Different worlds

Slightly odd moment this morning... I was running through a damp green English field early this morning, watching the rabbits hop across the path, when a Juluka song came up on my iPod. It was quite jarring - I couldn't have been in a less African environment if I'd tried. It made me think about where - if anywhere - I belong these days...



Eventually I decided that I belong wherever Bobby and the children are. And for now, that's right here.

There's a gas mask on the kitchen table

Sophie's homework yesterday was to construct a gas mask from cardboard and a plastic cup. The end result looks disconcertingly realistic. Today she has taken great pleasure in wearing it, and looming out at me from various corners while intoning "Mummy...mummy...are you my mummy?" (If that confuses you then clearly you didn't see the scariest ever Doctor Who episode). The gas mask has been constructed because they're studying the WW2 evacuees. They're going to have a day when they dress up as evacuees and tour the bomb shelter at a local school, and they'll also be visiting the Childrens' War exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (We went there a while ago; the exhibition is extremely well put together). When I was her age my school trips were to places like Groot Constantia, on the slopes of Table Mountain. The world is filled with so many interesting and wonderful places...

Our house is starting to look a bit like an IKEA catalogue, only untidier.

We spent a slightly frightening amount of money there on Friday night, and, after the usual harrowing assembly process (aside from a meal out with friends last night we worked pretty much all weekend putting everything together), we now have a new diningroom table and chairs, lots of kitchen shelves, bookcases for the livingroom, and blinds for all the bedrooms. It has been a bit tricky not having window coverings this past week; it will be pleasant not to have to crouch below window level while getting dressed tomorrow morning.

I'm so happy that it's half-term this coming week; it'll be bliss to be here with the kids instead of working. I am hoping that we will be pretty much organised here by the end of the week. Or, better yet, by Thursday, which is when my parents arrive to spend a few days with us.

We're in the new house!

I always forget how grim moving day is; goodness knows, we've done it often enough that you'd think the horror wouldn't come as much surprise anymore. But every time, I forget just how exhausting and backbreaking it is, and just how sweaty and grimy and disheartened one gets.

But it's done, we survived, and now we get to do the fun, settling-in part.

And BT got the internet and phone switchover right, which was a nice surprise, since I seem to remember it took them a couple of weeks last time we moved.

I am actually quite glad that we lived in the Awful House for those past few months, since we now appreciate so many things that would have washed over us before.

Like electrical power points, for instance. If you've never lived in a house with just two places for plugs in the kitchen, you don't realise what a sweet experience it is to be able to plug in fridge, washing machine, toaster, kettle, and slowcooker and still have spare power points. Oh, and speaking of sweet experiences - we have a dishwasher again! It is bliss not to have to wash dishes - and (although I am slightly embarrassed to admit this) the dishwasher gets them so much cleaner than we did washing them by hand. Things shine instead of looking faintly smudgy.

And warmth. For the first time in ages we slept like normal people, with our heads on the pillows, instead of burrowed under three duvets, heads and all. Central heating and double glazing - joy. Speaking of sleeping, that is one thing we got right this move - we remembered to re-assemble the beds and make them before we did anything else, so that we had somewhere comfortable to collapse when we'd finished lugging bits of furniture about. (But why did we have to re-assemble the beds, you might ask? Because, infuriatingly, in order to get them down the twisty narrow stairs in the Awful House,we had to take them apart. Likewise with the wardrobes.)

Work tomorrow, which is frustrating as I'm longing to carry on getting things organised here. But, the week after next is half-term so I will have time then. Can't wait!

My wallet smells of soy sauce.

So does my kitchen.

This is because Sophie dropped an unopened bottle of soy sauce, which shattered, drenching my wallet and much of the kitchen.

Carpeting a kitchen is really not a very sensible idea. However, only one more full day and we are out of this horrible purple-carpeted soy-sauce-smelling kitchen forever. Touch wood.

I am annoyed because ...

Bobby is downstairs in the livingroom listening to some loud, boring discussion about some computery thing or other, which makes me not want to sit in there

and even if it weren't for the annoying background noise, it's cold downstairs.

