Julie's Boggle

Hi all

Life is still very expensive with neither of us earning… I’m signed up with a temping agency to do general office type stuff (minimum £5/hour – *purely* to tide me through till something else comes up) but haven’t had any calls yet. After his first interview this morning, Tom is through to round 2 of an interview with a company not far from here (nice & central) tomorrow morning. And he looked very smart in his new suit this morning, I took some photos.

After a lot of debate over the weekend, we finally decided that we should start looking seriously for a place to live as our time here at Lee Abbey runs out on Saturday. It’s pretty hard to choose an area without knowing where you’ll be working and being Durbanites, we think any commute over 30 minutes is mad. Either way, we made the call and went to look at likely areas to the West since Tom’s job offers seemed to be coming from that direction. The first place we heard about was £290 per week “with a garden” (haha, don’t believe that – it’s more like a patio with a green border) and we turned them down because the hot water and heating wasn’t included. Many agencies later though, we decided that we were being a little too picky about that point, and it was, after all, the only one we’d seen with a separate shower(!)

The area that the flat is in is called Shepherds Bush and it’s quite close to the tube station. We went to see it on our return visit to the estate agent, and it’s fairly large by British standards… It has 2 bedrooms, a decent size open plan kitchen (with gas & electricity) and don’t forget the private “garden” (large square of concrete) which could be really nice for braai’s in good weather. The flat is what they call lower-ground, you have to go down a slightly dingy looking flight of stairs from road level to get to it, but once inside it’s actually not bad. Even Tom noticed that it was dirty, which is saying something, but they will clean it before letting it.

We looked at a lot of other flat listings and eventually concluded that we were never going to get that lucky again, so today we went along to put down our holding deposit of £290. If the landlord agrees to take us (we’re strictly on appro at the moment being unemployed and bank-less) then we’ll be up for two month’s rent as deposit (one back when Tom gets his job) + one month in advance. It works out to about R14000 per month(!!!)

That’s about all for now.

Love
Julie & Tom

Hi
Well, we’ve just come to the end of our first day in London and everything seems to be working out relatively well so far. The flight was fair although I would not recommend SAA’s in-flight TV service or food in a hurry. This morning I wasn’t feeling too good at all and Kris, I thought that I had definitely come down with your ‘flu but that seems to have passed now. The passage through Heathrow was a doddle – no tough questions or anything – and we were out by 07h45 UK time.
(Aside: Good advice to any SA citizen travelling to the UK for more than 6 months is to have your chest x-ray in your hand luggage not your suitcase… or to have a handy UK citizen available to run down to the baggage carousel and fish it out for you.)

Having successfully managed to get SAA to let us go on 24kg overweight (64kg in total) we then had to make a plan with getting it around. The Heathrow Express train to Paddington was the obvious choice but we were less than pleased to find that the trolleys are barred from the actual platform. Needless to say our 2 suitcases, 2 PC boxes, 2 carry bags, 1 satchel and a document bag were not able to be conveyed in a single trip – not even with 2 people. Fortunately the trolleys were right on hand on the Paddington side.

Gordon and Csilla here at Lee Abbey have been fantastic. After a warm welcome, they left us their flat so that we could shower and catch a nap until lunch time (our room wasn’t available until after lunch)… just what the doctor ordered. Then followed lunch, which at Lee Abbey is only for staff, but they took us down as their guests. Later in the afternoon we needed to get something off my PC and Gordon provided us with a monitor (which he’s donating to us it seems)… Honestly, I never believed I’d have my PC up and running on the first day – it has all worked out exceptionally well.

It’s just starting to get dark here – it’s going on 21h20 – and we’ve just returned from the huge 24h Tesco’s up the road. The air outside is quite pleasant – crisp enough to condense your breath. Anyway we’re thinking about bed now so I’m going to sign off.

Love to everyone,
Julie & Tom