Something for the Weekend: the Trevor Kent column

Bonjour mes enfants.
 
For some reason I still continue to be the recipient of copious press releases, despite rarely writing or broadcasting any more.

The TV broadcasting seemed to stop just as wide screens arrived – strange that, considering!

These releases still arrive as fast as sheets off a toilet roll – except in the case of that famous Spaniard Juan Sheet’s one of course. They normally all go the same way, but I just had to share this particular one with you.
 
Saniflow, yes the purveyor of those sometimes ugly, always unpleasantly named WC ‘macerators’ (guaranteed to dispose of detritus even uphill and, sadly on one occasion due to malfunction, down Dale), sent me the most splendid new product news the other day.

Now hold on to your seats, folks. This is a product no estate agent should be without in the office convenience (particularly if said convenience is available for applicant and client use).
 
Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you the all new, all singing and dancing  Sanimatic WC from Saniflow? This toilet, the manufacturers tell me, can be made to RISE or FALL in height, and even FLUSH electronically AND whilst the user is ensconced there upon!
 
What’s even more exciting to negotiators still smarting from an applicant’s announcement of a withdrawal or a newly broken chain moments before, and they then ask to use your loo, is the availability of a REMOTE CONTROLLER.

Need I say more, dear friends? The mind boggles with opportunities. Except perhaps that I think this revelation needs to end with a professional onomatopoeia or perhaps an acronym or indeed both: would NPLoPP hit the spot perhaps?
 
Now, I know some of you occasionally find me just a teeny bit hard to believe, so just for you:

https://www.responsesource.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=67714&hilite=

*****

I’m worried about Harry, In-Deed I am.

Has anyone reading this sold him a house in the last three months? It wasn’t so long ago he was on top of a reasonably large agency outfit: now he’s launched a sort of online conveyancing firm, so he must have a bit of cash to flash.
 
But why, I hear you ask, are you worried for him, Big T, or In–Deed interested in his property buying of late?

Well, he recently asked psychologists to interview 200 Britons who had bought or sold a house in the last three months to assess their stress levels.

Now, we all know that HH likes to get into the thick of the things he dreams up, so there is little doubt he was one of the interviewees. My concern for him is based around the fact that the press release announcing the results of the study claimed that, of the buyers/sellers questioned, 10% experienced hair loss, 14% short-term memory loss and a massive 19% suffered DIMINISHED SEX DRIVE! 
 
So, if living through just one sale in three months can do that for someone, just imagine what it would do to the libido of an agent who once claimed to sell more than anyone else countrywide!

By the way, it wouldn’t matter how many I can’t sell, I’m past-it.

***

A splendid little book landed on the office floor the other day demanding to be reviewed as ’twas intriguingly entitled “PROPERTY, The 100 best ways to BUY AND SELL”.

Given that I can’t shift anything to anyone at present, I thought – “This is the sort of CPD I need, it might even help” – so I dived in.
 
This pocket-sized (well mine anyway, well stretched by two or three Ginsters and assorted Mars to keep me going ’till elevenses) tome consists of 100 pithy and mercifully short sentences of advice, each illustrated by an explanatory cartoon.

There are within, nuggets of advice for buyers, sellers, estate agents and a number of  particularly welcome pages devoted specifically on how to get on with Solicitors. Magnifying glasses, quill pens, typewriters with ribbons (what they? – young neg inquires) feature strongly in the lawyers’ supporting cartoons.
 
The advice to all and sundry involved in the heartache we call home moving is penned by Ken Madden, who describes himself as ‘property agent, politician, theatrical producer, arts entrepreneur etc’, and his illustrator is Ken Buggy who claims to have won lots of things to stick on the door (it would appear of hotels and restaurants mainly). Nevertheless, I would strongly recommend you buy a dozen to present to appropriate vendors/ buyers who just don’t get the pearls of wisdom you rain upon them.

This book will explain everything to them and, if all else fails, as the authors say, ‘five hundred and forty of them laid end to end (or side by side I imagine) will give you a good idea of the floor area of a decent bedroom’ – handy!

Published by Book Republic and available from https://www.word-power.co.uk/books/property