Julie's Boggle

Hi there

It seems a while since we’ve had much going on with us but it probably is time for a catch up session with home. Tom doesn’t have much enthusiasm for writing detailed emails so it’s back to me again.

Our trip to Bath the other week was fun even with having to wake up before 6am on Friday to catch the coach.

It turns out that Bath is a scenic place (World Heritage site now) with most of the houses / buildings made out of pale yellow Bath stone in the 18th century Gregorian style. Not having much architectural knowledge up till now, we were very interested to hear all about the Palladian style, and this has made walking around London more interesting as well.

In the middle of Bath is the outlet of a hot mineral spring (the only one in the UK… it produces 1 million litres per day) and at this spot they also have most of the remains of the original Roman baths built by the Roman settlers in the first century AD. Very interesting to walk around.

We stayed in a comfortable B&B run by a South African couple about 10 minutes walk from the town centre, did all the touristy things, and had a pleasant long weekend overall.

The weekend after that we saw “AI” at Warner Village, Acton… Kind of a strange movie. I’d say rather wait for the video.

That was also the weekend that the washing line in the bathroom fell down – or, more accurately, that was when the large plastic screws holding one side of the line to the plasterboard wall wrenched themselves loose. Two wash loads later (socks and underpants drying on every free surface in the interim) and we bought one of those metal foldable washline things from Argos (a large, but very frustrating, catalogue store) for £7.99

The weather lately has really been rather good… People are saying we are having an “Indian Summer”. Yesterday we had a bit of a day-out and went to see the “World Press Photo Exhibition” which was on at the Royal Festival Hall. The exhibits are photos taken by journalists from news events all over the world in the past year and from the 1000′s of entries they’d had, the winners in each of the different categories were on show – free – in the Royal Festival Hall foyer. We bought Tom a one-day travel card and headed for town.

Since the closing date for sending Christmas presents by land-mail is fast approaching, we went via Hamley’s toy shop in Regent Street to do some present-hunting.

It was the first time we’d really looked around the whole shop and we had a lot of fun ourselves exploring the 5-floor kid’s paradise. The selections of toys and games are mind-blowing!

From there we caught another train to Waterloo Bridge, the closest stop to the Festival Hall. We both enjoyed the exhibition – there was some really captivating work on show although it did tend to highlight a lot of worldwide human suffering as well.

The entries included some from SA and among these were shots of the penguin-washing operation from last year, and the deporting of illegal immigrants. The photos were placed off to one side of the huge foyer, in the middle there is a long bar and lots of chairs and tables. Adding to the pleasant ambience yesterday was a live band and a singer entertaining the crowded tables as well as the more remote photo browsers.

On our way back we walked through Trafalgar Square where they were having a peaceful protest against the war in Afghanistan. It’s funny how so many of the South African’s I’ve spoken to seem to think that the Americans had it coming to them and should stay out of the affairs of the Middle East… In contrast, many British seem to feel solidarity with the Yanks and support the war. The splinter groups protesting yesterday were the flip side of the coin but they aren’t that common.

On the work side, I spent the whole of last week at a client’s site by myself. And tomorrow I’m going back there for one last day. Bearing in mind that Tikit only tends to deal with the top 200 law firms in the UK, these places do tend to be pretty swanky. I would hate to think of the rent that gets paid for one of those huge office blocks in central London!

Most law firms produce an enormous amount of documentation and the tendency is to automate the document creation as much as possible so that they waste minimal time over setting fonts correctly or putting in the date etc. In their versions of Word, they have additional menus which have items on them like Letter, Fax, Court document, Compliment Slip and Envelope to name but a few. Most of the time there are also sub-headings to distinguish different versions of these documents types.

So the point is that when you select, say, a Letter, before you even start typing, up comes the letter outline with your address already in place, as well as the date, the company letterhead, and whatever other frills you would like as a standard. Producing and fixing these automated documents (templates) is a big part of what I’m busy with at these different companies. For instance, the one from last week has just merged with a law firm in Paris and they want the company blurb at the bottom of the letter sheets to include the word “Paris” under the list of offices. 5 fax templates and 6 letter templates, an hour or two later, and I’m done.

Then there are the more hellish problems involving 4-tray HP printers that only want to print from the manual feed tray ever since they installed the new driver (printer work is the worst!), and favourite keyboard shortcuts that “always worked before we did X”. One of those took me a whole morning last week.