Stephen is upstairs in our bedroom supposedly doing his homework on the upstairs computer so I can't go to bed yet. Not that I am particularly tired, but at least in bed I would be warm. Or warmer.

I am bored

because (oh,the horror) I don't have a book to read

because we took all the library books back in preparation for the Great Move.

Which brings me to another annoyance -

namely, that we managed to rack up almost £20 in fines, thanks to three books on CD which we forgot to return after Christmas.

Also -

I think I am losing my mind, because a grocery delivery arrived this evening, and I have absolutely no recollection of placing the order. None. It is all things that I would be likely to choose, though, so presumably I have just forgotten setting the delivery up. And we were just about out of groceries, so the timing was actually quite good. But still, it was disconcerting.

And, am still infuriated by today's letter from Choices, the estate agency which is handling this rental, in which they reminded us to have the carpets professionally cleaned before we leave, or they'll withhold money from our deposit. The carpets which, when we arrived, where unbelievably, horrifyingly, disgustingly filthy. Shall be composing a snotty response tomorrow. Will not attempt it now, as, in my present mood, it would come out too aggressive.

The same letter, bizarrely, wants us to give them proof that we really were renting here, before they'll give us back our deposit. They want copies of things like gas and electric bills, council tax and so forth ... why? Just to make my life complicated, is my theory. The fact that this house has those ghastly pay-as-you-go meters for gas and electricity, so we have no bills for those services, just adds insult to injury.

Ideally, I would like to soothe myself with either chocolate or wine at this point (or possibly, both) but we have none, and the wine shop across the street and the corner store are both closed.

However. Only four more sleeps till we're in the new house!



It is a semi-detached house (as are most houses in this area) - the four windows on the right of the picture (two upstairs, two down) are ours. The other four belong to next door.

If you look beyond the falling-apart window frame, the view from our bedroom window across the roof-tops to the hills is one of the few pleasant things about this house.

I am not going to be sad to bid it goodbye, though. Only six more sleeps till we are out of here! The truck is hired and everything, so (touch wood) everything is on track. I can't wait!

Slightly disturbing moment in the grocery store this morning - I discovered that Morrison's (the grocery store) is selling their own store brand of deodorant - and one of the varieties is named Annalise!! I have grown accustomed to having a fairly unusual name, so it feels very disconcerting to see it on a deodorant can, and a Morrison's brand one at that. It smells quite nice, though, so I bought it.

I seem to have been whirling around in a blur of stress and busy-ness these past few days.

It's been busy thanks to the usual mix of work and chores and life in general, and also because we've had my parents staying with us for the past few days - they just left this morning.

As for the stress - some of it has been to do with money (or the lack thereof). We are paying the mortgage on top of our rent and we really can't afford it. And some has been to do with Stephen. He is miserable (we think) and acting out in a myriad of difficult-to-deal-with ways.

But, the financial stress will lift in April, when we are shot of this damn rental house, and I have been speaking to various people at Stephen's college (one advantage of working in your child's place of education) and I think that things should improve for him, so there may be some light at the end of that tunnel.

Things are also looking hopeful on the house front. The new bedroom carpets are going in on the 1st of February, so - given that we can rent a van - we will be able to move on the weekend of the 3rd/4th. I simply cannot wait. The weather has finally gone wintery (it snowed here this morning) and this house is revolting in the cold. This morning my breath was hanging in white clouds as I was getting dressed in our arctic attic bedroom.

The picture comes from this weekend. We walked through the park to the allotments - patches of land which people rent from the council to grow veggies. Too much of a mission for us, to have to go out in order to work in the garden - but once we move (our perennial cry) we are looking forward to starting our own little vegetable patch. I think that the bathtub in the picture must have something to do with the ban on hosepipes which - believe it or not, since we've had above-average rainfall for the past several months - has only just been lifted. Crazy, that a country where it never stops raining can't figure out a way to conserve some of that water.

The girls' room is finished, and so is Stephen's.

