LONDON–Time for a confession. As a young man, I wrote sports articles in the Midwest. Then for two decades, I dished out rather serious tomes about housing markets, architecture, urban planning and technology. My only drift from somber reporting was chronicling comic events at the National Association of Realtors.
Now for my secret desire: putting pen to paper on sex, sleaze and weirdness. Today, I was inspired after three days of giggling at the news in the London tabloids – sleazy reporting at its best. Here goes, ready for some slimy sausage in some sticky mash?
Monty “quest for glory” may push his Surrey digs onto UK housing market
Golf pro Colin Montgomerie’s “golf ambition” may push a hot $3.58 million home onto the market in Oxshott, Surrey, which his ex-wife Eimear currently occupies. Trouble in Monty-land has led to divorce court where a quickie split was handled by the Family Division of the High Court last Friday. The divorce proceedings took all of four minutes. The final property settlement will probably take four years. Egad, can you imagine?
Monty is holed up in the Albion Riverside building in West London.
Eimear’s rumored swing with movie star Hugh Grant is apparently not the only explanation for the marriage drift. Monty’s golf-holism filled Eimear with “anxiety and depression,” and Grant was merely a supportive friend, according to Colin’s broken half.
Not (tinghill) not Hot
Speaking of London’s Notting Hill, it was a tough and depressed neighborhood in the 1960s, much like Hollywood in the 1990s where Grant was apprehended by the LAPD for picking up Sunset Boulevard sex worker Divine Brown. No worker’s comp for that girl.
Overhauled, Notting Hill house values have skyrocketed as much as 20 percent annually in the last six years. The movie by the same name two years ago didn’t hurt. Nearly every home in the quaint neighborhood has been restored with antique dealers and hot new restaurants splattered throughout the ultra-charming urban burg.
But this summer the market is poised to sink like Tony Blair’s political popularity after the Iraq War.
“It just stopped,” said Notting Hill shop owner Tivian Mendes Dos Santos. “There is nothing more to say, it just stopped, sell signs everywhere.”
UGH, I drifted into my old ways: housing market dribble. Please, old chap, let me try again.
Mistress evicted
Glory Clibbery, the former mistress of millionaire racehorse owner Ivan Allan, was evicted on Thursday from her one-time lover’s $3.5 million estate in London’s Newmarket area. Quite the digs, the way the local estate agents tell it.
Weeping and hugging her mother at the home’s gate, Clibbery was hauled from the estate in a wheelchair, rather pathetic I am told.
She claims her ex-lover promised her residency for life. But that did not stop a court order in July from ordering the eviction of Clibbery and her 78-year-old mother who was Allan’s housekeeper.
What next for the poor old gal? Homelessness and $700,000 in legal bills, she wimpers.
Are you ready for the strange?
Pedophiles moving to the ‘burbs
The Home Office of the Blair government (equivalent to our HUD in the U.S.) has ordered a select group of pedophiles to be housed in specialist hostels in the suburbs. As many as 100 child-sex maniacs will be relocated to five hostels around England and Wales.
Research shows that these special hostels could do wonders for as many as half of the pedophiles. As for the other half, the English ‘burbs may never be the same. Look for Notting Hill to warm up again.
Love hotels on the rise
Developer Gerald Green is building three Yotels in England. Yotels are rented by the hour and are dubbed “love-hotels” in Japan where they were successfully introduced.
Green is modeling his tiny, one-room Yotel rooms after first-class seats on British Airways. As to the charge that Yotels are affordable retreats for office trysts, Green said in a local news report, “we are offering flexibility, I can’t dictate what people do in their rooms.”
Yotels are the most profitable hotels in Japan.
Sex and danger in the kitchen
The hottest new television ad in England peddles Elle McPherson’s Intimate lingerie line. There is a vague home improvement connection here, just wait. The ads have feminists up in arms because they show skimpy clad models in the kitchen, caressing sets of carving knives.
On Tuesday: Check Inman.com for an insightful article on the connection between sex and long-term housing demand.
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