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