Happy days are here again...we hope

Summer has finally come to London. After an insanely long time away from both London and hints of summer weather (OK, the away from London bit was 2 months. The away from summer was almost 2 years), it's great to be back and warm once again. I've been working on my accidental tan lines, with arms that are getting a nice healthy colour again (no, not brown, I'm not sunning myself, but it's not so bad that I turn blue under UV light anymore either) and I've discovered that gladiator sandals, whilst cool fashion-wise, do not do wonders for your feet when you wear them in the sun. I have patches of colour on my feet, exagerated by the stripes of white where the straps normally go. The trees are leafy, the old flabby men are shirtless, and the tube is sweltering. All if well in the world.

There has been a rash of summer flat hunting happening too, while we can see how much light it is possible to get into a London building and before we have to worry about getting frostbite through using our temperamental shower in cold weather again. we thought we'd found a place a couple of weeks back, put down a deposit on it and everything. It was probably more excitng for me than for my change-averse flatmate, who had been showering at the gym every weekday and so avoiding the worst of the problem. Joining a gym is an expensive solution to the problem, but it seems that renting a new flat might turn out to be a more expensive one! The place we put the deposit on was ours for a day only. Due to the ins and outs of the dodgy estate agent system that seems to operate here, the agent was able to accept a higher offer on what we had already started thinking of as our flat. We're not enirely distraught by this though, since the weekend after that we found an even better flat that is literally up the road from where we live now.The move ought to be fairly painless and this one has been ours in principle if not fact for an entire week now. We even have an assurance that we basically have dibs, and that no higher offers will be accepted before we have a chance to come back to them. Not that we can go higher or anything, since this is already a massive stretch for me to cover right now. But it has a garden, it has a lovely open-plan living area and, most importantly, it has a fully functional, wonderful shower. The girls at work are upset though, since they seem to be under the impression that I lead the most exciting life with all the drama that goes on in and around this building.

That has led me to look back at the various incidents...There was the stolen car that was ploughed into the tree across the road. Th fight that reeled through the street. The strange piano-playing downstairs neighbours, who could not possibly have gotten a piano into their flat. The adventures with the power and gas company caused by the landlord. The Irish handyman who turns up to make his repairs and demands food. The Polish boyfriend of someone a few doors up who took it into his head to stand outside her building and call her name for 3 hours (that girl is a seriously good sleeper). The entire day of police activity in one of the buildings across the road. The randomness of water disconnection. All in all, it's been an eventful couple of years here, and I've enjoyed it. But it's time to move on, and to have a room where I can't touch two opposing walls at the same time if I stretch really hard, where the toilet doesn't leak onto the carpeted bathroom floor, where the building doesn't feel like it's in imminent danger of collapse every time a bus stops on the speed bump outside. Maybe even where there is a single surface that is trule horizontal. But we aren't there yet. Fingers crossed that Monday sees us getting a phone call to tell us that our references are acceptable and that we should come down to sign the contract. Until then, we're holding our breath and making the most of what the summer has to offer us while it's here.