We've lived all over this place...

Dan at All that comes with it started the idea fermenting - post an aerial picture of your house on t'interweb - I've got the boiling oil on the roof ready to repel stalkers Dan...

So instead of zooming right in and showing you the exact house I thought we'd stay up here at 2000 feet so that we could see the last four houses that we've lived in - yes thats right, since 1990 we've lived in all four houses that you can see ringed in yellow, and yes that right, we moved one street at a time.

We're currently at the one at the bottom of the picture, its the smallest house out of those four but I like it the best, don't ask me why, I just do, its just, well its just got a feelgood thing about it.

Moving up the photo and to the left we have the house that we moved into in 1990 and the truth is that we would still be there and we would be nearly mortgage free by now if it wasn't for the fact that a river ran right underneath the house - remember the Meryll Streep film "A River Runs Through It", well they got the title from our house.

What you can't see from the Google Earth image is the hill that we are all perched on, the highest point being the bottom of the page where our current house is - this whole area was one huge big wood until 50 years ago complete with streams and other good stuff like that - the builder who built that first house decided to ignore the fact that the whole of that street stood on top of a water course and so all of the houses down that side of the road had running water under the ground floor floorboards, running water that could be up to three feet deep during heavy rain spells.

We sold that and moved to the one thats further up, almost in the middle of the page - that was a big house, I mean a very big house, the sort of house that people walk into and declare "oh what a lovely big house" while you stand there thinking "you should see the heating bills". Ultimately thats what made us sell that house at a profit of £120,000 in three years - it had cost us nearly that much just to heat the fekking place, the new heating system which Birtish Gas promised us would be far more efficient cost £9000 to install and the next quarters heating bill actually increased, the bastards.

It was a beautiful, big, prestigious house, built in the 1930's with oak panelled walls and a huge kitchen conservatory that looked wonderful but which never rose above freezing point during the winter - all of the heat from the four radiators in that room went straight out of the conservatory roof, but if I earned eight times more than I do then we'd still be living there, I loved that house, Suzanne hated it though, she hated it on the day we moved in, which was strange as she had picked it from the shortlist of three we had.

Finally the house that we moved to after the big house and before this house is right at the top of the picture and those are my cars in the driveway and judging by those cars then that image is about four years old. It was an ok house, still quite big but I never really liked it, never really did anything to it apart from fit three new bathrooms to it (it only had one bathroom but I did it three times - fooking women eh). I also hated the garden as it always seemed to be dirty, yes thats a stupid thing to say but thats how it felt, just fekkin grubby all the time, eeek, I hated that garden.

So there you have it - to all American visitors, yes, we really do cram our houses that close together, you should see the inner city housing, but then again land around these parts isn't ten cents an acre.

My old golf club is top right, thats the 17th green and 18th tee, bottom-right is the shittest pub in West Yorkshire and top left with the green roof is the church where our two kinder were christened and attended until the vicar would sign a piece of paper saying that they could go to the church owned Primary and Secondary schools - thats the church that I have attended the grand total of three times in my life, yes I'm a hypocrite for sending my children to a church school but I'm relying on that bit in the bible that says its never too late to repent, or something like that, I'll repent with my last living breath and jump the queue on all you sad bas'tads who've been going to church every sunday for the whole of your lives.

I don't know where we'll move to next, we've done all of these streets now.


And for another slightly different aerial view of Leeds in general and our house in particular, keep watching the video until you get to 1min 30 secs, and there we are, just near the top of the screen, I may even be waving.