The Landlady seals the deal for her Turkish home

I can barely believe that I’m now in possession of a holiday home in Turkey. It all seems like a bit of a dream, now that I’m back in a slightly chillier and much damper UK. I feel a little guilty, as I only told my holiday companion Miss T that I was buying a house on the way over on the plane, having plucked up the courage thanks to a few pints of lager and a couple of bottles of wine. I hadn’t told any of my friends because I didn’t want to jinx the deal, having banged on and on about buying foreign property before. This time, my caution seems to have worked.

During the holiday, Miss T and I seemed unable to be able to go to bed much before 3am, no matter how hard we tried and ‘one for the ditch’ became the mantra for the holiday, which is not good when you have to get up early the following morning in order to complete important paperwork regarding your house purchase. On the morning that I had to rise the earliest in order to have my photo taken for the deeds and sign over my worldly goods at the notary’s office with the people I was buying from, I had gone to bed at the spectacularly ridiculous time of 5.30am.

Although my photo doesn’t look too bad, all things considered, I struggled to stay awake in the heat and hustle of the notary’s office. Unusually – and some would say alarmingly – the notary’s office was in the kitchen of a first floor apartment. Someone appeared to have plonked an old desk and some even more ancient computers in the middle of the kitchen where the dining table should have been. A translator was brought in to translate a copy of my passport and the deeds of the house, but it all went over my befuddled head, apart from the fact that it stated that my land was 55 square metres. It’s a good job the people I was buying off were upstanding, honest and thorough, as I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing and was putty in their hands.

After a snooze by the pool on a sunbed, it was back to the notary’s ‘kitchen’ to sign more incomprehensible items and the deed was done. I have worked out that from agreeing a price to completing the sale has taken no more than seven weeks. I suspect that this rapidity is largely due to the fact that no solicitors were involved in the process, which can, as anyone who has bought a property will know, add another few months to a purchase. Mind you, I would have welcomed the intervention of a solicitor on the morning when I got in at 5.30am. At least I might have managed to get eight hours sleep…