Portico Quartet to win Mercury? But Christine Tobin has already won...

It's a great week for us. The Portico Quartet's Knee Deep In The North Sea is a Nationwide Mercury Album Of The Year (n.b. that I got the desired description correct). Wow. That's the second Babel album in 4 years. (Polar Bear's Held On The Tips Of Fingers was chosen in 2005.) The difference this time is that this lot may win.!?
But Christine Tobin DID win the BBC Jazz Award for Best Vocalist - at last, and so well deserved. While Fraud got the gong for Innovation. The only loser was me personally. I lost out to Alan Bates. I'm not going to appeal. Alan has done such a lot over the years for the music.

Selling a home

Over the past few months, much of my time has been taken with the sale of my home. It's been in the family for 57 years, my parents rebuilt it after the Second World War, and it's been owned by my two brothers and me. Notwithstanding all the emotional shenanigans - though these have been adequately recompensed by the sale price - I have found the nature of the top end property market really demoralising. Full of lies, though done with a sense of being my "friend". (It took me a couple of weeks to realise what was going on.)
Anyway, the most distasteful state of this was shown by my dealings with one of the leading estate agents in the area, reaching a peak when we decided to use one of the others (Knight Frank. To be recommended.) They have been a leading agent in the area for the past 30 years. But they can't have spent the whole time browbeating their potential clients like this? My email software is playing up, so I can't actually get hold of them. When I can I'll put them up. Certainly they were sending strong threats that they would try and make the deal fail. Does anyone think that we could use an ombudsman on this subject?