project: eggplant » The UK

old school

Lloyd — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:03:21 +0000

After a month and a half of skanky-dive viewing we settled on a fairly decent place in an “up and coming” part of town (read “mild chance of knife fights”: we’re actually 10min walk from the scene of a big case where a kid got stabbed for looking at some other kids “the wrong way”). Cynicism aside, we really were quite fortunate to come across this place: the Spanish landlady is a darling, and aside from some fundamentally poor renovation work, the place does show quite nicely. Hey, we don’t own it, so who cares?

Our move progressed in fits and starts, and we only recently got our broadband hooked up finally (sparking a bewildering dispute now with BT over a £280 phone bill) so it finally feels like we’re settling into an abode. We had only the novelty of the situation to sustain us. Daily trips to the library for sporadic internet made me wonder just what kind of third-world country we’d ended up in (we got better cel reception and access to internet in Thailand).

In all the swirl, we had only ourselves to blame for any head-scratching developments: the entire move was like a glaring spotlight on our own follies, mostly to do with stuff we’d thought we’d desperately need in the New Country:

Who needs 15 pairs of trousers? I do, apparently. I didn’t even know I had that many.
Q: Who needs 32 shirts? A: Lloyd, or a man with 32 torsos.
We brought canned pineapple? Not like we were moving into the jungle, and even if we were, there’d probably be pineapples growing there.
Oregano?!
There’s always room for Jello, especially in our sea-going container.
Costco packs of Colgate Total (given the state of British teeth, this may have been a valid concern).
And our lovely pizza pan: too big to fit inside our Lilliputian oven.

We now have a box full of very useful goods that we’ll be loading onto the first people passing through on the way back to Vancouver. You’ve been warned! Funnily enough, though, there are a few things we wish we’d shipped out that you genuinely cannot get here: red liquorice, salsa, frozen perogies (with the recent influx of Poles to the UK, you can finally get perogies, but only in special delis. No 2kg bags of Cheemo in sight.)

* And they said the pun is the lowest form of wit. The best head-shakers were reserved for our moving company though: from the aforementioned oregano wrapped in a phone-book’s worth of paper, to the shifty mover* telling me he loves his job because “it’s like Christmas every day”. If I hadn’t known him for, oh, 5 minutes, I might have thought he was casing the joint.

In the end, it’s all gone over well, and the days of constant bickering with the utilities etc. are hopefully behind us. It’s a characterful flat we’ve moved into: an old schoolhouse from the 1850s that’s been converted into flats. The nearby high street is full of cheap waistband-stretching eateries, and the centre of London is only a short bus- or tube-ride away. With the advent of Facebook, photos of the place will likely surface on Nazma’s page before they make an appearance here, so go check it out.

please shower off after swimming

Lloyd — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:48:23 +0000

We’re now 3 weeks into our potentially years-long London experience; Nazma has started her tepid wade back into the workforce; and I’m on the computer for what feels like 26 hours a day—shirtless and deadbeat, some would say. I would protest, however, that I’m actually neck-deep in rental listings, looking for that perfect (or at least tolerable) flat. Haven’t even stopped to blog, until now.

Several points to make this search interesting:

