There is a cat burglar in our neighbourhood. Last night, he broke into our flat. Fortunately, Joanne was able to scare him out of our house.

I would guess that we live in a house that was built around 1920 or so. It was built using that marvel of British engineering, the wooden sash window. Ninety years on, a smooth operating precise fitting unit it is not. The ones that haven’t been painted shut can be persuaded to open all of about eight inches if correctly wobbled in their frames. They are also devoid of that other marvel of engineering the screen.

The windows have been open most of the time including at night as we have been in the midst of a heat wave. What that means is that it is about the same temperature as we are used to in Toronto, just not quite as humid.

This morning, Jo informed me that in the middle of the night she had heard the blinds rattling and for some reason, knew what was happening. I heard nothing of the sort and had no problem sleeping through the entire incident. Joanne, however, sprang into action.

She fearlessly leapt from bed, ready to employ her perfect karate if required. She went in to our front room to find the neighbour’s black cat standing on our dining room table. I can only imagine the stand off between the two. The cat knew he had been caught red-pawed and immediately beat a hasty retreat.

I can draw the following conclusions from this incident:
1) We are sleeping with the windows shut.
2) We will not be unlocking the cat flap on our door.
3) I am no longer head of security.
4) Those police on horse back do little to deter a first-story feline.

Welcome home! It seems that the hard work has been done and we are now in our flat. It feels great to be able to unpack the suitcases and get organized and settled.

Our flat is part of a larger house with three other flats in it. The house in West Hampstead in the North West of London. Everyone here tells us that it is a good neighbourhood. Not chosen, just ended up here by luck.

As is often said, location is everything. We appear to have lucked out where that is concerned. The Tube is a 3 minute walk from our door. The main road (or High Street in the vernacular of the locals) has restaurants, cafes, wine bars, bakeries, delis, a used bookshop and a bookie. Everything that we need. There is even a Yamaha dealer, should the need arise.

The main road is West End Lane which, if you carry on south from us, turns into Abbey Road. At number 3, the Beatles recorded the album of the same name. We walked down to look at that piece of musical history, but there isn't much to see. We also managed to resist the temptation to recreate the album cover, which was photographed right outside the studio.

I have taken to calling our little place our pied a terre. As you can see on the left, we have a little patio. You would be free to sit on the bench at your own peril because it's as rotten as an Italian football match. As we found it, there was on old movie poster on one of the walls that featured either James Cagney or Sean Connery. It had been out there a while and it was hard to tell.

The garden retreat had not suffered from the heavy hand of anyone's maintenance for some time. Until now. We have been gleefully hacking and slashing back the growth so you can at least get to the door without feeling like Indiana Jones. It gets sun for most of the day and is a little brighter now that it is less overgrown.

Once inside, I think that the most charitable description is an economical use of space. This is not a big apartment, but then we had expected this is what we would find. The overall size seems to be about 400 sq.ft. according to my lazer measuring vision. The ceilings are high though. They are high enough that I get the sense that we live in a tube. We might almost have more room if we could lay the flat on it's side.

Despite being small, it is clean and furnished. Furniture! Included for free! O.K. not the best furniture. Or the most furniture. But everything is serviceable and the little love seat is somewhat better now that it has been shored up with bits of cardboard and styrofoam that we found.

The kitchen is a galley style but it has everything that one would need including what they call a fan oven. The fan oven is hotter than the fires of hades. It has to be set 30° lower than a regular oven. The kitchen even has a washing machine. Not bad at all.

If I do say so myself, we have gotten ourselves set up quite well here in England. Nice quiet neighbourhood and the police even patrol on horseback. (Seriously - I'll try to get a pic.) Satisfactory flat with everything we need. It's good to be home again!

Monday the 10^th of July, it rained in Toronto. It rained a lot, apparently. Enough that my brother received a call from the storage facility saying that a 5 inch drain pipe had split and some units had gotten wet. Ours being one of them. **sigh**

The initial report that we had was an e-mail from my dad titled "Soggy Self Storage". I can assure you, if you harbour any doubt, that is not the title you want on an e-mail. The e-mail only contained the little that was known at the time. . Added to the stress of having moved countries and been unable to open a bank account, I for one did not want to envision my sofa and chairs floating away like gum wrappers in the gutter.