Tom will finally be getting his chance to fly again next weekend if the good weather holds out. Better hold thumbs for that one… I don’t know if I could take the disappointment if it doesn’t work out! Anyway, that’s about it for now. Take care.

Love from,
Julie and Tom

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(Pictures taken from Wikipedia‘s image collection)

Hi 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

Hi there,
It’s hard to believe that I could feel so glad to be getting out of this extended holiday that I’ve been having – but I really am. Actually, job-hunting is far too much of a pain to make it a true holiday and when the agent called today and said I had the job, the first feeling was profound relief… No more CV’s to mail out and long explanatory emails to write, no more fickle job agents to speak to…. Yee-ha!

The job in question, is with a consultancy firm in Holburn and is thankfully very close by as London travelling goes. Our flat is about 5 minutes walk from the Central Line tube station and they are on the same line, even closer to their station than we are to ours. I reckon it’ll be about 25 minutes door-to-door at worst. The company is called Tikit (no you won’t have heard of it!) and they consult to law firms. Only.

As the third member of their rather small (think elite ) VBA team I’ll be going around to clients quite a lot of the time, doing work on their automated Word templates and document management systems. As well as this being new to me, there’s a lot of scope to branch out and learn other things too so there should be enough to keep me interested for a while.

We’ve also completed the bookings for a holiday to SA in January – for those of you who do your planning long in advance! We’re using the return-half of our current tickets to fly out on the 20th of January, and have bought another set of open-returns leaving SA on the 2nd of February. That little trip will already be taking my leave 2 days into the red, so other travel will be restricted to the weekends for a while! We aren’t getting too ambitious with European travel until the cash flow improves but we’ve used the good weather and long evenings to explore our surroundings quite a bit on foot, and lovely Holland Park is a favourite destination.

With the job in mind, things are definitely looking brighter now, even as the days start to get a bit chillier. Tom is settling down well into his work and concentrating on his image of being the person to go to with tough questions… and of course it won’t be long now before he’s on a train to the nearest airfield to fulfil his flying dreams once more.

Till next time…

cheers,
Julie

Hi everyone

People here are still asking us how we’re settling in but as far as we’re concerned, we *are* settled in. It’s hard to define but I think you do reach a certain level of familiarity with your surroundings and the things you do on a day to day basis, and once you’re there that’s what being settled in is all about.

For us part of settling in was finding a new church to attend and we got that sorted out in the first week. Both of us really liked St Simons, the Anglican church that’s about a 2 minute walk from here, and the congregation have made us very welcome. It’s curious how many churches there are in this area… we were preparing to move around a bit to find one that suited us, but fortunately that wasn’t necessary.

It always interests us how other churches organise their worship – no two are the same I think. At St Simons, they seem to always have three people up at the front with microphones leading the worship, usually one musician and two singers.

These people are on a rota and are never on two weeks in a row. The musician plays either guitar or keyboard, but if he’s playing a guitar then usually he will also makes use of the midi sequencer… this plays the tune for them just as if there were another person there playing a keyboard. Very handy when one has limited musicians! They have a lovely organ and there is one guy who can play it.  This tends to get used for the AMR type hymns which come up more often when there is a eucharist (communion).

We were surprised to find that most English churches only have a eucharist once a month at their main Sunday service… Something to get used to I suppose. Anyway we were quite pleased to find out that at St Simons they have a eucharist every two weeks… And this Sunday we will be sure to stand in the right-hand queue leading to the rail to ensure that we get wine -as opposed to the grape juice that comes if one stands in the left-hand queue!

Just like St Johns, there is also a family service once a month. On these occasions there is a plastic crate filled with tambourines and similar noisy instruments that is placed at the front for the kids (and like-minded adults) and there is lots of opportunity for making a joyful noise during the praise sessions.

There are no prayer books although there are sheets handed out for the eucharist. No hymn books either, it’s all words up on the overhead projector screen in the front. They have a good selection of music generally and we’ve found that we know about half to three-quarters of the songs from what we’ve done at home. The congregation is not as large as St Johns I don’t think (although more people keep returning with the summer holidays ending soon), and interestingly at least a third of the congregation is black. They don’t have many elderly people at all but plenty of children by comparison.

With the congregation being fairly small at the moment (they did a church “planting” recently and sent off a chunk of the congregation to another ailing church) there is no Sunday evening service and only the 10h30 service during the day. Think that’s late? Most main services start at 11 here! We finish between 12 and 12h30, and then there’s time for individual prayer or the chatting in the adjoining hall over coffee and biscuits.

