Category: London Calling

We’re moving today, so of course the lift is out and there’s a heavy rain advisory for London and the South East.

The removers arrived roughly on time, which was a bit surprising given London traffic at the best of times, never mind the rain. Four guys, and two trucks, just narrow enough to fit into the parking courtyard at the ‘old place.’

I warned them in advance that the lift was broken, they didn’t seem too concerned. Nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

Two guys started in the kitchen (as you do, kitchens take forever) and two guys started downstairs, on closets (clothes are easy to pack and move, but they’re heavy).

The cats have been imprisoned in the ‘not-leaky’ bedroom (not a phrase you ever want to need, trust me) and Dawnise and I are sitting on the sofa that’s not being moved, trying to stay out of the way.

The Echo Show in the kitchen is steaming music. Dawnise asked Alexa to ‘play 80’s radio,’ and the mix has been appropriately 80’s-tactic. The guys doing the kitchen asked to turn it up and have been humming along. Tears for Fears giving way to REO Speedwagon segueing into Prince and the Revolution.

And sitting here on the sofa, feeling useless as people labor around us, we were stuck by how ridiculously long the outro of Purple Rain actually is. Like minutes. And just when you think it’s over, it’s not. And if you’re running on empty, like we are, it becomes hilarious. And it’s all you can do to not giggle maniacally.

And then, as if on queue, one of the movers popped in and said ‘in case it matters, there’s water coming in in the bedroom.’

Yes.

Yes there is.

The lease has been signed and counter-signed, the needed monies have been paid, we’re scheduled to get keys to the new apartment on Tuesday and the the removers have been booked for Wednesday.

So of course the lift in the building has gone out of service again this afternoon.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Everything about this has been more complicated than it needs be.

For example – for some reason, despite being in the UK where party-to-party bank transfers are de rigueur, Foxtons (the agency marketing and managing the apartment) preferred we pay the first months rent and deposit (typically 5 weeks of rent) by credit card.

The demand was slightly more than our available credit on our Amex, so I called Amex, who obligingly raised the limit. Then I used the Amex to pay Foxtons, and bank transferred the funds to Amex once the charge settled. I imagine Amex was happy to get a rather sizeable processing fee (from Foxtons), and I don’t object to the points.

In other news, we seem to have come to an almost reasonable outcome with our landlord. We’re moving out, and she’s waving the rent as of the date we requested to end our tenancy. We’re technically still on the lease over the required 60 day notice period, which I think is because she’s in a dispute with the block agent responsible for the roof, but I honestly don’t understand it. I know I have a release of my responsibility in writing from the landlords agent, so I’m reasonably confident I’m not being setup to be sucker-punched.

Of course the landlord (via her agency) and the building manger responsible for the roof are both pointing at each other as the party that should pay my moving costs. So it looks like if I want to collect that money, it’s going to involve hiring a solicitor and getting in the middle of their conflict. Which sounds like no fun at all.

The rational part of me knows that it’s not enough money to justify hiring legal representation and digging in for a fight that could easily take a year or more. Never mind figuring out how to actually collect if the judgement is in my favor.

The less rational part of me wants to hire the solicitor on a spoils-of-war basis – once I’ve recovered my losses and legal fees, the solicitor can keep whatever excess they recover. I suspect that their legal system won’t permit such shenanigans, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.

Either way, that’s clearly a fight best not started until we’ve seen the back of this place.

So Monday morning I go sit the driving theory test, Tuesday we collect keys and attend the inventory (pre-move-in check) of the apartment, Wednesday we move, and Thursday we…

Actually, I dunno what we do on Thursday. Ask me on Wednesday.

At the moment I’d just like to get a good nights sleep – something that hasn’t happened since it started raining in our bedroom two weeks ago.

Oh, and that storm that rained in our bedroom? It was the UK’s wettest day on record. If it hadn’t rained in the bedroom before – and again since – I might be tempted to say it was a fluke.

But fluke or no, over two weeks later, with multiple reports of new evidence of water in each successive rain, neither my landlord, their agent, or the building manager has presented a plan for fixing the roof.

So it’s time to take my leave of this circus and these monkeys, ’cause as mentioned above – I think the monkeys are about to get into a legal tussle, which is basically the more “civilized” version of throwing poo at each other.

