A double delight

ALLELUJAH! After a couple of years of dedicated searching and underbidding, I’ve finally done it: bought not one but two English side-by-sides. Brilliant value, I’ve been telling you, but quite what amazing value I’ve been playing down. For a reason. Back when I used to moonlight as a property columnist, the long-haired chatelaine and I bought a medieval hamlet – yes, a hamlet – high in the wild mountains behind Montpelier on the Mediterranean coast. I then helped fund family holidays by writing about the area. Decades later, a local estate agent almost embraced me. “You created a one-man property boom,” he told me. “Buyers turned up with your articles, wanting to buy bargains.” Which was fine with me as I had already bought my bargain but a potential problem in my recent search for a gun as, according to one specialist auctioneer – gun buyers read . So I might have been doing similar for old English