Moving On, Moving In

I SIGNED a tenancy agreement this afternoon. So I'm now proud owner of one set of keys and three entry swipes. AND A ONE-BEDROOM FLAT! OK, I don't own it, the council do. But providing I behave myself I get lifetime tenure ~ and can even leave the tenancy in my will.

Someone was really upset with me this afternoon but I can't remember who... No they weren't. I just felt like they were. My brains turned to mud, from all this stress of NOT KNOWING HOW I WAS GOING TO MOVE. I was wondering about like a zombie, until this tenancy agreement got signed and I thought GOCHA! YOU CAN'T BACK OUT NOW!!

I actually got a really good flat. It's about as perfectly located as can be. About 12 mins from the main shops... And yet the area is restful and calm, and certainly does not feel like an inner city. I get my southerly satellite-dish-friendly aspect. But I don't get a bath. A bath, you see can be fixed; but you can't turn the block round if you're north-facing and you can't teleport it from nowheresville to somewhere decent. I'm literally 5 mins' walk from where I lived when I moved to London in the first place. The locality is very bourgeois indeed, if you just trot over the hill, you get to the "trendy" type of area, full of cafés and organic food shops, and little boutiques selling funky housewares and the unremarkable building to the left is a recording studio, where you pass minor rock stars on the street and EastEnders characters are drinking in the local pub... (Not like where I live now.)

So I invested £20 ($31.71) on a trolley for trundling gigantic oldfashioned television sets and heavy boxes. Because when I do move, it will probably be next to impossible getting a parking space right outside the flats and I'd far rather trundle than heave (getting old).

Then I rang my present landlord's Henchman "would you be able to move me..?" and he said YES. So I don't have to trawl through the shop windows for a Man & Van ~ who I'll be terrified of driving off in possession of all my electricals, or personal don't-want-to-keep-them-but-have-to-because-they're-legally-important-type papers...

I had to pick what colour paint I wanted. You could indicate up to four colours, so I went for three (from a very small and far too muted (for my taste) selection. The most garish thing they had was "lemon yellow" so I put in for two pots of that, plus one in some type of sludge blue... and I can't even remember what the last one was... might have been green. I gave magnolia and white a very wide berth indeed. Ideally I'd like my living room in duck egg blue, y'know greeny blue.

The illustrated shade is just a tad too light and about two shades further towards blue than I'd want. Hang on... Hey this is it! Turquoise. I had a thing about turquoise as a kid. My brother did too. Whenever somebody complimented his beautiful baby blue eyes he'd say, "They're not blue; they're turquoise!"Yes that shade there is precisely what I want. Nice and intense. And just the wrong side of "good taste" for my liking. The other colour I like is powder blue...

Something like this... Well I've yet to get to my flat today, as the signing process, plus the transfer-claim for housing benefit took over two hours. Then Binky wants a sleeve of 200 Polish Marlboros for £45 ($71.38 (I bet that seems expensive to you Americans, but the cigarettes I smoke cost £5.79 ($9.18) for 20 (Players superkings)) (but I break them into three and roll them complete with mini-filters, so I get 60 smokes for that money, which last me two days. I'm intending to give up smoking... one day. I'm sure my Baby Chirper won't like my always having a fag on...

Righto I have to go. I'm going to trundle my spare TV and Freeview box up to the new house (get my money's worth out of the trolley), take gas and electricity readings with my cigarette lighter-cum-torch (it has an LED flashlight at the bottom). Then tomorrow morning I have to contact my utilities suppliers and ask them to set up my account...