OUR old house in Redmire has gone up for rent recently.

It’s a council house and so the authorities use the North Yorkshire Homechoice system to find tenants.

Normally houses are advertised for a week, people bid and the people with the most points are offered the house. You get more points for being homeless or having a silly number of children.

Stay with me as this will get slightly more interesting, I promise. After the first week, the house was still not taken so the council put it back on the website.

It was the same after the second week, so I rang the council thinking it might make a story.

Apparently, five people bid for the house in the first and five more in the second week. Most dropped out or were offered an alternative property. The odd person wasn’t suitable. The last I heard someone bidding in the third week was about to be offered the house.

So ten people bid and most of them didn’t actually want to live in pretty little Redmire.

Good pub, village green, idyllic river nearby, annual doms tournament, very successful quoits team. OK, the locals get a bit aggressive when drunk and the buses don’t pass through any more, but it still seems a bit odd given that the last time I looked there was a housing waiting list in Richmondshire of more than 1,500 and at least 13,000 across North Yorkshire.

Maybe there isn’t much of a housing shortage in the Dales after all? And what happened to the unwashed hordes coming from Selby and Scarborough to take up our low-cost housing stocks we were warned about when the Homechoice system was launched in 2010?

I’m punting for a reflection of the limited employment opportunities available for young people in the Dales these days. Unless you paint them really well, scenic views don’t pay off student loans.

On a positive note, at least when the entire world wants to buy a retirement or second home in the area after Le Tour, at least they won’t be taking up housing which would otherwise have gone to desperate local families.

Finally, the youngest boy reads his school book every morning.

“How did you find the book?” I foolishly asked. “I opened my school bag,” he replied.