What's the Catch?

Mr S and I have just finished house-hunting for the third time in three years. I found house-hunting to be an activity that is both unbearably exciting and terribly stressful. Exciting, because the novelty of the freedom and adultness of the activity (I can choose where I live, and in what house? Don't I need to check with someone first?) hasn't yet rubbed off. Stressful, because of a whole list of unlikely rhetorical questions: what if everything is awful and every house we see is falling down? What if we find the one we love and in the half an hour it takes us to decide on it someone else nips in with dastardly haste and gets it before us? What if the letting agents decide I come under the prohibited definition of 'student' rather than the approved status of 'one half of a professional couple'?

These terrors have never yet come to pass, but my pessimistic expectations have been more surprised by the speedy and positive results of this search than they have been by either of the previous two. Thinking about what will be our third home together, which we sign the lease on tomorrow (but what if the landlord changes his mind overnight?! - shut up, brain), I can't help but wonder what the catch is.*

The first time we went house-hunting, it was in Oxford, where prices were high and where flats vanished from rightmove what felt like every ten seconds in the run-up to our search. We saw some appalling properties defined as 'student lets' (one of which had a basement for a living room in which my head scraped the ceiling - those who know me in person will know how low this was! - and another whose kitchen did not seem to have been repaired since 1940) until we finally chanced upon a fairly clean flat which impressed us so much with its non-geriatric cooker and unobjectionable carpets that we agreed to take it in minutes, relieved to find a place that was at least mildly well-cared for. It proved, over the course of the year, to have horrendous damp problems, so bad that our clothes moulded in the wardrobes. For what we could afford, it was the best of a bad lot, and I now mostly remember with fondness the excellent gas hob and the bright bay window in the bedroom, rather than the persistent coughs which we both suffered from due to its general atmosphere.

Our second flat, in Cambridge, was discovered after a run of (if possible) even worse viewings than in Oxford, including one particularly memorable property in which the letting agent, looking despairingly at the horribly peeling walls, pulled a long strip of paint off and said grimly: "the landlord will have to fix it now!" We had very few properties on our list - a symptom of the rapid turnover and high demand in such a beautiful and student-filled city - so nerves were certainly growing as we crossed more and more off, until I looked with new eyes at pictures of the university-owned accommodation (let directly from the university to students or employees as tenants, rather than through colleges). True, the flats available were in the midst of several very modern, over-large blocks, but at least, I reflected, they were new. We hastily signed a lease on a 10-year old ground floor, unfurnished flat with neutral walls, an almost shockingly efficient layout, and red blinds in the bedroom which look startling, but result in a surprisingly soothing shade of morning light. We also signed a lease which stipulated we had to get permission to play music: I was requested not to play my saxophone at all, and our piano-playing was limited to set hours. Moreover, the site is a good twenty-five minute walk into town, and the only amenity between it and said town is a cafe we have affectionately dubbed the 'Worst Coffee Shop in the World'. However, the flat is dry, and nothing ever breaks. A distinct step up from a house whose damp problems could only, we were told, be solved by demolition.

I've actually grown increasingly fond of the modern
architecture - I think it looks like the Cambridge
sky with its blue and light-grey panels.

So, we had high hopes that we could continue this upward trend with our third residence, this time in Fife, to where we are migrating for me to undertake a PhD at St Andrews. We decided to look in the coastal villages outside of St Andrews, on the grounds that they offered much lower rents than the town itself, and had good bus services (also, four years are too many for this country bumpkin to spend existing in anything more bustling than a large village). We booked a week in Fife, to give us plenty of time. This day - our first - started with the usual run of rejects; one too small, one too near a busy road, and one too-full-of-the-accoutrements-of-its-presumably-recently-deceased-elderly-female-owner (it still had bowls of pot-pourri, 1960s patterned carpet, and a flowered quilt on the bed. I can understand offering a house furnished, but this still looked like someone else's home). Then we caught the bus to a village called Crail, knocked on the door of a pretty stone house, and were welcomed upstairs by its landlord, who was wearing paint-splattered overalls due to being knee-deep in sprucing up an already pristine flat. 

If nothing else, the view out of the (double-glazed! - surprisingly rare in a place as chilly and windy as Fife) kitchen windows alone would have had us signing our next three years away then and there: nothing but sea. Add to that a sparkling kitchen, complete with dishwasher (oh, choirs of angels...), bedrooms with fitted shelves (we possess many books), the most picturesque harbour in Scotland two seconds down a lane, and we were pretty much biting the landlord's hand off.

When I call it 'picturesque', I mean it appears on
jigsaws.

Afterwards, in a daze of mild exhaustion and happiness at having found such a wonderful place so quickly, we took a walk around what will be our new village, and that's where things started to get a bit unbelievable. Across the road from the flat there was a second-hand bookshop, and when we got into conversation with the owner we were told happily that this was surely the friendliest village in the East Neuk, and if we ever needed anything, we should just go knock on the door across the way, whose inhabitant would help out any newcomer. Leaving the bookshop (purchases in hand, of course) we passed two cheerful cafes, a grocers selling fresh vegetables, a family butchers, and an uninterrupted series of lovely old buildings, until we reached the church, where we were greeted with a series of anecdotes about the church and village by a cheerful gentleman standing at the doors for the conveniently-timed open day. Both he and the bookseller imparted to us the low-down on the available 'entertainment' in Crail: a folk club, and a bi-weekly cinema club, at which (as I later discovered on the village council website) free wine is served. It has regular, quick buses into St Andrews which run late except on Sundays. In place of the kebab vans of student cities, it has a fish and chip shop, and a shed in the harbour that sells hot lobster to take away (£5 for a half). Oh, and it has a beach that has won awards. I am trying very hard to think of anything to criticise about either the flat we are going be taking or the village in which we will reside, and it is feeling increasingly surreal.

So, if you ever see headlines declaring "mysterious spate of murders in coastal village", or "sinkhole opens in the East Neuk", you will nod, and know - it was simply too good to be true.  But I'll try to

keep a hold of that giddy feeling until such evidence appears.

______________________________
*The answer is, of course, 'maybe lobster'.