The girls had picked out what we had thought would be a very very pale pink; but now that it's all over the walls we see that it is actually a very very pale lilac. They still like it though, thank goodness. Steve's room looks very nice - a soft cloudy grey-blue. I hope he likes the finished product. He hasn't seen it yet, as he stayed home today in order to study. Supposedly. I will be very interested to see the results for the set of exams he's currently taking. Bobby and I do not feel he's working nearly hard enough; he thinks he is. We shall see who's right in a week or two.

We take the radio over to the house when we're doing all this DIY stuff, so we have heard an awful lot of the BBC's World Service recently. I had the radio upstairs with me when I gave Steve's room its first coat of paint, but it was downstairs with Bobs when I was doing the second coat. It was really odd; as I moved round the silent room, repainting, I remembered all the different news stories I'd heard earlier quite clearly. The muslim lifeguards in Australia when I was painting by the door; international reaction to Bush's "surge" in Iraq along the right-hand wall, a silicon-valley based Indian entrepreneur talking about the use of biomass in green energy when I got to the window wall. This must have implications for recalling other information. Maybe I should suggest that Stephen study in the room in which he's going to take his exams?

First day back today, and work - which I normally enjoy - was unbearably tedious. The weather didn't help either. It was dark when I got up and dark when I left work. Dark, and drizzly. And cold. And when I walked home this evening it was raining just hard enough to be annoying, yet not hard enough to warrant the effort of getting my umbrella out of my bag and wrestling it up.

I want to make some new year's resolutions, but I feel sort of stuck, as though I can't start anything new just yet. I am hoping that when we are finally in the new house I will be able to move on and start the next phase of our life here.

Still not sure when we actually will move, mind you. Bobby has a sore throat and streaming cold so we haven't done any more work at the house for the last couple of nights. Tomorrow, if he's feeling better, we'll carry on. With a bit of luck, two more weekends should see us finished the floors and painting, and then - as soon as the carpeting people are done - we can move in. The good news is that the bedroom walls actually look all right now that the second coat of paint has dried. Not as wonderful as I'd hoped, but not like the pond sludge that I feared before Christmas.

Two whole days of painting over the ghastly blood-red walls of our bedroom in the new house, and I find, to my horror, that the new, supposedly calm, neutral colour which I picked because I thought it would make the room seem tranquil and peaceful actually just makes the walls look as though they have been coated in sludge.

I am hoping that when I next see those walls - in a week's time, when we get back from Scotland - they will seem less dire. We plan to leave tomorrow at four tomorrow morning; I am looking forward to the break immensely. I think it'll do us good to be in an environment where we can't possibly do any chores of any description. And no internet or tv either, which will be good for us too.

Meanwhile, I hope that all of you who'll be celebrating this week have a wonderful time. See you next week! (Or maybe, next year!)

The kids' schools and my work closed for the holidays on Friday, and Bobby goes on leave tomorrow, so we're all free for the next couple of weeks! Yippee!

Last week was crazy, what with the house and work, and I shopped like a mad thing yesterday, so it feels wonderful to finally have a peaceful afternoon at home.

One interesting thing from last week - I was asked to go on a field trip with the media students, and ended up watching them film an episode of Fortune, a rather patronising and (in my opinion) distasteful ITV show in which millionaires (one of whom, weirdly, is Jeffrey Archer) give money away. It'll air early next year sometime, I think. I've always been quite cynical about so-called "reality" shows, and seeing this has made me even more so. For instance, you know when a contestant says something, and then they pan to the audience so you can see the expressions on people's faces - joy, or outrage, or whatever? Well, they actually get tons of those shots before they even start filming the show, and cut them in later as they see fit. Same with the clapping. They had the audience clap excitedly, clap boredly, hiss in disgust and so on, so that they had all that recorded before the contestants or millionaires actually arrived on set. Also, to add insult to injury, the studio where they were filming looked more like a barn than an actual studio. Looked like a barn, and felt like one too, since an icy wind was whistling in through the open doors. However, everyone in the audience had to remove coats, scarves, gloves etc, so that it looked as though they were in a real, warm, studio. So if you ever see the show, and the audience seems to have a blueish tinge to them, that's why.