We had our first home group meeting last night. As it turns out, the hosts of this group are the only other South African couple in the church and they live quite nearby. They provide supper for £1 a head and the meeting starts after the meal. No excuses about needing to make supper first! In September there is a big outreach initiative that lots of churches get involved in, it’s called On The Move. As our South African host put it last night, “it’s just like a really big braai“…

Basically the participating churches choose a public park close to them (in our case Shepherds Bush Green) and they set up braais cooking and serving free food to whoever wants it for 4 evenings in a row. A small crew of people are involved with the actual cooking and food preparation and a much larger contingent are present to minister to the people who come for food. I’m not sure exactly how they work the ministry teams but it I gather that they mostly talk to the people, offer prayer for those who want it, and answer a lot of questions about the church and Christianity in general. They will be doing this at 14 other parks around London at the same time so it really should be an interesting outreach to observe and participate in.

Once Tom started work, our new weekly routine developed quickly. Between 8.15 and 8.30am Tom strolls off to his work in Kensington (one of the really lucky ones who can walk to work!) and around 9, I tend to head off on a 10 minute walk to nearby Hammersmith to look for jobs on the internet at a contractor centre that I’ve signed up with. Tom arrives back around 17h30 in the evening and if we need to, we’ll nip out to the Safeway supermarket (about 5 minutes away) before supper to do last-minute shopping. For more major shopping excursions we tend to go to the big Tesco nearby since the prices there are more reasonable…. That’s about 10 minutes walk away and we can go after supper since it’s open till 10pm every night except Sundays. In the evenings we’re at home, we tend to keep busy with the PC’s and the internet (unlimited calls after hours on our contract) or reading -there’s an excellent library nearby.

Some good news that’s come up out of the still-depressed IT job market here, is that I have finally found an agency with a client that’s interested in my CV. Consequently I now have an interview coming up on Tuesday -hurrah! It looks like a fairly decent job so we’ll be praying for that one to work out!

Thanks to all who sent Tom birthday wishes… We weren’t quite up for a splashy supper at a restaurant at UK prices but we did devour most of a tub of Häagen-Dazs toffee ice cream to celebrate the occasion!

It’s been great to hear news of what’s going on at home (although not the news about the rand-pound exchange!!) and we certainly are very grateful for the wonderful blessing of email technology.

Love to all of you and God Bless,
Julie & Tom

Hi all
Here we are at the end of another week… For us things are certainly settling into a routine again although my routine of job-hunting will hopefully be changing in the not too distant future! All the agencies confirm that this is a slow time for the job market but they are all (optimistically perhaps?) predicting that it will bounce back somewhat in September.

At the moment I’m up against all the other people with no “commercial” experience in IT and my job searches focus around the word “junior”. With the market being so slow, it’s important to catch job ads as they pop up (on the internet) and be amongst the first dozen CV’s that they get, following up 10 minutes later with a phone call. That doesn’t leave much room for finding an arbitrary temp job in the meanwhile… Fortunately with Tom being employed, it’s not a crisis situation for us and we can wait the market out to some extent.

Last week Saturday we thought to put the good weather to the test and have a braai in our back yard. It had been raining lightly in the afternoon but nothing serious. The previous tenants had left charcoal in the braai itself (one of those portable devices with wheels on it) which Tom tried to incinerate with the aid of a bottle of “white spirits” -we’d call it turpentine- that I found lying around – it was fairly damp though and that mission ended with the charcoal being turfed into a rubbish bag.

Everyone had arrived by 5pm and we made the first movements towards outside around 5.30. That was the cue for the weather to prove itself, and down came the rain. You could almost see it trying to drive Andrew and Tom away as they huddled over the braai under an umbrella, with the rain becoming progressively harder by the minute.

Tom made the leap for the open shed, next thing the half-inflated lilo that lives in there (no, we don’t know why either) came sailing out and the braai was moved into the shed. Further applications of white spirits to encourage the feeble charcoal we were burning helped a bit (although it almost smoked out the two braai attendants) and soon after the guys retreated into the house leaving the shed to smoke quietly to itself. The rain quieted somewhat until Tom’s next venture outside when it started up again with a vengeance. “Movement sensor”, was Gordon’s dry comment.

