First Class Hostage

My working years, representing more than half of my life to date, have been wholly reliant on what can be crammed into my diary so that I can get through a workload that changes quite rapidly.

This usually involves appointments on the hour, every hour and allowing for travelling in between.

I have to thank, for a usually seamless day, my very efficient Personal Assistant .

She is very skilled at setting up my working day which can cover a geographical area from Whitby to Thirsk on the east/west axis, down to Goole in the south west, across and out to Spurn Point in the east and all parts in between. Other days I may just spend a comparatively leisurely time within the city boundaries of Hull.

Her knowledge of places and routes is exceptional and I may find that over 8 hours of jobs I will not travel along the same length of road more than once or even deviate from a perfect clockwise or anti clockwise passage.

This skill has developed over the last 15 years but has had to be acquired and honed to the fine art that it is now.

There have been misunderstandings and misdirection along the way.

The place names for Scarborough and Scorborough are easy to transpose but can be problematic. Many a holiday maker has turned up at the group of half a dozen houses and farmsteads that make up Scorborough and been greatly disappointed not to have a view of Scarborough Castle or the harbour and funfare. There is a distance of about 30 miles between the two, one very much inland and without penny falls or candy floss.

Eastrington and Easington have also caused some logistical difficulties in the past and I was a bit annoyed, but of course hid it ,when knocking on the door of 30 High Street, Easington only to be met with blank expressions before the realisation that I was 50 miles adrift from an anxiously waiting client.

Thankfully I have not ended up in Lancashire when scheduled to meet someone in Preston or Bolton both of which are within easy distance of Hull rather than Blackpool.

I spent a few hours trying to come to terms with a copy of a property Title Plan that had been sent to me by a solicitor based in the Midlands. It was of a house and garden outlined in the usual red and with a few named streets and reference points for secondary identification. The property was in Cottingham.  I like to think that I have an intimate knowledge of the place, a well to do commuter village about 6 miles out on the edge of Hull. However, I could not make any headway with the enclosure of the plan. The names given to the highways and by-ways were wrong. There was a river where none should have been. The layout of the plots and buildings were not anything that I recognised. I began to doubt my own mind until I realised that this particular Cottingham was in Northamptonshire, just outside Corby and not East Yorkshire, I sent everything back to the solicitor and if I had possessed a spare copy of The Readers Digest Book of the Road that would have gone also.

In some cases a small hamlet may attach itself to the nearest postcode town as an address without actually including the accurate postcode. I have had a few fruitless journeys looking for an address described as High Street, York only to find out that it could apply to every town, village and hamlet in the expansive county of Yorkshire. That does give quite a large margin of error.

One such request from a Bank was to carry out what is termed a "drive-past appraisal" of a property.

This is a common instruction to keep costs low but is often required if a bank customer is experiencing difficulties in meeting regular payments. It can also apply where a customer with an excellent credit history is looking to borrow more and the bank, in principal have no real issues but want an idea of the value of the property which forms security for existing facilities with them.

It was always emphasised, and indeed implied by the type of appraisal  that I was not required to make any contact with the occupiers.

I could not find 'The Cottage' in any of the narrow lanes of the village in which it was supposed to be. A host of quaint and character dwellings could have met the literal description but they had prefixes of 'Forge', 'Cosy'. 'Cobweb', 'Little Bear's', 'Nook', 'Old Betty's' and the rather more stark, 'Temperance', 'Cold Harbour' and 'Abstinence'.

In frustration and not a bit of embarrassment I decided to ask for help at one of the whitewashed dwellings, characteristic of the place. A lady came to the door and in answer to my query for directions to the address was forthright in saying that yes, indeed, I was at the correct house.

Fortunately for me the lady was aware that her Bank were to seek some form of valuation in connection with her otherwise healthy financial situation and after a cup of tea and an amicable chat about the property market and world events we parted company as though we were longstanding friends.

I drove away, relieved that for the absence of a postcode, the worst case scenario had not unfolded where a disgruntled customer, under threat of foreclosure would have found a sadistic pleasure in holding an emissary of his bank captive and affording an opportunity to vent his spleen or worse.