As it worked out, only a couple of items were wet and the damage was minimal. It could have easily been a lot worse and I sympathize with people who did have their units flooded. Things that are stored must, for that reason, have some value, either financial or sentimental. If nothing else, it creates a horrible mess to clean up and probably much worse.

I am left wondering at the end of this about the true value of possessions. The weight of stuff we brought with us would win an Olympic bronze in the Clean-and-Jerk, if you could lift all at once. I carefully packed, boxed stacked and shelved everything else that we own. I have referred to the packing of our storage unit as the capitalist jigsaw puzzle. Monthly I render unto storage man that which is storage man’s. Despite all of my efforts, possessions, can ever be maintenance free.

People have asked about all of our stuff when we told them of this move. I tell them; sold the car, sold the house, heck, sold the rollerblades. Many people’s reaction is that it must be cleansing. And they’re right to the extent that everything is gone. Those items that remain still apply the same amount of pressure as any other time that I owned them. Maintenance is the real price you pay for your possessions.

The other thing that is blatantly obvious, yet again, is the value of support of family. One reason that everything was so carefully stored was so other people would not have to deal with our stuff or the problems that having stuff creates. My parents and brother have spent several days and a summer Saturday chasing my saturated belongings around. There is no price that can be put on that. Thanks Mum, Dad, Steve and Wendy.

So here we are, housed, fed, clean and jet lagged. With the exception of the jet-lag, the necessities of life were covered. This left quite a bit of time to explore our neighbourhood, our new city and our situation. Perhaps a bit too much time.

Our first Sunday in London, we acted like the gringo tourists and headed for Trafalgar Square. We had seen on the news that there was a Dutch inventor was demonstrating his self propelled walking machines. He had designed has creations on either a Commodore 64 or Atari 2000 computer and constructed them out of the cheapest material available, namely PVC conduit. They had been tested against each other with the successful ideas being transplanted to improve less successful. He referred to it as "evolution". I would call it trial-and-error engineering. Very complex and clever.

There is a scene in the second Austin Powers movie in which Mike Myers as the eponymous hero gets a golf cart stuck in a corridor while attempting a "K" turn. He can go about two inches forward and backward, colliding with the wall each time. Bear this in mind as I tell you about our first week in London.

We had arrived with a little money to get us started. It had been brought over in the form of two bank drafts drawn on a British bank. It seemed to be a reasonable way to transport our funds. The thinking being that an account could be opened close to us at any High Street Bank.

It turns out that you only need two things to open a bank account according to the Bank of England rules. 1) Proof of Identification. Valid passport or driving licence is entirely sufficient.
2) Proof of Residence in England. Utility bill, bank statement mailed to your home address.

Chicken? Egg? We may never know which came first. Not important. Address? Bank account? Well this is a little less theoretical and more thorny practical problem. As you can plainly discern, without the bank account there would be no residence with which to open a bank account. The mind does not necessarily boggle, but it goes round and around. A lot.

We had rented our short-stay accommodation for two weeks and it was a very acceptable temporary living arrangement. Key word = temporary. There did not appear to be a solution. The nice people in the bank were very sympathetic. "You understand, Mr and Mrs Wingate, we must be wary of people trying to launder money." I'd be lucky if I could launder a sock at that point.

This stumbling block - no, brick wall - left Joanne and I very frustrated. We also had, as I said, quite a bit of free time. In that free time we walked around from bank to bank trying to open an account with no luck. We were working on the old try-to-catch-them-napping theory. The rest of our plentiful free time we discussed our situation and tried to find a solution. Those were some very circular conversations.

When you have something that is weighing on you it's bad enough. When you have LOTS of time to sit around and think about the problem, the stress increases logarithmically. There's no apparent solution so you and the problem just sit around staring at each other. Sometimes all night long. Not fun.