After the serious smoking stopped somewhat, and with some persuasion from the dry spectators inside, the braai was moved into the glassed-in laundry area with the back door firmly closed. Unfortunately a partially open upper window in the kitchen soon had the house filled with smoke as well.

As Andrew predicted, we had fond memories of the braai for the rest of the week just sniffing the lounge. All told, it was definitely an entertaining evening – much more interesting than your average South African braai… Lets hope the photos come out! The next day we returned the £3 bottle of fire-lighter gel to our local retailer on the grounds that it had not performed at all as we’d have expected a fire-lighter to. According to Tom, you could light a blob of the stuff on one side, and the flame wouldn’t even spread across the blob! More environmentally friendly fire-lighters perhaps.

Tom’s first week seems to have gone alright. They gave him a course for Tuesday to Thursday and he only really started work on Friday. Walking from here, it takes him about 20 minutes each way – less if it’s raining – and the hours they work are pretty flexible as long as they get in their 40 hours a week. Apparently they’ve been requested to be at work by 10h00 (unless there’s a problem) but that’s about as restrictive as it gets.

…

So much for what Julie has to say. I have been instructed to tell you what my job entails. To be honest, I am not yet sure. Something to do with working on the user interface of the company’s product (they only have the one product, called Orchestream Service Activator). After attending a course on the Activator, I have now pretty much learned all about what it does, and that is not a lot. Still, I got a certificate which I am considering putting up on the wall next to my desk.

There are quite a few issues with the software as far as I am concerned, mainly owing to the fact that the design is overcomplicated. The company is huge, employing about 100 people in London and goodness knows how many others in its satellite offices in France, Germany, Canada, USA and Australia. Many of the London staff are software engineers, the salary bill must be huge. Of course none of this is really my problem, but it does present some opportunities for a few innovations from someone like me, promotion here we come!

In the meantime, Julie is keen to start working, I think because she is tired of searching for a job more than anything else. I am keen for her to start working because flying is rather expensive here, and I can’t really justify doing so until we are both earning. Sad really. Julie just pointed out yesterday that where ever I end up flying is going to a fair distance away by public transport and expensive to get to as well! Time to find some paying customers who want to go with me .

Speaking of flying, We spotted a Concorde on finals for Heathrow last week. Very beautiful, and heart-warming to see one in the air as well.

Love from us both
Julie & Tom

Hi
We’ve been living here for 4 days now and it certainly feels good to have a place to call home. We contacted British Telecom (BT) yesterday and by the time we got home with our £4.99 telephone, the line was already available.

We ran into some problems with the modem though; no. 1 being that it has a 3-pin SA plug coming out of its power supply transformer. A trip into London Central eventually produced a rare 3-pin SA-to-UK adaptor for £4.99 and for a further £4.65 (ouch), a converter from SA-phonejack to UK-phonejack. Needless to say, it was all cheaper than buying a new modem. Back at home, there was the extreme disappointment of discovering that the phone connection in the study has been disconnected… but Tom to the rescue. Tinker-tinker-tinker and off we go again potentially at the expense of our BT security system should we ever want it re-commissioned.

I didn’t mention before that Tom actually only starts work on Monday the 6th of August, this gives us a good chance to get settled down before he disappears and I’ll start in seriously on the job hunt from next week too. Meanwhile, there’s lots to be done around the flat. I thought I’d give a quick verbal walking tour of it for all of you who will never get to see it…

Coming down the street (Westwick Gardens, a quiet suburban road) you stop at number 31, a 4-storey, terraced (i.e. joined to each of its neighbours) house. To the left of the stairs up to the main door, you come down some concrete stairs which curve slightly to the right. On your left in a piece of garden at street level, there are some large overgrown green shrubs – due to be pruned at some stage. At the bottom of the stairs, sheltered by the stairs to the upstairs flat, is number 31A (a “lower-ground-floor” flat) with a bright red door. Welcome.

There’s a several meter long entrance hallway and then to your left is the main bedroom. It has an attractive bay window and gets lots of light in the morning (potentially more once the aforementioned overgrown bushes are trimmed back). One double-bed against the wall opposite the window, fair-sized fitted cupboard with doors completed covered by mirrors (a tad unusual) against the left wall. Nice pine-veneer bookshelf against the far wall, already collecting books, Julie’s travelling teddy bear and other clutter. Another “feature” of this flat is a ‘dado’ rail running round the walls of most of the rooms… and below this rail the walls are painted a bright pastel blue. Quite nice.

