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.