In other news, we celebrated Emily's 14th birthday on Sunday. She doesn't actually turn 14 until the 30th, but we decided to do it before Christmas so that her birthday doesn't get lost in all the post-Christmas-getting-back-from-holiday muddle.



She had planned her day down to the last second, (my darling girl is nothing if not organised) and she loved every second of it. So Sunday was devoted to buying her a new outfit, having lunch out, watching a movie, and playing board games in the evening. She loved the day. And she'll have her non-family party once we're moved into the new house.

Speaking of moving, the floor is looking pretty good! We just have to do the edges of the living-room, and that whole room will be finished.



The worst floor-laying moment was probably down to me. Last night, I noticed that two of the planks weren't quite as tight as the others were. It wasn't really a problem, but I suggested that Bobby tap them together anyway - and in so doing, he dislodged a plank for real and so had to re-lay a whole enormous section. Aside from that incident, the rest of our DIY stuff has been quite stress-free, thus far. Though we're not done yet ...

What I am done with, however, is Christmas shopping. I am quite proud of this, since I only started yesterday. Not only have I bought all required presents, but I have also taken each child on a separate shopping trip to buy gifts for his or her siblings and assorted relatives. I normally go all dithery and pathetic when shopping, and end up hating the experience, but this time, oddly enough, I actually enjoyed it. Perhaps leaving everything to the last minute has its advantages?

I pity the people whose job it is to come up with names for paint colours. It must be difficult to come up with positive-sounding names for some of the toxic shades they're faced with. After our experiments with paint swatches last night, we have decided that a more realistic name for Tuscan Terracotta, for instance, would be Radioactive Salmon. And Earth-baked Terracotta looks more like Mud. As for Natural Paprika ... just call it Hideously Bright Orange and be done with it.

After a fair amount of angst, we eventually settled on the rather sticky sounding Honey Drizzle for our livingroom and kitchen walls, with a paler variant on the same theme for the hallway.

After the girls were in bed this evening we went over to the new house to start the dreaded re-decorating. Didn't get to any actual painting, but we have polyfilla'd up the holes from old picture hooks etc and put tape along the skirting boards, so we can start painting tomorrow night. If we feel strong enough.

So. The house. We want to install wood laminate flooring (or possibly real wood flooring)in the hallway and the livingroom, recarpet the stairs and bedrooms, repaint the whole house, and do a loft conversion. (Which, now that I write it all down, sounds rather ambitious. However.) Anyway, we looked at various wood and carpet and paint options in some local shops yesterday, and had someone come round to the house to give us a quote for the loft conversion, and got a couple of quotes for the floors. Said flooring quotes made us flinch a bit, so, after doing much online research, Bobby believes we could lay the floors ourselves, which - even factoring in the cost of a decent saw etc - would almost halve those particular costs. He is totally gung-ho about this, whereas I am filled with doubt and angst. I have visions of us collapsed in despair in a house strewn with misshapen bits of wood. I think it's my bad sewing experiences that make me think that Things Like This Go Wrong. So we will see ... I think even as I type Bobs is researching how you do the fiddly bits like the places where the radiator pipes are.

And today we went to B&Q. (Big DIY chain, mainly remarkable for the amazing speed with which its employees disappear around corners before you can catch up with them).

I did not enjoy the experience, not one little bit. I felt incompetent and overwhelmed, and it made me bad tempered. Though I did not plumb the depths to which one grandmotherly looking woman had sunk. Her words, which I overheard in the Christmas decorating section: "Oh for Christ's sake, just get whichever one you fucking well want." And a merry Christmas to you too!

We came away from B&Q with some paint samples and brushes and a step ladder and various other bits and pieces; after painting some swatches on the walls this evening we want to pick up a couple more samples tomorrow and, with any luck, we can start painting for real on Tuesday evening.

I need to practise saying that as though it's a good thing.

Oh, and just to make life that bit more complicated - we are pretty sure that Stephen's eyes need testing, so we need to try to book an appointment for him for tomorrow afternoon.

