by Henry VIII attends a Notting Hill property auction and discovers a bidding system considerably more opaque than any land grant he ever personally issued
I once awarded property through simple royal preference, a signature and a witnessed seal sufficient to transfer an entire estate. The house auction required a solicitor, a registered bidding paddle, and a reserve price nobody would confirm to me in advance under any circumstances.
The Legal Pack
I was required to review a legal pack before bidding, a document running to some forty pages I paid a solicitor considerable money to summarise for me, a level of due diligence I never once applied to any property I personally acquired in my original reign, several of which came with rather more significant undisclosed problems than a leaking roof.
The Registration
Registering to bid required proof of identification and a deposit held in escrow, a system designed, the auctioneer’s assistant explained, to prevent time wasters, a phrase I found genuinely satisfying given how much of my original reign was spent tolerating considerable time wasted by considerably more powerful people than any auction time waster could ever hope to be.
The Auction Room
The auction room itself buzzed with a nervous, competitive energy I recognised instantly, paddles raised in small, deliberate increments, and I found myself bidding on a modest one bedroom flat with a genuine adrenaline I had not expected an administrative process to produce so reliably.
The Bidding War
A rival bidder, a woman in a sharp grey coat who never once looked in my direction, matched every increase I offered with what felt like personal, targeted defiance, and I found myself raising my paddle with increasing determination purely out of pride rather than any genuine remaining budget flexibility.
The Hammer
The flat sold, eventually, to the woman in grey for a figure roughly eight thousand pounds beyond where I had genuinely intended to stop, and she left immediately without so much as a glance my way, a level of cool indifference I found more wounding than most actual military defeats I have personally endured.
The Verdict
I left empty handed, considerably more informed about property law than I arrived, and genuinely determined to return for the next auction with a firmer resolve and a lower ceiling on my own pride. I once simply took the property I wanted. This century requires a paddle, a solicitor, and the humility to stop bidding before your own ego does the deciding for you.
The Next Attempt
I left empty handed, considerably more informed about property law, and genuinely determined to return with a firmer resolve and a lower ceiling on my own pride. I once simply took the property I wanted. This century requires a paddle and the humility to stop bidding before ego takes over entirely.
Humility, it turns out, is the harder lesson of the two. The auction saga belongs, appropriately, near my succession plan. Further reading on the wider chaos of modern Britain: the original account of my own return to Britain, the marriage that quietly relocated itself to zone six, London’s ongoing talent for charging you simply for looking.
