This week saw the beginnings of an end of year review, the lesson that function is more important than form, and envy, sort of.

FLAT NEWS!

A small amount of progress. I am going to put down in words my experience of this ordeal, because I think it is very, very funny. For the small price of one (1) non alcohol beer I will perform it at a social function of your choosing. Here we go.

I am selling my flat. When selling a flat your buyer does some searches, and one search on my property turned up an agreement made in 1990. It was a section 52 agreement, where the developer agreed to commit some money – around £5,000 – to build a car park. Fast forward to today, and this agreement is still on the land where my flat is built. Given that it’s still appearing, the buyer’s lawyers say, there’s no way we can get the money for the mortgage.

This naturally surprised me, given I have a mortgage.

Do you have any evidence, they asked, that this liability has not been passed down through every person who’s owned the land until, finally, it was invested in your flat?

No, I said. Because that would be insane. Because the counter-argument – that there was indeed a conspiracy to designate my apartment as the sole inheritor of this ancient liability – would have some paper trail. There would be at least one email saying, “At last, our evil plan has come to fruition: now the fool will surely be on the hook for a car park, a-ha-ha-ha.”

Now listen, they said. We’re responsible to the lender for making sure we’ve done all our checks. The lender’s interests are not protected if the buyer takes on this extra liability.

I pointed out that the lenders were offering the buyer a quarter of a million quid, and probably wouldn’t protest too much at the risk of another couple of grand, particularly because a quarter of a million at 3% a year is (as they say in the biz) a nice little earner.

They clocked off for the weekend, which means I win. Hopefully, having answered all their questions, I will be able to retrieve the golden fleece and sell this damn flat – though, tragically, it means I’ll need to find something new to write about.

Jobs news

I had an interesting mix of feedback this week. Most of it was good. One piece was that despite the above, I still ran our show and tell with my usual mix of wit, charm, crowd control, melee attacks, and slides with very few words on them. Like this one, which says “Rotation, rotation, rotation”.

(I was presenting some work I’ve done on rotating Fast Streamers. Not like…turning them around. Moving them around. You know what? It doesn’t matter.)

However, I also got some really good feedback from my product manager. The codebase I’m working on was inherited from another team and they…did the best they could. Their best was just not as good as I’d like it to be. However, bitching and moaning about it (one of my all-time favourite past-times) isn’t much use at all. I’ve got to get to a place of radical acceptance. Acceptance, because re-writing the whole thing is impossible, and radical, because radical is cool (except in the context of trans-exclusionary radical feminists: they are not cool at all). It is going to be a struggle but I think it was really something I needed told.

The last time I did something for the first time

Maria guided me through patching up my new coat, whose pocket got caught on a seat. I haven’t sown anything at all since a cub scout badge, and it was a really pleasant experience to mend something. I’ve not done a particularly good job with it, because it’s my first time, but I did something for the first time and it was good. I’m happy I did it. I’m excited to see how long it lasts and if there’s anything I learn for the next time. But right now, it works. It’s patched and it works, and that’s good.