I’ve been looking into buying a place here in London recently, with the prices falling and the interest rates making saving practically pointless and all, it seems like a good time.  So I’ve been doing some searching on the various property websites out there, found a few that look ok, nice enough areas, within budget and so on.  One in particular I clicked on the ‘contact estate agent’ tab, filled in my details and checked to arrange a viewing.

I had left both email and mobile number so figured that the agent would then be in touch to arrange a time.  A few days passed and no sign of the estate agents.  It got towards a week of silence so I decided to call them up.  Got through to a girl at their office and she wasn’t aware of any web based contact (groan), but she’d get an agent to call me to fix something up.  A few more days of silence so I called again, same thing, but at least this time someone called back within the hour and we arranged a viewing.

We’re in a seriously depressed market right now, if the media are to be believed there aren’t many buyers out there so I’d have guessed estate agents would be falling over themselves to ‘service’ potential buyers like myself, so the difficulty I had getting a viewing was not a good sign, but alas I had one, so that was something.

Unfortunately a booked viewing was not the same as an actual viewing.  Yesterday was the day of this much anticipated viewing, so I cycled down to the place in plenty of time and got there a comfortable 10/15 minutes ahead of time.  It wasn’t the nicest of days to be hanging about but patiently I did so.  2 o’clock came and went with no sign of anyone from the estate agent.  At quarter past I rung them up to see what was going on.  They had no record of the viewing but would get one of the sales staff to call me to sort things out.

Some twenty minutes passed and still nothing, so I called for a second time, and this time the girl on the phone promised that she would come out herself, give her 10 minutes and she’ll be there.  I waited at the property until 10 to 3, around half an hour after this phone call, before deciding to call it quits and give up on this property.

It turned out that the pictures on the website had glossed over certain things that put me off the property in question, but even if they hadn’t, the antics of the estate agents certainly would have done.

Step forward Haart Estate Agents, you were absolutely bloody awful.

Today I joined the nice folks from Dulwich Paragon for their Saturday club ride.  They go for a 50 odd kilometre ride out into the London countryside.  All very nice and genteel on what was a lovely autumn day.  Little did I know however that today was also the annual club hill time trial, whereby each rider goes at 1 minute intervals up a stupidly steep hill for nearly a kilometre.  It might not sound very far but rest assured it is a couple of minutes of lung bursting effort.

The course is the same one used in the Bec CC Hill Climb, one of the leading such events in the country.  Don’t have any pics from the event today but some of these from the Bec Hill event may give you an idea of the anguish involved

You may be able to tell the gradient of the climb from the pictures.  Rest assured it was bloody steep.  Anyway, dragged my butt up the hill in 2mins 44seconds, not too bad for a first effort.

Super day in Trafalgar square today as the British Olympic team were paraded in front of the nation to congratulate them on their achievements.  It was lovely to see all the guys and girls in the flesh, and equally lovely to see the nation come out en masse to celebrate the successes of the summer.

I did attempt to take some photos with my phone, but sadly the event proved that my skills as a photographer are sorely lacking as the large majority turned out to be rather awful.  Which is all rather a shame as I had hoped to get some snaps of the cyclists and swimmers in particular.  Alas I’ll have to make do with these slightly better snaps from the BBC website and try to pretend they’re mine.

Becky Adlington with Mark Foster

Nicole Cooke, Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton

Anyway, it was a fun morning, and to cap it all off Boris gave a typically raucous speech to leave the crowd in raptures as only he can.

Boris giving his speech