Council Has Decided, they tell me. With Capital Letters.

But it’s not good news.

Okay, they’re trotting out some suitably plausible excuses. Main ones are that the house has no planning permission, and it doesn’t match up to modern building-standards or plumbing or insulation or the rest. Which is hardly surprising, given that it dates from long before any of those were ever a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye.

The real truth behind all of that legalese? A lot of arm-twisting from the developers, I’d suspect. Maybe the house does exist, they say, but it shouldn’t. Not according to their rules. And because it’s too embarrassing for anyone to admit that the house does indeed exist, they’re going to make sure that it doesn’t.

If the house doesn’t exist, then it’s a lot easier to pretend that that embarrassing land-title never existed either. Makes everything a whole lot easier for council and developers alike.

So that’s what they’ve decided. Demolition order, duly signed by council. No appeal allowed, nothing I can do about it. Go away? Please? Right now?

They will – as they put it – graciously allow me to access the house, to retrieve whatever I might wish of the contents, before the bulldozers move in. Which should be happening any day now. Maybe as early as tomorrow morning.

And once the bulldozers arrive, that’s it.

I need to move fast.