What if I don’t want to live with Sarah Beeny? It’s one thing being mortgage free but what with queues for the bathroom, disputes over dinner choices and TV viewing choices and people perpetually forgetting to plug in the iPad and so on, my home life is complicated enough.
What sort of hours would Sarah Beeny keep? Unsocial ones, I imagine, what with her always being off filming and running her property website.
She likes baths, she said as much in last night’s programme.
So how long does she spend in them? Does she always rinse out afterwards?
It strikes me that regardless of the great allure of mortgage freedom, having to have Sarah Beeny as a permanent house guest could be a major catch.
There was a major catch attached to all the debt-free domestic dream scenarios in last night’s programme.
Take Freddie. Freddie was going to stick a self-built love nest on the back of a bale trailer in the middle of the Kent countryside.
More accurately it was the middle of his family’s land, in the Kent countryside.
So if you should want to do similar, you need some ancestral land or the funds to rent some from someone else. Which sounds a bit like a mortgage to me.
Then there was Charlie. Charlie had constructed something truly brilliant out of six shipping containers.
He was a skilled welder, and had spent around year’s worth of 12-hour days on his construction.
There is a skill to watching and enjoying programmes of this sort, and the skill lies in not paying much attention to the title.
Obviously there’s the Sarah Beeny bit to overlook, for a start.
There is also, more significantly, the “How To”, which carries tones of “You Too” and “Anyone Can Do It”.
Now this is plainly not true. I’d like to hand this programme title to some really pernickety lawyers and see what they did with it.
It might end up something like Anyone Can Live Mortgage Free Provided They Have Some Land And Are Highly Skilled Builders Who Don’t Need To Earn Any Money For A Year.
Alternatively you can just watch it, admire the ingenuity of others, envy them their light-filled, sustainable, low-impact and lovely mortgage-free lives and don’t think too much about your own for an hour. Or the title.
On the subject of heavy borrowing, various TV programmes of late have shown us what reliance the police have on technology and not necessarily their own.
The final case in Reported Missing (BBC1) concerned Archie, an elderly widowers who’d walked out of his house one morning and vanished.
It ended on a happier note, with the formidable Archie, a former Para, being found confused and weak after a couple of nights out in the cold, but otherwise okay.
The success of the operation depended chiefly on calls from concerned members of the public, who’d seen him heading out of town on a specific road.
The earlier stages, however, relied much on footage of Archie in his own street, captured by CCTV cameras mounted on his neighbours’ houses.
At one time, bear in mind, no one put these things up to deter or catch crooks, as that was what the police did.
Daily Express :: TV and Radio Feed
