Dear John

What a shame we will never have that big house in Blackpool that we fantasised about, now.  Well, we probably wouldn’t have gone for it anyway.  It was just appealing – there seem to be dozens of big properties in that area, ex hotels with six or eight or ten or sometimes even twenty bedrooms, for really amazingly cheap prices.  The only explanation, we concluded, was that it wasn’t viable for so many hotels to stay in business.  There must have been dwindling numbers of visitors for years, and the competition must have been such that lots of people were giving up and selling, unable to afford the upkeep on such huge properties.  Hence so many cheap run-down hotels going dirt cheap.

But we wouldn’t have wanted one as a hotel, we just wanted maximum space and value for money, so we would have had it as a private home.  Oh it was such fun to read the details and imagine what we would do with all the rooms!

A bedroom for you, a bedroom for me.  One or two guest bedrooms to keep for visitors or possible let out to a lodger to get some income.  An art studio for you, a home office for me (to run the business from that would sell your art).  A cuddly toy museum for me – space to spread out all our collections – and maybe a private ‘pub’ for you, to fill with appropriate ‘nauticalia’ (for example ship models, and photos of yachts), like you’d always wanted.

We looked at lots of properties online, and we were thinking of going up there to have a look, see if it really might be a possibility.

Even if we’d never really bought one, it would have been so interesting to look, and dream.

Probably we would have decided against it, on the basis that we were getting older, and that the upkeep on a big property like that would be prohibitive – all the new windows that might be needed, all the heating to have to pay for, all the new carpets to put in.  Our research on Blackpool didn’t make it sound like a particularly appealing place, so I can’t really imagine we would have gone for it, in the end.

But it was a ‘might have been’.

I suppose I could still buy a huge cheap old hotel in Blackpool myself.  But what’s the point, if you’re not there to share it with.