After a week of this we decided the solution was to just go and get what you would call an apartment. Here it is called a flat. If you live in Oakville, what we got is called a closet. We walked into a letting agent on the High Street near where we were staying and told them we were new in town and needed to rent a place to live.

A letting agent is like a real estate agent, but they concentrate on rental accommodation. London has more letting agent's offices than Hamilton has Tim Hortons. Must be a lucrative business.

The salesman makes his commission by selling. He took us around to a couple of flats and we decided to rent the one we could afford. After much negotiation (read whinging on our part), we had a deal. Then came the action that anyone takes in a jam. Out came the trusty credit card and we charged our way to a solution.

The fine folks at the bank took our tennancy agreement as proof of residence. Somewhat hesitantly, but again, my negotiation skills saved the day. Bank account opened, money deposited, heroes relieved.

Hello!
We are back online and have settled in a flat in North West London. At last! Move-in date was the 8th of July and the stability of having permanent place to is an immense relief. As the next few days go by I will colour in that picture.

However, for now, I give you the First Exciting Thing to happen.

Monday the 27thwas gray and rainy. This is what I had expected of London weather. It was a break from 32°C, sunny, humid weather. Perhaps it was the Toronto weather that I brought with me making my suitcase so heavy.

I maintain the following to be true. Our first Monday in London was my first celebrity sighting. Oh yes. Now, other than Liza Frommer from City TV who can hardly be called a celebrity, I have never made a celebrity sighting. That is, until our first English Monday. As I walked from our digs down to the high street, I passed what we would call a private school. It was about half past three, the parents were picking up their seeds and I walked right past Noel Gallagher from Oasis. Dead sure. I checked on their website and Oasis finished a tour in May of ’06. And according to the fan chat boards, Mr Gallagher, or Noel as I call him lives in Marylebone, a neighbourhood close to the school. Hey! Pretty cool, no? Not that we had anything that you would call an interaction. And despite saying that I am dead sure it was him, what are the chances for real? But I maintain I saw Noel Gallagher from Oasis.

I was there. You weren’t.

Hello everyone!

Just a quick update. We are moved into our London flat.
For now, we will not have access to the internet on a regular basis until next week.

More updates will be posted next week once we are up and running again.

Watch this space for the further adventures of....

Jo & Martin.

By looking at the post code for a place in London, you can tell approximately where it is located in the city. For instance, EC indicates East Central, SE tells you that area is located in the South East portion of the city.
We arrived at the Belsize Park tube station at 7:30 Saturday morning. Belsize Park’s post code is NW3, so it is in the North West of London.

Belsize Park is a leafy, somewhat upscale neighbourhood that is made up of large mansion style row houses. My guess would be that they date from the late 1800’s, but I could be off by a few decades. Think Mount Pleasant and Eglinton in Toronto, but older.

Right across from the Belsize Park tube station is the wonderful, non-historical Bagel Stop café. Wonderful because we were finally able to build a fort out of our mountain of luggage, sit down and decompress. After waiting until they opened a half hour later, Jo and I fortified ourselves with toasted bagels and strong coffee. It was a relief to sit down and not have to lift luggage for a few minutes.

After eating and collecting the keys for our short-stay accommodations, we walked down Belsize Avenue, cases in tow, to our flat. The flat is located in a converted mansion. What the English call a mansion block. Essentially a formerly grand house cut up into lots of little flats. Think Parkdale.

I ran in, unlocked the door and came back out to the sidewalk. “Is it horrible?” Joanne asked.

At that moment, I could see by her face that if I had said yes, she would have likely dropped everything, turned around and gone back to Canada. Fortunately, it was ok. Small, Spartan and clean. With a contained kitchen and bathroom. Heaven! We now had a start on getting settled.

The test came the next day when we had to navigate the Tube with all of the stuff that we brought. We ended up on the train away from the airport, the Gatwick Express, at half-past five in the blessed AM. At that point, the fun was just beginning. Dragging our cases through the airport was just the warm-up. After all, it’s an airport. People are supposed to arrive there with suitcases of varying sizes and portability. Here there’s a ramp, over there an escalator, once in a while a lift. All intended to aid the movement of the weary traveller.

