Finally on the move?

Perhaps it's time to announce that it looks like we're buying a flat. I have been a bit wary of saying anything to anyone, after our unsuccessful attempt to buy a flat in our block last year - but though we haven't exchanged contracts yet (hope to do so this week) it all seems to be going through smoothly this time around. Of course we keep touching wood every time we think or talk about it - actually we should probably be carrying little bits of wood around in our pockets, or like the Log Lady in Twin Peaks, remember her? Funny how we still cling to these superstitions, no matter how secularised we are in the rest of our lives...

Anyway perhaps I will say no more on the subject until it is signed and sealed. But we have decided to prepare ourselves for the putative move by starting to clear out our possessions - of which we have far too many anyway so it is a Good Thing To Do. In the past we used to move every few years, so would have a cathartic clear-out at every move, but we have been where we are now for about 7 and a half years so we have been acquiring without shedding.

Mainly books. We ran out of bookshelf space long ago, and a while back I adopted a one-in-one-out policy. We have now weeded a very large stack of novels and unread non-fiction books and yesterday I spent several hours putting them up for sale on Amazon. (If you're interested, you can view my storefront here). By the time we were leaving to go out for dinner at Abi's, I had sold one!! Very exciting, even if only for the grand sum of £1. Thing is, now I obsessively check my email to see if I have sold any more - none so far...

Today I have gone through my clothes and cupboards and filled three bin liners with stuff for the charity shop and another of rubbish. It's a start - and quite satisfying too.

Next stage is getting rid of the furniture that there just isn't room for in the new place. Anyone for a lectern??


This was an impulse buy from the junk shop on Brixton Hill ... last summer? It looked smaller on the street than it turned out to be once we got it into the flat! I think we thought we might one day live in a huge farmhouse with an enormous kitchen where we could use this for standing cookery books on... Also, even though its tracery is obviously rather damaged, it has a fantastic dedicatory plaque:

which announces that it was 'Presented to the Dulwich Road Wesleyan Mission Hall by the Trustees as a Memorial of the late Miss Craig's interest in and generosity towards the work of the Mission. 1898'. The antiquarians in us got the better of us! Who was this Miss Craig and how did her interest and generosity manifest itself? And how did the lectern come to the sad pass of sitting outside the junk shop on Brixton Hill...? At least we have admired and loved it while it has been with us... But alas, no room for extraneous lecterns in the new flat.

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This evening we have given ourselves 'repetitive form injury', as K so wittily put it just now, by filling out - in duplicate - visa forms for Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iran, where we are going in April!! Very exciting - though we have not had much time to think about it. It's an organised tour, so once the visa hassle is out of the way we don't actually have to do anything, except turn up at the airport at the right time - but the forms are a killer, especially since we hardly handwrite anything any more. Next thing to arrange is to be fingerprinted at the Iranian consulate - an arrangement insisted upon by Iran ever since the British government introduced compulsory fingerprinting for any Iranian citizens wishing to enter the UK. Ahhh, so great to live in a liberal democracy...

Sans Souci

Sans Souci, Potsdam, Berlin © MRO

I can't believe it's almost exactly a year ago that I took this picture - after finishing and submitting all the work on my book, I treated myself to a long weekend in Berlin to coincide with Glaire being there from North Carolina on a work trip. I stayed with Nadania in her lovely apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. While G met with colleagues at the Frei Universität during the day, I entertained myself - as is very easy to do in Berlin - and one day I took myself off to Potsdam, where I had never had time to go before. Since I was mentally still in book-mode, I was also interested to see the famous examples of Orientalist architecture, especially the Pump House which was built to draw water for the complex system which supplied the many gardens of the royal pleasure palace. The Pump House is built like a Mamluk mosque on the outside, and decorated on the inside like a miniature version of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Fascinating - though the guided tour was in German only, so I didn't learn as much as I could have!

By the time I walked up to Sans Souci - Frederick the Great of Prussia's own (much smaller) version of Versailles - it was a really hot and sunny day, and the park was absolutely full of sightseers. I skirted round the palace for a while, visiting all the interesting little garden pavilions, then found I was too late to visit the palace itself - tickets were sold out for the day. I was happy wandering around the outside and taking photos of the rather over-the-top Baroque decoration - I thought K would like these chaps. And now this is our calendar image for June - hopefully it will also bring us respite from our cares...

