More on life in the UK
Thursday, 20th September 2001 by JulieHi people
I think life in the UK is is starting to feel more and more like the norm for us… I’m having to scratch my head to think of things that I would classify as “news”. Although there are still many aspects of our lives that are completely foreign to people in SA we casually accept almost all of them. I’ve had comments in letters from home saying that there is “not much news” and I must say that this is all a matter of perspective – especially when one is 10 000 km away from where those things are happening -every detail counts!
A week or two ago, we forked out for my travel expenses for the next year in the form of an annual Travelcard… Despite the fact that this is a saving of £120 on what it would cost to buy daily Travelcards, it was still a hefty outlay at £756! All this for a little piece of cardboard! Fortunately they do replace it if it gets lost and it can be refunded as well. It does offer quite a lot of freedom though… I can now travel on any Zone 1 / 2 tube or bus, 7 days a week and there are various discounts available when I buy a ticket for Tom.
I find that I can do the “door-to-door” trip from home to work in 30 minutes when the underground is at its busiest. I’ve been trying to establish a pattern for the train crowds this last week and so far it has eluded me. I’ve caught a train at exactly the same time on two successive days: one on which I had to stand the whole way completely surrounded on all sides, and the other in which I got a seat by the second stop. Butterfly effect perhaps? Getting a seat is a real blessing… It’s the only way to read a book successfully — hanging on with one hand and holding a book in the other is not a trick to be attempted by junior players.
We’ve finally found a decent set of nearby movie theatres (thanks Megan and Deon!) and for the small price (haha) of £15.20 – which includes surcharge for booking online and bus tickets there and back – we can see a movie in a really large and plush cinema with excellent sound. The good news for us is that they are building a Warner Village complex just like that one, at the shopping centre up the road from us! Couldn’t have chosen our position better I reckon. 
After seeing an advert for train trips to surrounding areas, we were inspired to organise ourselves a weekend break to Bath for this coming weekend on the spur of the moment… We’re going to be taking a coach as it turns out because they require less notice, and we’re leaving on Friday (at some ungodly hour in the morning, 8am I think) and returning Sunday night.
At work, I am busy “shadowing” my friendly colleague in the VBA department, and today was the first day that I could feel like a true “consultant”. Of course I was in theory just watching but I added my 10 cents worth! After doing battle with the client’s difficult templates all day and eventually winning, we got out at 15h45. At that point we took a vote on going home instead of back to the office, and home won.
(I felt that was justified anyway as we’d worked through lunch and I was feeling pretty tired by then from the intense concentration. Apparently we were booked out for the whole day, so the client gets to hand over £750 for our time — although I come free at the moment
The way the leave works in the UK caught us completely off balance… It turns out that on the 1st of January each year, you have your full leave quota available and you could take it all before February if you really wanted to! The catch to this is that if you leave before you’ve “earned” that leave, you have to pay the company back. The mandatory leave allowance in the UK is 20 days (I thought we were scoring over SA until I saw the reduced public holidays!) and at the end of the year they are very uncomfortable about carrying it forward.
Tom and I have persuaded our respective managers to give us a few days towards next year, but the rest of our planned SA trip in January will come out of next year’s allowance. This also means that we need a plan to use the rest in 2001 and Bath is part of this plan.
Time to sign off… we need to go and buy milk for Monday morning and pack for our trip tomorrow. Hope you are all enjoying your brief taste of cold so you can sympathise with us come November!
Lots of love
Julie and Tom