The Tube, well there’s a different kettle of fish. For those taking notes, the Tube is also called the Underground. Cleverly enough, because that is where it is located. The whole system is rather old. The best method devised at the time to get people in and out of it was built was lots and lots of stairs. If you recall from just paragraphs before, we were moving the equivalent of the average-sized dead body. A poor combination to be sure.

Last year, in July there were terrorist bombs detonated in the London Underground. This has led to, as you might imagine, a heightened sense of awareness in and around all of the transit systems in London. There are no litter bins anywhere. There are constant announcements over the public address system that bags left unattended would be subject to seizure and destruction. I imagine a dozen transit workers gathered around a small pit on a Friday afternoon exploding my seized bag.

This left us with two options: first, take one heavy bag in one hand and an even heavier bag in the other hand and walk either up or down a set of Victorian era stairs. Second, try to get four bags down the stairs using two people and never leave any of them unattended. Kind of like the brain-teaser with the fox, the chicken and the bag of grain that you have to get across the river in a boat one at a time.

We finally ditched option one. It proved almost instantly too frustrating to carry on that way. We took to taking cases up or down flights of stairs part way one piece at a time. Never out of sight, but occasionally out of reach for a few seconds. If I was to pick a sound track, the music from Benny Hill would have been fitting.

Part way through, there had been enough lugging of cases that had one of them been seized for destruction, my protests would have been meek at best. Add in to all this, our arrival at the Embankment station to find the construction blocking our access to the platform we needed. The less than entirely helpful workers pointed out where we could get the train we needed. Back down the stairs.

By this time, we had gotten off of an overnight flight, hustled onto the express train and had been humping 12 stone of luggage up and down stairs. Add to, or perhaps more correctly subtract from, this situation that we had not had anything to eat since the airplane dinner night before. When we finally arrived at our end destination, Belsize Park tube station, we were hot, tired, hungry and cranky. We were also relieved, as we were ready to start getting settled in our new home.

There is a line in any Lonely Planet book that warns you to lay out your clothes before you leave, look at them and then put half of them away again. For anyone travelling and lifting their own bags, this is sage advice. While it may seem unnecessarily minimalist, a week or two of slugging a portly bag is apt to convert you.

In light of that it must be remembered that we are not holiday makers coming for a week or two. We had spent a considerable amount of time trying to devise the least amount of clothes for the move. We tried to carry as little as possible and make it as versatile as possible. In a way that is what we accomplished, but still ended up taking rather a lot of stuff. In all, seventy-six kilos of stuff. If you are filling out your scorecard, that is 167 pounds of clothing. I foresee a new requirement for those intrepid enough to visit. They will be required to mule some of our excess stuff back to Canada.

For a moment, put eighty-five pounds in perspective. That is like dragging around a fourth-grader. Not that I advocate dragging any school children about. Bear in mind also that it wasn’t just a quick lift in the airport and a push in the cart. We had to get these boulders across London when we got there.

We checked in with the nice people at MyTravel airways and found out what we suspected. Our cases were overweight. Way overweight. Way, way overweight. In all, we were sixteen kilos over the limit! At a penalty of $16.00 per kilo, that worked out to a hefty tariff. The counterman was good enough to reduce the penalty to $160.00. We do not travel light it seems. On the other hand, in the realm of moving, we do move light.

Despite having to labour under the added bulk of our belongings, the plane managed to groan into the air. Our flight was perhaps the smoothest one that I have ever been on. There was what amounted to no turbulence. Really. None. Smooth as glass. Jo and I sat in first –class and enjoyed the nice meal, bar service and T.V. The upgrade to first-class was worth it in just the added legroom alone. There must have been a favourable wind because we arrived at 4:30am, which was about half an hour prior to schedule.

So, a little bleary-eyed and worse for wear we were on the ground in our new home. It is tempting to say “The adventure begins here”. But that would not be accurate in light of all the work that went into getting to where we were. It could be fair to say, however, that at this point, the heavy lifting begins. Watch this space and follow as we traverse The Capital.