First off, a brief night forgetting this stupid mess by going to celebrate London Restaurant Festival at Gauthier Soho, stuffing my face on this menu then staying with a friend. Sure, we stayed because technically we had no-where else to go after the hotel booking ended, but actually it just felt like the sort of thing we’d do if we were visiting someone in our normal life. A lovely evening.

And then today, we collected keys to our friend’s flat, where we’re going to get our breath back and start coordinating the massive job of getting the flat empty. It feels odd being here among someone else’s things, and we’re petrified that we’re jinxed and we’re going to make something terrible happen here too. We don’t know how long we’ll be here, if we’ll arrange to make this an official stay, but we just don’t have the spare brain space to start thinking about that. Let’s get the old place empty first.

I can’t even begin to describe what an overwhelming job it feels like right now – we went in and gawped for a moment, then gave up and came back to our new base. One for daylight tomorrow, I think.

Oooh, warm. Comfy. What shall I do today? Maybe I’ll wear my denim skirt and my blue top. Might grab my kit and go to the gym. But first, better get up and feed the cats before they start kicking off.
Oh.
Hang on.
No I won’t.

That slow realisation that we’re highly unlikely to have anything like that life any time soon is chilling.

I can’t begin to describe how happy I am that I decided to keep slightly in control of the evening. Normally, I’d be home on the last train, which would mean I’d not have got home until after all the excitement, but tonight it just felt right to call it a day at a sensible time and wobble my way home. We caught up with the events of the day then went to bed reasonably early, ready for another long day at work.

Shortly after midnight, we heard an almighty rumbling crash, enough to wake us up. I couldn’t work out if it was one of those electrical London storms, or if something more serious was going on. For all our house is very solid, it’s not soundproofed too well and you can hear so much sound carrying through from the flat above and from the stairwell.

“What was that? It’s a storm, or it’s an explosion”
“Don’t be silly. It’s someone having a fight”

And to be honest, that’s what it sounded like. Someone was obviously having a domestic and heaving things down the stairs. No idea what the initial noise way, but there was a clattering afterwards that sounded like it was carrying on. Suitcases… furniture… bodies… Someone having a domestic would explain the shouting we could just about make out, anyway.

I lay there for a few moments, trying to ignore the ongoing clatter, then gave up and went for a wander round the flat, a quick trip to the loo, then back to bed.

“Selfish gits. Don’t they know it’s a school night”

And then another big crash. What on earth were they playing at? There’s a time and a place for this kind of stuff, and once I’ve gone to bed is not one of them. We debated what we could do. It hardly seemed worth ringing it through to the police, yet if someone was kicking off that hard, neither of us fancied going into the main building to tell people to shut it.

S froze for a moment, trying to work out what all the shouting was about. More clattering, and then he stopped dead.

“I think they’re saying fire”

He pauses and listens some more.

“Yeah, it definitely sounds like fire.”

We’re still drowsy, but we’re slowly starting to get up when the crashing and banging starts again, this time at our front door. For a moment or two I sleepily wondered if the row has moved round to the carpark and our door, but this time there’s no mistaking it.

“FIRE, get out NOW”

The hammering at the door is so strong I think it’s going to give way, so we’re both screaming “coming” while trying to get dressed in the first things to hand. It’s amazingly difficult: all the adrenaline coursing through my body is making my hands shake, and I’m forgetting what order things should b put on, what I need to wear to be warm and decent.

“FIRE GET OUT HURRY UP”

I grab my keys, phone and purse, then look up to see S grabbing a cat carrier. It’s in bits, so I start trying to put it together but my brain has seized up. The clips just won’t work and I have to stop a couple of times to try and stop my hands shaking.

The other cat carrier was already constructed, and S walks in with Bob tubbed and ready to go. We start to look for Jay, who has hidden with all the commotion, but the voice at the door isn’t for having it.

“GET OUT NOW, THIS FIRE IS MASSIVE”

We give up, and rush out of the house with Bob, shutting the door behind us. It’s taken maybe a minute.

One of the first flats we visited was this place:

Didn’t look too bad at all from the outside, and once we got in we found the most beautiful newly renovated flat in the area. We’d set off to find something that would do, and instead found this:

Not a difficult decision.

We moved in over a couple of weeks, and moved our NorthHouse clobber out of storage. Sure, it wasn’t ours, but the landlord had done it up to sell it, so it was immaculate. How many rented flats have spa baths and brand new dish washers? Perfect. Exactly the place to start off down here.