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Foremost among these is that, try as we might, we cannot get a mortgage on the flat we want to buy. It all got very complicated, and K spent weeks solidly on the phone to our mortgage advisor and the reps of different mortgage companies and finally the surveyor who came to assess the flat, all to no avail... The building is unmortgageable in the current financial climate. It turns out that the thickness of the walls is half what it should be for a mortgage lender to consider it suitable for resale. This makes it prone to condensation and damp - which certainly is a problem in these flats - though I still don't quite understand why that should mean lenders won't touch it. Apparently this kind of 'higher risk' flat used to be covered by the sub-prime mortgage market, which just doesn't exist any more, being as how it was the root cause of the global recession an' all. All the smaller sub-prime lenders have been bought up in the last year by bigger companies who are getting rid of all possible risk from their lending policies.

So this is the current climate that we have stumbled right into... Looking on the bright side, at least the problem does not lie with us. And our mortgage advisor is trying to reassure us that we have had a lucky escape - if we had managed to buy the flat, there is every chance that we couldn't sell it again. Which is in fact now the situation that all our flat-owning neighbours are going to find themselves in - it really doesn't bear thinking about. Apparently there are a number of 1930s-built properties like this in London, where the only way people can sell their flats is to cash buyers - and I wonder how many of those there are around in the current market?

So - everything was going smoothly and we had completely thought ourselves into the purchase and the move - and then this bombshell, just as I got back from Tunisia (about which more another day). The prospect of moving - and especially somewhere so nice and modernised as the flat we were going to be buying - makes you notice all the things you endure about where you actually live but which you can't do much about: the damp and mould in the bedroom; the mildewy shower curtain in the bathroom; a new floorboard starting to creak in the kitchen; the dodgy valves in the boiler that means the radiators come on when you run the hot water... And I really was looking forward to having a dishwasher...

The thing is, as soon as I was faced with the prospect of not being able to stay here - or rather not being able to put down roots here, as there is no urgent necessity to leave this flat - it made me realise quite how much this has come to be my home. Capital 'h' Home, in that deep emotional attachment kind of way. We've been here 6 and a half years now, so it's not surprising. It's not only the fact that as a maisonette it's like a little house, but it has all the advantages of being in a block of flats in terms of security, a shared garden for whose upkeep we have absolutely no responsibility but which we love to look down on and sit in, and above all the sense of community and the friendship of our neighbours. We're starting to realise that what we have here is very very rare, and now that we are casting an eye around at other things, we are quickly realising that for the same price we cannot get the same amount of space, nothing as nice architecturally or in terms of the arrangement of the rooms, and certainly nowhere with a ready-built community of friends on your doorstep.

We kind of feel that this is our moment to buy - since we have the momentum, and there is only so long the stamp duty holiday will last, since even though at the time the Tories claimed Labour had stolen their policy, it doesn't look like they're going to hold to it now they're in government... But I don't want to rush into anything, and I certainly have not let go of the simple, original plan of staying right where we are. Plan B is to keep a lazy eye on the market, and think about it in a more focused way when we get back from holiday in late June...

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And talking of the new coalition government... When I left for Tunisia, no-one knew what was going to happen - just that the Liberal Democrats had failed to pull the votes that everyone had predicted. Labour did surprisingly well - my Green votes in the local council election counted for nought as all 3 Labour councillors were re-elected, and Chuka Umunna got his parliamentary seat (I decided straight away that I could live with the latter - less happy about the former). K texted me while I was on a bus in Tunisia to tell me that Gordon Brown was resigning!! Which was exciting news, but then what?? Too complicated to convey in text messages... I got back to a Liberal Conservative government, a genuine coalition by all accounts, with Lib Dem MPs in cabinet positions, which no-one expected. It means that my speculative Lib Dem vote was not wasted, but more importantly, it seems like it might actually be a good government for the time we're in. It's a change anyway, and a new start. It's already been sorely tested, with the unfortunate scandal over poor David Laws (my personal theory is that right wing Tories are targeting the Lib Dem officers of the coalition) but we're definitely prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt...

Sundry frustrations

Mumbles Pier, March 2009 © KR

I haven't been posting the calendar pictures for a while, since they are all images I posted here at the time we took them - in February, the snow on Cromwell Road on my way to work; in March, the Crooked House in Windsor, where we had lunch on our anniversary day trip; in April, the gorgeous Modernist spiral stairwell at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea... But this month we have this beautiful photograph that K took of the run-down benches and ironwork on Mumbles Pier, when we went to Swansea en famille for my father's birthday last year.