So, to-do list for tomorrow :

1. Call doctor about Emily's prescription; she needs a repeat as she has only two weeks' supply left.
2. Call optometrist.
3. Be at work by 8.45
3. Walk to hardware shop in my 40 minute lunchbreak and get paint samples.
4. Hopefully, visit optometrist with Stephen after work - ie after 4.30.
5. Get home, be at new house by 6, as another loft company is coming to give us a quote.
6. Eat. What, when?

Maybe I should go assemble something in the crockpot now. I really don't feel like it, though.

On the plus side, we did also buy a teeny weeny Christmas tree from B&Q which pleased us all greatly. Our livingroom here is so minute that there's no space for a decent sized tree, but our baby tree makes us feel Christmassy and happy anyway.

On this day last year, I found out that I hadn't got the job I'd just applied for.

Exactly one year later, things are looking up.

Today, I got the first of my new job's paychecks. While the salary is still rather sad, it's a lot more than my last job paid, and, more importantly, I'm loving work.

Also today, I picked up the keys for our new house. (Very easy to do, as I walk right past the estate agency on my way home from work.)

Yes, it's finally really and truly ours!

(Side-note on England vs Florida ... when we bought our house in Oviedo, the estate agent gave us a $50 gift certificate to a local restaurant when we got the keys. Here, the estate agent gave us ... a key chain with their logo on it. But I digress.)

I can't wait to move! We went round to the house this evening (of course) and started planning the redecoration. One nice side effect of living in our current quarters is that, this evening, we didn't get that sinking feeling one often gets when one sees the new house without its furniture and so forth for the first time - you know, when you see the faded marks on the carpet and the scuffs on the paintwork, and it all seems a bit smaller and tattier than you remembered it, and you wonder if maybe you made a horrible mistake when you chose the house in the first place. Because compared to this house, the new house, which is really quite ordinary, seems absolutely palatial, old carpets and all.

We spent Thursday evening at Stephen's old school. We were there for prizegiving as, ironically in view of recent events, Steve was being presented with a monster trophy thing for getting all those good GCSE grades despite having to do two years' work in one.

He does seem to be doing a bit more work now though, so we are hoping that he is getting himself back on track.

And news from the house front - we have finally exchanged contracts. This is good news, as we have finally reached the point where there are penalties for the seller if she tries to get out of the deal. On Thursday, apparently, we are going to "complete" - which means the house will officially be ours.

We are thinking that we won't move straight away, though. We want to redo the downstairs floors, and repaint some of the bedroooms (certainly the master bedroom, which is currently a violent raspberry). And since we are stuck paying rent on this place for the next four months, we might as well get the new house properly sorted out before we actually move.

If we hadn't already decided to go away for Christmas I think we'd be tempted to move as soon as possible - our current home does not really lend itself to festive cheer - but as things are, it seems to make more sense to wait.

I can hardly believe that the house deal really is finally working out!!

Call from our estate agent - apparently the house-buying thing is happening, and they want to complete next week.

Quite how we've gone from "a couple of months", which was the last we heard two weeks ago, to yesterday's "next week" I don't know.

I hope we never ever have to buy another house in this country.

Brrrrr. This house doesn't have double glazing or central heating, so we are really feeling the current cold snap. There's a gas heater in the living room, so it's toasty down here, but as one progresses up through the house it gets colder and colder until your get to the attic bedroom where Bobby and I sleep, which is positively arctic. There is an electric wall heater there, but, even though it is very expensive to run, it's also not much good at providing any actual heat. This house has prepayment meters for gas and electricity - you have these little key thingies that you have to take to the post office, put money on (like a pay-as-you-go phone card, sort of), and then insert into the meter when you get home again to get light and heat. It's an irritating system, in that one has to be organised or run the risk of being in the cold and dark, and it's also the most expensive way to pay for your gas and electricity. And,the meters are in the scary cellar, which adds to the bother of the whole thing. However, it does make one very careful about switching lights and so on off - it is quite sobering seeing the amount of money on the meter ticking down.