Next door to the bedroom is the bathroom. Quite a long narrow room, basin & cupboard (with large white-tiled surface) then the bath on the right, and toilet on the left. Dado rail and pastel blue theme repeated, this time blue above the rail.

Next door down is the lounge. Major feature here is the fireplace straight across from the door. The bricks that surround the actual fire-making area are a rough grey & tan and the structure goes from floor to ceiling with a big flat wooden plank embedded in the bricks above the hearth. No gas to it unfortunately but we can have a real fire if we can find a log somewhere! On the right wall is another large mirror. The lounge suite is neat but uninspiring. A three-seater that converts into a single bed (anyone want to sleepover?) and a single seater, all covered in a rough beige weave except for the wooden arms and legs. New coffee table, pine-lookalike, in the middle.

The lounge leads on to the kitchen with the dining table sitting on the boundary against the left wall; same flavour as the coffee table, with four solid but elegant looking chairs. The largish fridge-freezer stands behind it.

Cream-colour surfaces on the left side with gas hob and under the counter electric oven in the middle. Rather sticky black extractor-thingy over the hob – nice light in it though.

Single sink (in brown – odd!) set in the surface against the far wall (actually just one big window above the sink, which lets in a lot of light). Fairly attractive wooden cupboards, under all the surfaces and above the working surface on the right, all of which (less the three already done) need a good wash inside and out!! Cream-coloured stone tiles on the floor.

To the left of the sink is the heavy wooden stable door leading to the “utility room” (glassed-in laundry as I think of it). Out here lives the (new) washing machine and some low shelves for storage. Even the roof of this room is clear perspex – good place for plants I reckon. The glass-door to the “garden” is opposite the kitchen door up some mossy damp stairs.

The patio is probably about 4x5m and has its own set of 4 white garden chairs + table complete with faded cushions & umbrella, a dinky shed in one corner and raised flower beds on three sides, all completely overgrown. I had a good go at it yesterday, ripping down an insidious creeper that was smothering our only rose and the pretty ivy growing up the wall. Unfortunately I had to be content with what I could rip off, as the roots require far more solid garden tools than I have available.

The only rooms left inside the house are on the left of the lounge as you walk out of it. Almost opposite the lounge is the door to the shower room, home to our electric “power-shower” and its undersized shower cubicle. It has a few idiosyncrasies around the controlling of flow and temperature but it does the trick. Not a match for the real thing sadly, but it does beat the over-the-bath types.

Turning left as you come out the lounge you come into the last room, the study / spare room. It is a long narrow-ish room, painted cream (no rail here) and nice & bright from the windows on the far end. One day soon we will have 2 desks – only one at present – and a single bed is also on its way (both from the landlord) for additional prospective guests. Needless to say our 2 PC’s will be living here. Minor inconvenience in this room is the running of a power cable across the room (short distance though) due to the substantial design flaw which placed the power point on the wall opposite to the phone connection.

The ubiquitous central heating radiators in white enamel paint abide in every room, and all rooms except the bathroom, shower and kitchen have fitted carpets in neutral blue / green shades. None of the rooms is what I would call large (well perhaps they are if you take London standards) but it’s more than enough space for us to be comfortable. One might wish for fewer neighbours but at least the house rules keep them quiet after 11pm.

That’s pretty much it…. Of course the furnishings came with the flat but that was about where it ended as far as provisions (kitchen and otherwise) went. We found some odd bits and pieces, like an egg-slicer and a garlic press, but nothing as useful as crockery would have been. Smatterings of cutlery included only a teaspoon in the spoon-department so Tom’s been eating his cereal with a fork for the last 3 days (Tip: spoons work much better).

Today we went out to the massive IKEA (home / furniture hyperstore) in NW London with Gordon and bought some dinner plates, glasses and a cutlery set. They were cheap for London but paying in pounds still hurts. Tom only gets paid on the last Friday of any given month and next month that *would* end up being the 31st!!

Sunday morning 10:30 found us at St Simons, the church about 60m up the road. Smallish congregation but quite lively and very friendly to us newcomers. We even got invited to a picnic lunch at someone’s house afterwards and spent an enjoyable afternoon lazing on their piece of lawn in the shade and making some new friends. The weather has only started to cool down this afternoon – it has been exceedingly hot here this last week… hard to remember that we’re not in South Africa at times!

Guess that’s more than enough details for one letter … Hope you’re all doing well.

Love
Julie & Tom

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