Today I had a phone call from the estate agent through whom I made an offer on a house ten days ago. Throughout all of last week she was giving me running updates on her efforts to merely get in touch with the seller and let him know there'd been an offer. Apparently he was extremely hard to contact.

She called me again this morning. The seller has decided he wants to keep his house after all, so he's taken it completely off the market. Bah!

(He had previously cancelled my attempted second viewing of the house at fifteen minutes' notice, which led Mum to speculate that he didn't really seem to want to sell his house. Absolutely accurately, it seems!)

Back to the drawing board, then, I suppose…