The pier dates from 1898 and was originally 835ft long. It functioned mainly as a landing jetty for steamer excursions from Swansea to other towns on the Welsh or southern English coast, and my father talked of how he remembered coming down to meet his grandmother alighting here, when he was a child. There's something so elegant and picturesque about the flaking paintwork in this photograph, and I love the two jumping dolphins with entwined tails...

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I have been feeling rather frustrated recently. Turns out this mortgage business is fraught with frustration! People often say that buying a house is the most stressful thing you will do in your life - well, K and I have done some pretty stressful things (up there at the top of both lists would be finishing PhDs...) so that has not been our experience, just an initial flurry of excitement and activity and then long anti-climactic waiting... The first mortgage company we applied to took two weeks to get back to us! And to cut long and boring stories short, it is turning out that it is not so easy to find a mortgage company willing to lend for the purchase of flats in buildings taller than 4 or 5 storeys, such as ours. There is also a lingering distrust of the fact that it was originally built under the auspices of the London County Council. Basically, the companies think we live in a council estate, and without doing any valuations for themselves are not exactly turning us down, but not giving us generous terms. I think K and our mortgage advisor have finally cracked it between them, but I can't feel excited about it, because there is now a sense of that's all very well, until the next problem arises... So watch this space.

I have finally signed up for an iPhone - which I am quite excited about except for i) I was extremely frustrated (note recurring theme) at waiting in the flat all day on Friday (the last of my Fridays off) for DHL to deliver it, only to be told when I rang to check on it at 3.30 in the afternoon that it had never left the depot. I cycled over to Nine Elms to pick it up, and what was more frustrating is that I had been working in that area - at our store by Battersea Power Station - on two separate days earlier in the week, so could have gone and collected it, if I'd known they wouldn't bother to deliver it!!

and ii) it's taking aeons to have my number moved over from Vodafone, who in the meantime have been calling me every day trying to persuade me to sign up for other deals with them. Hence further frustration.

And I was frustrated with the annoying length of my hair - until I went and had a haircut on Friday!! This is actually a significant moment for me, as I literally cannot remember the last time I had my hair cut professionally - not during my adult life I don't think. My sister cuts my hair, and I cut hers. We've done that ever since we were children - although then we weren't supposed to... I have basically straight hair and I never do anything interesting with it, just have a few inches chopped off the bottom, and I have always resented the extortionate rates charged by hairdressers to do this for you - £40 seems to be an average price in London. And frankly, until now, I have never been able to afford this. Throughout my student days, it was literally a choice between food, or a haircut.

So, my regular coiffeuse having moved to the Outer Hebrides, I pondered whether or not I could hold out until mid-June when we go and visit her (tickets booked, Icelandic volcanic eruption allowing!!), decided I couldn't really, and then noticed for the first time a little hair salon on Brixton Hill that I must have walked past a hundred times... I enquired within about the cost of a hair cut and was told £15. It turned out to be £19 for some reason, but I decided this was entirely reasonable. They even gave me a cup of tea and a piece of cake! Somewhat oddly, there was an elderly Irish lady hanging around - not a customer, not an employee, but obviously known to the staff - who then proceeded to have a row with the lady who had cut my hair! I was hanging around at the counter drinking my tea and waiting to pay and not really knowing where to look... Still, I'll probably go back at some point - I need a long-term alternative to having my hair cut once a year in the Hebrides!

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I turned in my portfolio (for my promotion) on Wednesday last - writing and assembling it was a pretty painful experience (this is how fantastic I am etc etc). But at least now I can forget about the process for a while - the interview is at the end of this month. And on Saturday - the god Vulcan permitting - I am off to Tunisia!!!! So there will be a bit of radio silence here for a while... But then you're used to that...

Spring forward, fall back

The clocks went forward this morning, so it is officially - erm - British summertime, though the idea of summer still seems an incredibly long way off at this point. Lets be content to call it spring shall we? Though the weather can't seem to make up its mind about that either. Anyway, point is, it only feels like a few weeks ago that the clocks went back! This year is just zapping by in a blur of Ceramics Galleries work, without me really having the time to pay attention.

