The Wonderful Web

Isn’t the internet wonderful? It is hard to believe that most of us take it for granted and yet, just a few years ago, it had not been invented.

Readers of this column may remember that my husband and I used to live in Belgium. We lived in Sterrebeek, just a few miles outside the centre of Brussels, for a little over three years. This is a leafy suburb in the Flemish speaking part of the country. Joe was working for the UK Permanent Representation to the European Union (UKRep) and I worked at NATO. It was the mid 1990’s and our son, a small boy then, was still living at home with us. Life was good. Belgium is a lovely place to live and work. By-passed by most tourists as they zoom through it on the way to more exotic European destinations, it retains its olde worlde charm. Grand Place, in the centre of Brussels, has to be one of the most impressive town squares in the world, with its original medieval guild houses and spectacular town hall.

We faced a dilemma.

We knew we were returning to England for a home posting and would be living there for three years. We had nowhere to live when we got back. Our house, let out to a group of lads who were allegedly not students, did not smoke and were supposedly clean living, had been trashed in the two years they had rented it from us and so we had sold it, as we could not bear to go back to it after we saw the mess they had left it in. This left us homeless.

What to do? The UK held the Presidency of the European Union Council at the time. This might not seem significant to our little problem to the uninitiated but, I can assure you, this fact governed our lives. Each member state holds the Presidency of the EU for six months and then it moves on to the next member state. The current holder of the presidency is Slovenia until the end of June, when France takes over. While the UK held the presidency in 1998 the staff could not take leave. This meant that we could not book time away to go back to England to house hunt. We had to find another way.

At the time estate agents had not quite geared up to the potential the internet offered. One or two companies had realised that they might be on to a winner if they put property photographs and descriptions on their own web pages, but the majority had not thought to buy a web presence, let alone exploit it. Nevertheless, we hunted about and came across a forward thinking agent with an impressive number of properties for us to browse through. Things were looking up.

In the end we did two Saturday day trips to England to look at the properties we had found on the web. It was 187 miles from our home in Sterrebeek to my parents’ home in south west London, not counting the English Channel in between Britain and Europe. It was another 70 miles to Southampton in the middle of the south coast to see the properties we were interested in. Each trip we looked at 13 houses. We took along a video camera so that we could remember which house was which. After the first few they all became a blur! For two consecutive weekends we were all exhausted. In the end we settled on one house which seemed to be in the right area, was the right price, had the right number of bedrooms and living areas; it ticked all the boxes and so we bought it. The internet had saved the day.

We have now owned our little house for ten years and the time is rapidly approaching when we need to sell up and move on to another house which also ticks all the boxes. This time we are here in Anguilla and contemplating our impending departure in September. Nowadays all British estate agents have web sites. I have been browsing and have found my parents’ home, which was put on the market this week. Their agent has taken some excellent photographs and, despite the economic downturn that is spreading around the world, I think it will not be long before they can move into their dream home near the sea. In the meantime, we are looking at property for ourselves and getting our own home valued and on the market, all by using the internet. By September we should have a new home and, if my husband’s next job is in the UK, we may even get to live in it for a little while before we leave for our next overseas posting.

Who would have thought, all those years ago when the internet first found its way into our vocabulary, that it would become such a useful tool that people could build their lives around it?