I did the weekly hoovering today.

I felt more than a little ridiculous moving the catch basins while vacuuming the bedrooms.

Rearranging the proverbial deck chairs indeed.

It’s not rained steadily for a few days, so aside from the lingering smell of damp, the missing lights, and the bare bed frame, mattress propped along a wall, you might not notice anything amiss.

We looked at around a dozen places across two days, narrowed it to two that we thought we’d be happy living in, and have agreement in principle with the landlord of our first choice. If all goes to rapidly-evolving plan we’ll sign a lease by close of business Monday with a start date on or around the 19th. The new place is hundreds of yards, as the crow flies, from the old place. And because I’m not very smart, it too is on the top floor of a building and is reached by a lift.

What could go wrong?

On Friday we served formal notice to our current landlord by way of their agent that we wish to abruptly terminate our tenancy on a “mutually agreeable date” due to the ongoing and unresolved leak issues, and proposed 26 October. Under normal circumstance our lease would require sixty days notice, so it’s still possible that our landlord refuses to release us early and we end up paying for two more months.

I’m hopeful that she does the right thing and lets us out of the lease, but I’m not sure I’d put odds on it.

Similarly, we’re going to try to get some responsible party to pay for the move cost, but I’ve no plans to hold my breath. The landlord’s agent bluntly said to me at the landlord isn’t liable and pointed me at the block (building) manager, who I pointed out I have no legal relationship with. So I’ll push on the landlord, they’ll push on the building management, and I’ll end up paying for the move ’cause it won’t be worth chasing it in court.

That finger pointing likely foreshadows a rather protracted argument between our landlord and the building management over who’s fault this all is, and who pays to make it good. Since it involves the shared roof, that argument could easily expand to include all the other owners in the building.

It’s the sort of thing that might be educational to watch from a distance, but I’ve really no interest in being in the middle of it.

And while they’re arguing, water will be doing to this building what it does to buildings.  If they argue long enough, there will be no apartment left to argue about.

Dawnise is pretty sure that this problem was a result of both parties thinking it was the others’ responsibility. I suspect she’s right, and the fact that the bits of roof most affected are under terraces that “belong” to this apartment do seem to muddy the responsibility issue. I figure the building management will ultimately demand our landlord be responsible for taking up the decking on the terraces in advance of roof works.

The weather forecast for the next two weeks shows a few days of “proper rain.” Not as much as precipitated this crisis (see what I did there?) but enough that we’ll probably have more rain in the bedrooms.

So there’s that to look forward to.

I think I’ll miss the bells the most.

We had a Catholic Church within earshot of our apartment in Luxembourg (to be fair, it’s a small country, and there were lots of churches). Over our time there the sound of church bells became a welcome accompaniment to our Sunday brunch. I didn’t realize how much I missed the sound of bells with coffee and breakfast until we moved in here and we could hear the bells at St. Paul’s.

Or, maybe, what I’ll miss most will be the view. London is a pretty flat city. The City has a good cluster of tall towers, and they certainly dot the rest of the city landscape, but you don’t need to get very high to get great views. Our apartment on the 5th and 6th floors (that’s the 6th and 7th, if you start from “1” instead of “ground”) has fantastic views. Off the “back” side is St. Paul’s, the tip of the Shard and Walkie Talkie, the Courts, and the London Eye. Off the “front” side are things less famous, but no less interesting. And the sky is never still, even when it’s grey.

I might realize what I most miss are the local restaurants. Trade – the best pastrami for my money I’ve had outside the north east US. Monohon where the shop and the ramen reminded me of one of the tiny places I wandered into in Tokyo. Mola, our weekend breakfast staple. The kebab shop on Old Street – nothing special, just tasty tasty calories – and I didn’t even have to say “avec sauce samouraï.” I’d say I’d miss the pubs, but to be honest I haven’t been into one in months – I barely remember what they’re like. And sadly they’re often “much of a muchness,” so I imagine wherever we end up, there will be more.

In the end, it might end up being that I most miss living in easy carry distance to a whopping great Waitrose in the middle of the city. Living here you can easily understand why Brits – and Londoners in particular – were so far ahead of the US in embracing online grocery shopping and delivery. Most people don’t have a “big” grocery store near them – and why would you carry your shopping home in your hand, or on your shoulder, when someone will courier it to your door?