A springy picture to bring a smile to your face - daffodils are probably my favourite flowers, seen blooming brightly and happily away here in our lovely Sargadelos vase...

The last few weeks we have been piling stress on to the madness by moving judderingly yet unerringly forward with the business of getting a mortgage and buying a flat. Yikes. This is something that we have been talking about and nudging our way towards for a couple of years now - ever since K's parents kindly offered to give us the money we needed for a deposit, which was the only conceivable way we would ever be able to afford to do this - but our finances were in such a state that we needed to spend quite a long time sorting them out. It was hearing the phrase "to be brutally honest..." coming out of the mouth of the mortgage advisor some friends had put us in contact with.

Anyway, the long and short of it is, thanks to K's inheritance from his grandfather, we have just this week paid off the huge loan that we took out to pay off all our debts in one fell swoop - which actually means that for the first time in about 10 years, we are debt free. I know I should be whooping for joy about this, but I guess it hasn't really sunk in properly yet, probably because it is just a stepping stone on the way to being in more debt than either of us have possibly imagined... The sudden incentive to get things sorted out is because we have seen a flat in our block that some neighbours are selling and have decided to just go for it. We're going to try to buy it from them privately, so once we get the mortgage application in - hopefully in the next couple of weeks - we'll be at the delicate negotiating stage. So it might not work out, but we're going to try to do whatever we can to ensure it will!! Exciting - but also frankly terrifying.

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At the same time, I have been nominated for a promotion at work. Which I was very chuffed about - until the full reality of the bureaucratic process that this entails struck me. I have to go through something ominous-sounding called the Curatorial Review Board, which means putting together copies of all my publications (actually rather a lot - mostly done in my own time!) for consideration by the Board - this I have to do by Wednesday; a "portfolio", which I have a bit more time to think about (end April); and then an interview in front of a panel of 4, including an external assessor (end May). I know colleagues who have been through this process, and it is not much fun apparently. You pretty much have to sell yourself, which I am not much good at. Plus there isn't space in my brain to think about all this at the moment. But I am hoping a bit of relief comes in April from the full-on workload - most of my ceramics displays will have been installed by then - and I can start to gear myself up for it. I bloody well deserve a promotion after all!!

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A nice thing that's happened - I got a place on that Summer School in Tunisia that I applied for, so I will be going there for 10 days in mid-May. I knew that part of it was giving presentations, but I understood that these were on topics that you already knew something about or were in the process of researching. As it turns out, I have been selected to present on the "minor arts" - a phrase I absolutely hate, since it implies the primacy of painting as the most important art form - plus I don't really know what it means. Basically, it looks like I have to talk knowledgeably about the objects on display in museums I have never been to. We are supposed to do preparation for this - they have sent me some references to articles - but this is time and work I have not anticipated doing! The others on the course all seem to be academics in research institutions, who may have time on their hands to read articles - but some of us have crazy busy working lives! Still, I am very much looking forward to the trip - I think it's going to be amazing! I have to start making travel plans soon...

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Another nice thing that's happened - my sister has finally found herself a permanent job in North Uist!! This is not an easy thing to achieve, because the jobs are few and far between to being with, and mostly seasonal. But she has persevered, and just this week landed a job at the Hebridean Smokehouse - hurrah! She worked there over their crazy pre-Christmas period and said it was a bit of a nightmare, and it's busy at the moment because of the pre-Easter orders, but hopefully things will settle down soon. She was really worried that if she didn't find something soon, she wouldn't be able to stay up there. So this gives her some stability and a regular income, and because it is just mornings it means she can get on with her own editing and writing in the afternoons. Phew.

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And finally...

When we walk out of the front door of our block of flats on to Brixton Hill, we can see straight down into central London and have a clear view of the Gherkin, one of the most iconic buildings on the London skyline. A few months back, we noticed a new skyscraper had reared itself above the Brixton skyline... Officially known as the Strata Tower, this has already become known as "the Razor", because after "the Gherkin" all landmark buildings in London have to have a nickname. It's a new tower-block in Elephant and Castle, and sounds like an amazing building - with three huge wind turbines at its peak that give it its distinctive appearance, and will generate energy to power the building. You can read all about it here.

"The Razor" under construction, courtesy of zupermaus

Problem is, every time we see it, we can't help but think of the Tower of Mordor, and that a huge eye is going to appear above those wind turbines, and blink...