Over the last two and a half years, we’ve slowly bedded into the community. We know a few of our neighbours, we know their quirks, but more importantly they know ours and we’re all rubbing along just fine. It’s possibly time to move on, but there’s no rush. After all, it’d have to be somewhere pretty special if we were to consider leaving here.

I’ve even been able to come up with a sort-of substitute for my NorthHouse garden. It’s not much, but it makes me happy.

Life, in fact, is pretty good.

What happened? My building was blown up.

Now that the mania of the first few days has passed, I’m going to try and capture what’s happening in one place. I think this will have a dual purpose – I’m partly trying to work out exactly what’s going on, but also, I’m in the very fortunate position of having a lot of concerned people wondering what the hell is going on and this is an easy way to get a lot of detail to a lot of people at once.

Thank goodness for loaned laptops and decent data tariffs, I was going stark raving bonkers with no web access.

By the way, I’m writing this after the fact, but I’m tweaking the post dates so the time line makes sense.

(Hey, we’d not heard anything but what’s new? It was worth a go)

So I nearly fell over when I saw that they’ve suspended all viewings while they sort out the EPC. The EPC which they saw right back at the beginning. What on earth are they playing at? And more importantly, why haven’t they decided this is worth mentioning to us?

I appreciate it’s hard out there, very hard, but TALK TO US.

The house has been on the market since December 2007 and I’m getting very very bored. I want to move on. We’ve identified the vague area we want to move to down here, we know what our budget is likely to be. Everything’s set except the small matter of the NorthHouse.

If you remember that far back, it ended up with me losing 30kg. I didn’t feel like I looked particularly different, but I did notice I had a lot more energy, and I was able to buy clothes from normal shops for the first time in years. My weight bounced back a little, but nothing particularly worrying. I was happy, and got on with my life.

Which is why I didn’t count on the goalposts shifting. For some reason, being smaller than I was is no longer enough. I’m not sure if it’s being down in London. where there are a lot more Beautiful People, or if it’s that my eyes have reset to something approaching normal, but where I am isn’t good enough any more. I’m still right at the top of the sizes in the shops – OK, it’s just that the shops I’m going now to have a considerably smaller spread of sizes, but that’s not the point.

We were at a friend’s BBQ this summer, and I was horrified when I saw the photographs. In my head, I remembered how much I’d lost and thought as myself as OKsized now. And yes, compared to how I was, I’m in great shape. But, I’m still lardy and oh, did those photos ram that home. BetterThanItWas isn’t good enough. Now I want RightWeightForHeight, which means losing 15kg.

We’ve been on holiday this week and eaten a hell of a lot of lard. That stops NOW. And it’s back to the gym to try and finally get myself running for more than 1km at a time. Wish me luck. I suspect this time is going to be hard.

So, here’s the trick to Mim and Minty’s Supermarket Fine Cheese:

1. Go to your local co-operative food supermarket, and buy their Truly Irresistible Parkham Farm Cheddar.  (although I do suspect it’s made by these people, because I’ve seen Tesco variants…)
2. DO NOT OPEN IT.  If you do, you’ll have some nice, but ultimately forgettable, plastic Cheddar.
3. Continue to ignore.
4. Wait until the useby date has expired.  A month is a good starting point.
5. Eat.  Enjoy the stingy taste. Perfect.

I’ve tried leaving it once I initially tasted it, and I just got slightly blue tasting supermarket cheese.  But leaving it sealed so it can finish off maturing, and it really is a thing of beauty.  WHY supermarkets don’t dare sell us things in this state in the first place, I do not know.

We now have about three blocks in the fridge at any one time, maturing away. Works perfectly.  And best of all, it’s cheap.

All _my_ links are pretty much OK, but the internet has moved on and all _their_ links have changed. HOW DARE THEY!

I realise from looking at my tag cloud that I’m spending more time whinging about being nerdy than I am talking about my life. But that’s about right, I guess. What’s my geek ratio? 3:1? More?

Looking at the land registry, nothing has been selling on our estate.  So would dropping the price make any difference?  Are we at the point where we’d let it go for pence just to get our deposit out of it so we can get on with our life?  If we could stick on to it as an investment we would, but in the meantime we’re living in a damp basement flat with a neighbour who’s a nice guy but likes sticking on dodgy RnB at weird hours of the morning.

In an attempt to make things feel more like home I’ve been making window boxes for our wall. It really helps.