It's as if we'd never been away. Here I am again walking the streets of East London with two dogs. As I return home I am reassured by the sight of the high level white roof of an elderly vehicle. This time of course it's Billy instead of Scamper and the Land Rover instead of the VW Camper Van but still eerily similar.
I'll definitely miss the power showers in Field View (the new shower one could kindly describe as being like standing in a mist) and I will miss the quality of the local envirnoment. If you ignore our neighbours everything was very pretty and the local towns like Ware and Hertford were clean and smart. These streets have that inner city grime that displeases me although Billy is quite keen to find the occaisional discarded fast food wrapper.
There is life here though. I had great fun in the local 'international' supermarket. At any time of night and day I can now select from twenty different types of Haloumi cheese, three hundred brands of olives and a selection of fruits and vegetables delivered daily by NASA from some distant star system. The main target audience seems to be Turkish but they have evolved to keep with the times and most of the signs are in English and Polish.
I was put off when we arrived to move in by a group of hooded yoofs walking down the middle of the road. But now I am starting to notice some of the more positive groups in this melting pot - as I walk round the streets with B&P I am amused by the signs people have put up. "No Junk Mail and No God Squad" was a favourite and I made a mental note to commision a similar one. In the window of one brightly painted house was a notice explaining that Rosie's funeral would be in the church on Wednesday. This was a chance to say goodbye to someone who had lived in the area for eighty years - a remarkable thing in an area full of To Let signs and a population so obviously transient.
That includes us. Who knows where the next steps will take us and when?
Sunday 21 March 2010
Saturday 13 March 2010
A New Hope
When the call finally came I was on the tube and so I missed it. I saw the voicemail symbol as I emerged from the underground cathedral that is Canary Wharf Jubilee station but assumed that it was not important. Another headhunter perhaps or another delay - after all that very morning I had heard that the buyers' solicitors had requested yet more changes to the contract.
But that was it - we had exchanged contracts and the sorry nightmare that is Field View is all over.
It had been a nightmarish week. Every day brought no news or more ridiculous questions (solicitors have a real obsession about septic tanks). In the meantime we had to find somewhere to live, I had a really bad abcess and was not well on the antibiotics and J's arms were going from bad to worse. At work I have so many audit related deadlines for March 31st that I have needed to work late or join calls with the US from home (the Fed were somewhat bemused when I had to stop mid flow and explain that I had just been knocked off my chair by my labrador). We had to get the Landrover Discovery to the garage to move it and when the RAC turned on next door's land they came out shouting and every one of them has been wheelspinning and speeding on the drive.
But it was all over.
We sold Field View for less than we paid for it but it hasn't been all bad of course. We borrowed against the value of the house to pay some of the surrogacy costs - something we couldn't do in today's world. Plus we have had ridiculously low mortgage costs - an effective interest rate of 1.1% for a year now. So we are sanguine - it hasn't been a huge financial success but it did allow us to have Harriet that is more than enough.
To have more though we will need to work hard on saving so we are moving to a smaller house and must condense a three bedroom into two. To this end there is a skip in the driveway and we are beginning the process of ruthlessly eliminating that which we don't need. When we expected to move in November we had done a preliminary clearout so the house is not too bad but the garden sheds are another matter.
The garden furniture will stay because we do not expect to have a garden that can seat twenty people or so (something of an irony since in London there is far more chance of course that we will have twenty people round). Another feature of Field View that will be preserved is Mango.
Mango is fifteen years old and it makes no sense to take her back to London where she will be in constant conflict with the other cats. Soon we will be moving to the States and that is one journey that she will definitely not be making so it will be best if she stays here. The new owners are happy to have her (we had broached the subject back in October when they came for their second viewing). It will be the best for everyone.
These have been an eventful four years and we view the future with hope. Harriet's party two weeks ago was an amazing experience. There were seventy people there to celebrate this and it was great for both of us to see people so familiar and also some people we hadn't seen for years. It wasn't perfect because there were some important people who were not there. For those who could not come we will of course try to see you in Scotland or London soon. To those who would not come we have nothing further to say.
It's Mothering Sunday today which we will designate as 'Principal Care Giver Day' and that is for J. We are very ordinary in that respect - Harriet will always be special and different but viewed in a certain way she is from an old fashioned family unit that is part of an old fashioned wider family network. Those seventy people who were there at her party are in many ways just the tip of the iceberg - whoever puts her first will be part of our family.
Included in that number will be her siblings so we had better get saving hard. In the clearout I have found thirty pounds of tesco clubcard vouchers. Well, it's a start....
But that was it - we had exchanged contracts and the sorry nightmare that is Field View is all over.
It had been a nightmarish week. Every day brought no news or more ridiculous questions (solicitors have a real obsession about septic tanks). In the meantime we had to find somewhere to live, I had a really bad abcess and was not well on the antibiotics and J's arms were going from bad to worse. At work I have so many audit related deadlines for March 31st that I have needed to work late or join calls with the US from home (the Fed were somewhat bemused when I had to stop mid flow and explain that I had just been knocked off my chair by my labrador). We had to get the Landrover Discovery to the garage to move it and when the RAC turned on next door's land they came out shouting and every one of them has been wheelspinning and speeding on the drive.
But it was all over.
We sold Field View for less than we paid for it but it hasn't been all bad of course. We borrowed against the value of the house to pay some of the surrogacy costs - something we couldn't do in today's world. Plus we have had ridiculously low mortgage costs - an effective interest rate of 1.1% for a year now. So we are sanguine - it hasn't been a huge financial success but it did allow us to have Harriet that is more than enough.
To have more though we will need to work hard on saving so we are moving to a smaller house and must condense a three bedroom into two. To this end there is a skip in the driveway and we are beginning the process of ruthlessly eliminating that which we don't need. When we expected to move in November we had done a preliminary clearout so the house is not too bad but the garden sheds are another matter.
The garden furniture will stay because we do not expect to have a garden that can seat twenty people or so (something of an irony since in London there is far more chance of course that we will have twenty people round). Another feature of Field View that will be preserved is Mango.
Mango is fifteen years old and it makes no sense to take her back to London where she will be in constant conflict with the other cats. Soon we will be moving to the States and that is one journey that she will definitely not be making so it will be best if she stays here. The new owners are happy to have her (we had broached the subject back in October when they came for their second viewing). It will be the best for everyone.
These have been an eventful four years and we view the future with hope. Harriet's party two weeks ago was an amazing experience. There were seventy people there to celebrate this and it was great for both of us to see people so familiar and also some people we hadn't seen for years. It wasn't perfect because there were some important people who were not there. For those who could not come we will of course try to see you in Scotland or London soon. To those who would not come we have nothing further to say.
It's Mothering Sunday today which we will designate as 'Principal Care Giver Day' and that is for J. We are very ordinary in that respect - Harriet will always be special and different but viewed in a certain way she is from an old fashioned family unit that is part of an old fashioned wider family network. Those seventy people who were there at her party are in many ways just the tip of the iceberg - whoever puts her first will be part of our family.
Included in that number will be her siblings so we had better get saving hard. In the clearout I have found thirty pounds of tesco clubcard vouchers. Well, it's a start....
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