We are looking for places close to Nazma’s office in the City. That means a half-hour commute max, but still close enough to the action that if we want to pop out, there’s a decent high-street close by, or at least a very short ride to said action.
Given the recent spree of knife-related crime in London, we’d prefer to be not stabbed coming out of our building. Avoiding flaming jeeps is another priority, so proximity to airports is out. A “safe” neighbourhood it is, then.
Short of challenging a Aussie backpacker-cum-waiter to a fight-to-the-death, the entire market for flats below £250/week is off-limits. Yes, that’s CAD$530 a week. As such, we’ve set ourselves an upper limit of £350/week for a 2-bedroom flat, or £300/week for a 1-bed.
There’s a little thing here in the UK called council tax, which is like property tax, except that the tenant pays it. That means coughing up an extra £800-1600 a year. That’s some pricey garbage removal.
Distances in England are tiny; this was something I first noticed when reading The Lord of the Rings and thinking that Frodo and crew didn’t really have to travel very far to get into all kinds of hobbity trouble. That and you can practically see Sauron’s big eye from Minas Tirith. Anyway, all this to say that prices can change drastically if you walk even 5 mins over to the next street. A “desirable” road can be £50 more than the same flat a block over. Which is great but it makes second-guessing-yourself by far the greatest hurdle.
Trolling the photoless by-owner classifieds then is pretty uninformative and maddening. The greatest tool (and worst temptation) then, is to retain an estate agent: like realtors that only deal with rentals. It seems like they get access to the nicer properties, short of you getting lucky with the classifieds. But what a dirty experience: they’re usually males between 18 and 22, smooth-and-fast-talking to the point of incoherence, and generally the slimiest folks you’ll meet. Follow one in his wide-pinstriped suit and you’ll run into his trail of insincerity like a lightcycle from Tron.
Despite this, we’ve already done so, but luckily they’re so flaky themselves that you can shake them easily. For instance, we went out for a viewing with one, from a firm that’s apparently been under attack in the news for inflating prices and pocketing the excess. Nice start. Some beautiful places he showed us, though. We looked through 4 places and booked another round of viewings with him, but we still played it pretty cool. He should have smelled money, but sure enough, we haven’t heard from him since. No follow-up, no promised appointment. Must have hooked bigger, easier fish: he’s passed on our details to some other dude, who booked me for a showing today only to phone this morning and change it to next week.

In the meantime, there are apparently as many estate agencies as there are properties in London. I’ve been trying to sift through a shortlist of 6 agencies and their listings and I’ve discovered another 6 that I’ll have to contact. There’s no question we’re definitely spoiled for choice; just a lot of sharks circling us as we look for that one pearl in the open sea that is the London rentals market.

movez-vous, s’il vous plaît

Lloyd — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 10:41:45 +0000

The movers have come and gone, the house is (more or less) empty, and we’re living out of our suitcases from now till Thursday. Too busy wrapping up all the loose ends of a decadent, materialistic Western life to blog about our wonderful time in minimalist-by-circumstance Cuba. Once the dust settles, stories will spill forth of hustlers, antiquated autos, and the sharpest barber/Castro-critic in the West.

Having said this, leave it to us to discover Facebook in the middle of packing. It’s a near-certainty now: that with our attentions diverted to unearthing long-lost elementary-school chums, we will arrive in London having forgotten to pack underpants.

week 1/0 (L/N)

Lloyd — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:55:59 +0000

For this move to succeed I’ll have to be a bit more effective and efficient in my packing. My first week: I think I’ve managed 2 boxes. The problem is detritus. Actually, the problem is my borderline-obsessive/compulsive need to organise every little item, and worse, to think about it carefully before doing so. So if I find a fruit-leather, or a rubber band, or (heaven forbid) printed material, I’ll have to maunder/ponder/peruse before finally sorting it into the appropriate pile. Give me a pile of paper clips, figure 5 minutes/clip, and it quickly adds up to a week of absolute unproductivity. Sweet. So passed my first week.

For Nazma, though, the adventure into (temporary) unemployment begins today, with a carefully deployed going-away-do downtown. How productive will we be now, given my penchant for sleeping-in, feeding off of her penchant for same, in a vicious cycle of comfyness?

Now the excitement begins!

i guess they have to ask

Lloyd — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:24:28 +0000

Filling out our visa apps for the UK and just had to laugh at this. Err, if I said “yes”, can I still come in? Pretty please?

thankyougoodbye

Lloyd — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 03:29:57 +0000

Haha I’m actually quite sad now that my time at Ballard is over. Almost pathetically so. Today my last day there flew by in a eyeblink with the packing, the wrap-up, the goodbyes. 6pm rolled around, my cardboard box was still only half full, and the building had already begun to feel foreign. A passing trick.

People ask if I’m excited, presumably because I appear to be the total opposite. I really am, but I probably won’t be visibly hopping till the plane is taxiing down the runway.

