First signs of Christmas 2020

Yes, Ecclefechan Tarts are back in stock in Sainsbury’s. I must make sure I stock up on enough to see me through the Spring. Last year I ran out in a January and it was a long Winter.

Yesterday I was standing outside having a coffee with my nextdoor neighbour whilst the gutter cleaning company was up on our shared roof (semi-detached house), and we were talking about Christmas and how neither of us thought we'd get away to join our families for Christmas (in one of life's weird coincidences, our neighbours are also a Brit married to an Italian and with no kids). Started only half-joking discussing that we should just all have a communal Christmas in the street (since it is a private gated street) where we all sit on our doorsteps and wave socially distanced glasses of booze at one another.

We have a management company in place which owns and is responsible for maintaining all the common parts of the estate. The shareholders are all the freeholders of the properties and we elect a board of directors to run it and keep everything shipshape.

This year, for the first time in at least a decade, since the finances were looking healthy and it seemed a nice "bring the community together" thing to do, the directors actually organised a residents' garden party here in August on one of the communal lawns. I missed it as we were in Italy at the time but apparently it went very well and was very popular with residents. I saw photos and they had a bbq and some awnings, and it all looked quite fun.

Whilst I like the idea, I don't really get on with any of my neighbours. Plus, the houses in our road all point in different directions so we'd all have to shout very loudly to talk to one another if sat on our doorsteps. It may be that distance from one another that means we all keep ourselves to ourselves...

Yes we were doing that with the neighbours too with both supermarkets and fresh fish deliveries. 

These sorts of things are super-dependent on who you have running things. It can be dreadful. Here it used to be a nightmare with a group of apparently terrible people who had hijacked the board and it all went horribly wrong and nearly bankrupt for a while. Place looked a bit sad and run-down when we first moved in seven years ago.

But then around the time we arrived, a group of elderly long-term residents lost patience and managed to stage a coup whereby they kicked out the old lot. Then, as soon as they could, they managed to wheedle a bunch of us newer younger residents into replacing most of them. Only two of them, a retired property developer and a retired businesswoman, remain and the rest of us are professionals working in the city (a lawyer (me), an investment banker, a Lloyds broker and the head of shared services for a major corporation (who is our super-efficient chairwoman)). 

Took us a couple of years of effort and buttering up the more difficult residents, but we've kicked the company into shape and profit, and the grounds and roadways are looking much nicer, and importantly the residents all seem pretty happy. I think oddly it helps to have mainly time-poor people running these things because we (a) haven't got time to waste and (b) are therefore used to being decisive, which also puts the fear of God into the managing agents (are all managing agents broadly useless?!). It also helps to have a couple of non-working (but ex-business) people because they then have the time we lack to (a) notice non-obvious problems in the first place and (b) deal with third party suppliers like gardeners and electricians and that sort of thing.