Jul 21, 2003
Everything that happened
OK, while I was off the air for a bit (is that right? I wasn’t offline, just a bit of my site, so what’s the term? And don’t anyone say hiatus…) loads happened. Like, tons. So here’s a little recap.
When you last saw our friendly author, she was extremely stressed, because the house that she’d just moved into at the beginning of May was neighboured by posh loud wankers who prevented her from sleeping, relaxing, enjoying home life and, in fact, talking about anything else apart from her stressful home life and noisy neighbours.
This got extremely tedious for her and, no doubt, others, too.
The landlord (this makes it sound like a person, when in fact it was a faceless investment company) agreed to release us from the lease if we could find someone else to move in.
We placed ads in just about every flavour of London classifieds, and I even bit the bullet and went and asked the debutantes upstairs if they knew anyone who wanted a new flat.
Via a combination of sheer luck and exhaustion, we managed to find some people eager to move in; though while at least one of them was actually principally responsible for the racket upstairs (being, as he was, a near-permanent houseguest of the neighbours) I decided (with legal advice) that it would be prudent to take down the blog for a bit, in case any prospective tenants should stumble across it. You never can tell.
To cut a long story a wee bit shorter, the lads who were to move in were nice but very laid back – of the classic “oh yah, mummy will pay my deposit…oh don’t worry, we don’t need to do a security check…we’ll probably have everything sorted and paid before we move in, yah…” variety. This meant that we were unable to pay or sign on a new place until they had finalised (paid and signed) on our old. We finally lifted pen from paper at 6.30 on a Friday evening, went home, packed and picked up the van at half seven the next morning for the move. Talk about cutting it fine. For a week or so, we didn’t know whether we were actually going to be able to move at all – or be left responsible for two houses, or, worse, none.
That was a not very pleasant experience, and one I’m keen to avoid in future, and would advise others to do likewise.
So anyway, the move. Let’s just say three things:
- If it hadn’t been for Niki & Gilles and Anna & Bobbie, we’d have been well and truly buggered.
- Moving house with flu on a searingly hot weekend is probably the worst experience I’ll have this year.
- Moving a mile down the road is a much better (easier) idea than halfway across London. Oh yes.
So I had that horrid flu that’s been doing the rounds (wobbly knees, bad throat, fever, streaming head, all that) while we were attempting to move house and then, when we’d finished, P got it too. If there’s one thing worse than a person with flu, it’s two.
The new house is lovely beyond measure. It feels very settled, very peaceful, very us. We’ve come home.
Meanwhile, notsosoft.com was raking in over 800 pieces of spam a day. While I was flitering them with Spamcop, it felt like wading through treacle. It feels very redundant knowing that there’s little I could do to stem the tide, so I resolved to just move on. Besides, I wanted a change – something a little more me(ish). And here we are.