In any case, here’s a parting shot: Grumbles, my soon-to-be-departed, parked next to an Al Gore future.

unemployment-a-go-go

Lloyd — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 06:33:52 +0000

That’s it: my first grown-up job is a thing of the past, and I’m off to roads paved either with fulfillment or wretched unemployment. Growing up the son of immigrant parents, you almost expect that moving to an entirely new country and context should be easy: I mean, your parents managed to do it, after all. Having to do it yourself though, fat and spoiled from good clean Western living, that’s when you realise just how daunting it can be. A million things to do now. Someone asked me today what’s on the to-do list. First off, make a to-do list.

alea jacta est

Lloyd — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 01:58:35 +0000

Crossing the Rubicon, figuratively or even when Caesar did it for real, never took as much deliberation as we two fools have. Maybe a fait accompli for everyone we’ve talked to about this, but we’ve finally decided to move to the UK. Nazma accepted the offer from her “smallish” concern, and now we have 3 months of confession, wrap-up, and final laughter before taking the plunge. Tentative plan: leave work by early March, gone by early April for a couple of months on the road, then settle in central London in mid-to-late June.

This is likely all old news by now, since you are probably reading this sometime in early March. No way we’re letting the cat out of the bag before we let our workplaces know. Nothing like a pink slip to throw a wrench in the works (or, funnily enough, move up our departure).

pimps and cure-alls

Lloyd — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 01:41:07 +0000

Nazma had her first interview with an overseas firm the other day: a “smallish” concern from London (i.e. only 500 lawyers). While they seemed a bit reserved at first, the initial reports from the recruiter in the week since has been pretty favourable. He even suspects a forthcoming offer, but my experience with recruiters, corporate pimps and the like, demands a curb in enthusiasm. I’ve seen that carrot-on-a-stick before; until money’s on the table, it doesn’t matter what they say. Anyhow, two more interviews in the coming weeks: things seem to be lining themselves up with little effort on our part and we’re (generally) happy about that. Now there’s just the part about making up our minds whether we even want to go or not… deciding whether a place like London really is the panacean Land of Opportunity we’re feebly hoping for.

derailed by prodigious body-hair

Lloyd — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 02:37:38 +0000

Second post and I’m already going off-topic. Back in October we went to see an excellent outfit called Ladytron, who had all the shag-cut electroclash derelicts and gold-lederhosened tarty-tarts working the Commodore Ballroom floor-springs, while we rather self-consciously nodded our heads to the beat until Nazma slinked off because her feet were hurting. Don’t let our physical passivity fool you: it really was a fantastic show. We were just feeling really old next to the bouncing cellphone-camera-snapping scenesters with their supertight jeans. What does this have to do with shining futures abroad? Not much, but I’ll try to draw a connection.

Once in a while, a moment will just click, and all of a sudden you wake up and realise where you are. Sound stupid? We wade through the haze of the everyday wake-work-eat-sleep routine here on autopilot most of the time, so I mean: that sometimes, something happens and you snap out of it. It doesn’t take much: something as mundane as everything else, just in a different cast than the rest of the monotone.

For me, the moment came when the big beer-sodden bastard beside us starting flailing his elbows at a particularly punchy song. As we tried to avoid broken noses, the strobes caught his arm hair like little black icicles against the brilliant backdrop of bass and bobbing heads and everything just froze. And ridiculous as it sounds, the sight of the thug’s thorny simian arms haloed against the strobe, every one of them distinct and deadly, like those vaguely Celtic-looking pointy-knot designs on t-shirts from Surrey, shook me from wherever I’d been: a discontinuity, and my head was in a different place from before.

Now, “buddy’s got a lot of body hair” isn’t exactly the sort of epiphany that inspires people to great deeds, and it certainly didn’t cause me to do anything more than shift over a foot to the right. But there’s a strange clarity in that instant when your inner sight suddenly expands, and you see all the possibilities and the manifold effects and consequences. Like, for instance, pulling up stakes and leaving promising careers and an increasingly resigned but dangerously comfortable existence. Everywhere we wanted to head, what it all meant, and what it would irrevocably do to us, crystallised in that instant.

What did I learn? Not much: the synths crested and pulled me back to the music and the moment leapt on, like gold-leggings on a sprung dancefloor. But I’d begun recently to believe and fear that the quotidian haze had utterly eroded my ability to process with that kind of lucidity, and Arm-Hair, with his muttonchopped appendages, had given me a strobe-light shot of hope: that I haven’t completely lost it.

Despite how ludicrous this post has turned out to be.