Cowboys vs House-hunting

GOOD THING: COWBOYS
When I say that cowboys are a good thing, I'm not talking about the herding and ranch-based work they do, but the fact that the look is pretty damn sexy. I'm not going to make a blanket statement here, because clearly some cowboys - real or fictional - are fairly unattractive (John Wayne for one), but there's something about the image that's endlessly appealing. Maybe it's the hat, tilted at a mysterious angle, or the beat-up jeans, or the chaps. Maybe it's more primal than that, and its actually the pair of six-shooters he's packing or the way he handles his steed. Brokeback Mountain has shifted the public perception of cowboys somewhat, but the fact that Ennis and Jack were gay didn't change the fact that they looked pretty damn fine in their rugged outdoor gear. All the great Hollywood actors are improved even more by the presence of a stetson, including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Robert Redford and even Brad Pitt (he wasn't a cowboy exactly in Thelma & Louise, but the hat and jeans were both in appearance.) The fact that I live in the North East of England and not Montana may slightly hamper my chances of meeting a real cowboy and spending my life on a ranch...maybe I should start attending rodeo shows...

BAD THING: HOUSE-HUNTING
I've yet to have the experience of having to actually buy a house, but if it's anything like looking for a rental property, I'm in for a real barrel of laughs. Last night just captured the whole horrible experience in just a few hours. The first flat was on a lovely road but inside it resembled a residential care home (to be fair, the vendors were probably in their early seventies) - great if you want to rip things out and start again, but depressing if you have to leave it untouched. The second flat was quite nice, but situated on Hell Street; there were several chav kids hanging around on the street, a couple of 14-year old mothers, and a teenaged lad emerging from a heavily-fortified off-license with some 2-litre bottles of cider. The flat's current occupant assured us that the neighbours were fine, but he was American, so for all we knew he could be used to living in Compton or South Central LA. For the third flat, we were given the wrong street information (two roads called John Street within a mile or two of each other), and when we finally got there 15 mins late, the estate agent couldn't let us into the flat. It was occupied by some - apparently Chinese - students, who had left the key in the lock so that we couldn't get in. I suspect that there were probably about 15 people living in the flat rather than 2 or 3, and they thought they were about to get busted. We then drove acr0ss the city to view 2 flats the size of a postage stamp - the kitchens were virtually in a cupboard, and I don't know how they managed to lever a double bed into what was blatantly a single bedroom. The agent there insisted on showing us another place they had, back where we'd just been. This one was in the middle of nowhere, miles from where we needed to be, and looked straight out onto a main road. The agent was keen to point out the 'little river' running behind the house, which can't have been more than a burn - and barely visible thanks to overgrown bracken and the result of illegal fly-tipping. By the time we got home, it was clear to us that we'd have to rethink the strategy, make our budget stretch further and keep looking. If it didn't kill us.