The good news is, though, that it seems as though we may yet be able to move into the house we've been trying to buy for the past six months. Our seller has found another house to buy, and her seller doesn't need to find anywhere to buy (she's moving into a caravan, apparently, which sounds absolutely deranged to me but hopefully she won't come to her senses till it's too late to back out of the deal), so there's no onward chain. According to our estate agent, we could be in by January. So with any luck we may not have to spend the whole winter here.

Even better news is that those blood tests I had last week came back "fine", according to the doctor's receptionist. I'm quite relieved; when you type my symptoms - unexplained bruising, fatigue and muscle weakness - into Google (I know, I know, one should never do that) you get a bunch of dread diseases. So while I still have the rather unpleasant symptoms at least I can stop worrying that I'm going to die of them.

At 11.45 last night we, and our tired, disoriented children, were still wandering through the labyrinth that is Ikea, flinging random goods into our trolley. However, as of this morning, we have rugs to cover the dodgiest bits of the fitted carpets, curtains, and sofas in the living room. Thank God for Sweden.

We got quite a lot done this week. Among other things, I shampooed the carpets on the ground floor; a rather horrifying experience. On the third go, the water in the carpet cleaner was still coming out literally black. I ask you this - what kind of an idiot carpets a kitchen floor? Industrial sort of carpeting, but still. Ick.

And we now have a telephone at home. More of an achievement than it sounds, as in order to do that we had to establish our actual house number. It turns out that it's not 51B (the estate agent's first option) nor 51B (the landlord's preferred option) but 51. The same number as the chemist next door. But, ours is not to reason why. And at least I have got to know our postman, since chatting with him about this issue.

Still updating from the library, as we don't have internet access at home yet. Maybe by this time next week, if we're lucky. Probably all the delays are for the best; though I miss reading everyone's blogs, it's just as well that I don't have too many sources of distraction at home at the moment.

Oh, and late yesterday afternoon, in amongst the moving madness, I dropped my signed contract off at my new place of work. It seems like it'll be a lot nicer than my current work; when the deputy principal noticed me waiting in reception to speak to the personnel officer he came over to chat and tell me a bit about who I'd be working with. He was really friendly and pleasant, in striking contrast to my current deputy head, who still doesn't seem to recognise me when he passes me in the corridor.

And then, just as I got home, I got a message to say I have an interview next Thursday for a job I'd applied for just before the one I took came along. I'm not going to go to the interview; having signed the contract it's too late to back out. And I think I'm going to really enjoy my new job. But I did have a couple of if-only pangs last night, because this other job had a rather good salary.

Anyway. Today we need to assemble the girls' bunk beds (they have been quite stoic about camping on the floor, but they are starting to get a bit plaintive about it now), go grocery shopping, and do mounds and mounds of laundry. Tomorrow - if all goes according to plan - we'll do something fun. We all need a break from the non-stop chores that have been our life this past week.

Updating my blog from work during lunch, something I swore I'd never do. But, since I'm only here for eight more days, I can probably afford to be a bit reckless.

We checked out of the B&B this morning; the estate agent has promised us that the electricity will be sorted out at home by this evening. We are trying as hard as we can to believe her.

The B&B (run by an Irish couple named Mary and Joseph) was very comfortable. Certainly a lot more comfortable than our house. But it has been a real pain carrying clothes and homework and that sort of thing back and forth, so I am desperately hoping that we will actually be able to sleep in our own beds tonight. I do worry, though, given the scary state of the house in general, and the tangle of wires in the basement in particular, that the electricity man may take one look and say he can't connect the electricity, let alone certify it as safe, so we'll have to find somewhere else to live entirely ...

Oh, and before you ask, no, I didn't mention a basement before. That is because I didn't know that the mysterious door in the living room - the one I'd thought was a cupboard door - actually led down a rickety, dusty flight of stairs to a basement, home of our fuse box. A basement which, despite the fact that is accessed only from our living room, belongs to the chemist next door. A basement which, among other things, holds containers marked "Biohazard. Dispose of by incineration only."

I'm telling you, this is the strangest house I have ever lived in.