If anyone involved is reading this, don't worry, I'm not angry, I'm just impressed at the sheer scale of circumstances. I mentioned, at the end of last week, that two of my three tenants in Newcastle had decided on the same day to announce that March would be their last month of tenancy. That's their choice and tenancy contracts provide for this sort of thing. It provides a couple of problems. The first of these is a loss of income on a property which I have not been running at a profit for the last year. The second problem relates to what I was trying to do with the house, which was run it remotely by using the presence of tenants whom I know as a way of having some influence on the way it is run. With people I know there, whose behaviour is a certain sort of way, I can reasonably predict how the house will run, make requests here and there and have a good working relationship with the place.

I anticipated that people would leave and I envisaged that I'd replace tenants one by one, the other two people conveying the way things are done to the new third. Over time, all tenants would be replaced, but the ethos of the place would stay pretty much the same because they would all have a sense of how things are meant to be done. That was the original plan. To be honest with you, it was optimistic.

When the third tenant, quite reasonably, decided that living with two strangers might not be in his best interests, I found myself in a position this weekend, where suddenly a house that's a few hundred miles away from me, starts to need more of my attention than I was planning to give it at this point in the year. And money. Always with the money.

So, I guess I'll be working on keeping two houses from falling into the ground and taking my bank balance with it.

If you know anyone in Newcastle who's house hunting, now would be a good time to get in touch.