SOLICITORS ARE USELESS

Solicitors are useless. We accepted an offer for our house in June, and the conveyancing is still dragging on. Our solicitor has known for ages that we want to complete this deal on 1st September. Today he sent us a list of about 20 supplementary questions from the purchaser's solicitor. The latter had dated the document "6th August" so it had taken my solicitor 12 days to get this document to me !

I spent an hour or so this afternoon answering the questions and e-mailed the answers to my solicitor. He said he would pass them on "in due course".When I asked what this meant, he said "in the next few days" ! My final e-mail today said I hoped that "after reconsideration" he would send them tomorrow. I await his response.

And this man has actually threatened to charge me an extra £100 (+ VAT of course) if there are fewer than 10 working days between exchange and completion ! If he does, perhaps I'll finally get round to reporting one of these overpaid useless so-called professionals to the Law Society. Which will probably get me nowhere.

And we're continuing to have a problem with the son of a neighbour. I'll tell the full story once we've completed this move, but this man is a Pain (with a capital 'P').

The English system of buying and selling houses is a disaster area. Unlike Scotland and most other sensible countries, no-one is legally committed to anything until exchange of contracts which takes place very late in the process - typically 8 or 9 weeks after you've accepted the offer. What this does is encourage dishonesty, deceit and double-dealing.

I used to scoff when people said moving house was stressful. But it certainly has been this time. Even now, about 8-9 weeks after we accepted the offer for our house, we could be told tomorrow that our purchasers had changed their minds and weren't going to buy it after all. And they would be perfectly within their rights - legal rights, I mean; moral rights - no. But morality doesn't come into it when people are buying and selling houses.