I know for sure I’ll miss our neighbors, who we got to know a bit before the pandemic and have stayed in touch with during. They’re smart, interesting, lovely people who have been a pleasure to spend time with.

It really doesn’t matter what I’ll miss most. I’ll miss all that. And more. And things I haven’t even realized I had noticed.

We looked at some flats today – one of them we both liked and will make an offer on. That made it real for me.

We’re actually going to have to move out of our apartment and not return because building management essentially can’t fix the roof.

The primary job of a building is to keep the outside out, and the inside in – and this (part of) this one is no longer fit for purpose.

It’s raining in my bedrooms, there are water stains creeping down walls…

And yet… I’ll miss it.

We generally like our apartment, but the lift in our building is utter crap. It’s slow at the best of times, and it’s been incredibly unreliable since we moved in. We’ve taken to keeping track of outages in our shared calendar, and have a steady stream of often increasingly irritated iMessages between us and the building manager.

Lift engineers – from two different firms – have been out countless times. Each time they’re reasonably prompt, and each time they leave the lift “works” again. Sometimes for hours, sometimes for days – it even went a few weeks between failures during the height of lockdown when no one was using it.

It’s possible all they’ve done is hit it with a hammer.

They keep saying “engineering.” I don’ think it means what they think it means.

Today it went out of service with Dawnise in it on her way out to the grocery store. Fortunately she was able to convince the doors to open. The lift had made it to the 5th floor – one whole floor down – and thought it was on 2.

The lift “engineer”‘s prognosis was “I think the drive is dead.” I’m no lift engineer, so I’m not sure what that means, but I expect it means this will be a prolonged outage while the they who are involved in these things argue about costs, try to source a second hand part, or bodge the clearly broken one back together, maybe find someone to replace it at a discount, and generally treat the whole thing as “someone else’s problem.”

In this case, I’m the someone else. And I’m well past sick of this problem.

A few months after we arrived we were watching a bit of standup comedy on “telly.” The comic, who’s name I forget, was a Canadian who’d lived in the UK for a decade or so. He summarized the situation as “nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”

When we were done laughing we looked at each-other and realized it was funny ’cause it was true – and since hearing it put that way, his punch line has become a regular in our daily conversation.

“Nothing in this country actually works, and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone.”

Try it. There’s a good chance it applies to whatever the country you live in, too.

I ‘ve been seeing familiar faces around town on my morning runs. Fellow expats from Luxembourg, friends from Seattle, even a friend from California I haven’t seen in decades. None of these people live here, or have any reason to be in London.

Of course, I’m not actually seeing people I know – just people who bear a passing resemblance. My subconscious is seeking the familiar – and when it can’t find it, it creates it. Patterns in the noise.

While part of me is looking for the familiar, mostly we’re drowning in it. We mark time with mundane tasks: the weekly grocery shop – elided this week in favor of delivery to resupply on some things heavier than we wanted to carry home. The alternating biweekly visits from the cleaning service and saturday morning “hoovering” of the apartment. Weekend visits to our neighborhood cafe for breakfast.

I expect Tim Hartford is right – I won’t likely remember many details about what I did during the pandemic.

From that perspective, work has been a welcome distraction. Between the changes brought on by the pandemic, and my moving onto a project predominantly based in Seattle, my work days have shifted to a “makers schedule.” Very different from the last two-and-a-half years. I have something of a habit of fixing foundational things that other people ignore, or work around, and there’s been plenty of opportunity for that of late. It’s not flashy or sexy, but making dozens of my colleagues more efficient and productive is, from my perspective, heavily leveraged.

After successfully feeding ourselves twice a day for just shy of six month, we’ve started occasionally letting someone else cook. We’ve Deliveroo‘ed an occasional meal from local(ish) restaurants. Adding Chinese and Indian to our rotation has been a welcome change, but I quite miss the “out” part of dining out.

In other “non-news,” there’s been no response yet from the DVLA regarding my license application. Despite it feeling like forever in fact it’s only been two weeks since I shipped them off my BRP and paperwork. The messaging on their website respectfully requests I leave them the hell alone until at least three weeks have passed. I email’d them anyway – and got the automated response I expected – “we’ll get to you in due course, now cool your heels and wait your turn.”

I hate waiting.