

I have moved jobs twice in the past 14 months. And, spookily, moved exactly how Bobbyaro said I would do. Onwards and upwards!