The Landlady: Rent Book Rales

Stamp It Out

This week has been a ‘good news, bad news’ sort of a week. First the good news, which is that for the second year running, I have a tax rebate on its way to me as I paid too much tax again last year. I suspected as much, as for the past three years, the Revenue have been helping themselves to a large proportion of my Supermarket wages every month and always take too much. This is fine by me, as the rebate will go halfway to paying a return flight to Cuba in a couple of weeks. I am determined to sell a property in Hastings next year and purchase a flat in Havana, so need to start looking for suitable properties.

The bad news is that in order to purchase a flat in Havana, I have to track down the guy with whom I co-own the property in Hastings. Although I have emailed him about various things over the past few years, he never ever gets back to me, which is quite frustrating. Perhaps if I remove all the money from our joint account I might get a response…

More bad news is that I have not heard from my ‘Cuban in Europe’, with whom I am having an affair, for two whole days… Because I don’t know him that well (yet), I don’t know if this is normal or not and, much as I’m trying to get on with life as normal, it has cast a perceptible pall of gloom on my daily travails. I’m sure he mentioned something about going away fishing to somewhere with no internet, but my Spanish is far from perfect, especially when I’m mainly dumbstruck during our lengthy Skype conversations. Ridiculous that, at the age of 50 I still retain the ability to mope around like a lovesick teenager, waiting for emails or Skype ‘missed call’ notifications. I have to admit, it’s quite depressing when you see you have a message from Skype and eagerly open it to find that it’s a contact request from an octogenarian American in a military uniform with an eye patch.

“I am determined to sell a property in Hastings next year”

At least there’s more good news, which is that our government are finally beginning to tackle the ‘buy-to-let’ bubble, by raising the Stamp Duty rate for landlords by 3 per cent. About time, is what I say. Maybe they should go a stage further and, like in Cuba (there I go again!) restrict property ownership to one per person. Now there’s a thought…

The Landlady’s book Let the Good Times Raul – travels in Cuba is available on Amazon Kindle right now.