Kentishers at last

We are “kentishers”, at least for a year! This is how we now regard ourselves from last Saturday, at 2pm. New home, new identity. Kentish Town looks like a lively area, full of stuff to shop around, to visit & to get to know. Previous place was good, but may be far away from downtown, this seems the loophole of Clapham, trendy & quiet, but may be too much! Now we seem to find in Clapham the problems we didn’t care of before. Provisional conclusion is: south London is great for middle aged couples with kids, not yet our cup of tea.

While strolling down Kentish main street, we seem to have discovered the for the moment “best pub” off Camden Street (“the abbey”). After the pub, next is figuring out where is Marta’s gym (still undecided) and Joan’s preferred supermarket to fatten as much as possible. The flat looks gorgeous, small but cosy, not as fashion like as we might wish for, but it will become for sure the best place we have ever been in London. The main strength is our garden, perfect for barbecues, sunbathing and may be dinning outdoors in summer time. But don´t get us wrong, not that we plan to get into the world of gardening -may be Marta she reckons. Gardens bring peace, space to relax and may be to become "urbanisation aware". See, a couple of fatty squirrels pop into the garden every other day, wandering for a while to find out whether we were keen enough to hand them etable stuff ( we were not!). Meanwhile, some shameful looking cats from other neighbouring properties elegantly pass by as if the garden fence had never been build up and finally blackbirds constantly are in and out, playing "hide-and-seek" as if it would not be cold outside.

The inside of the house is not so good yet though fine. We seem to have already decided the colour we will paint the flat, sort of "grey white" that Marta finds “very modern”. Next question was though : who paints the flat? Marta looked for some people to come and help us painting, but it happened to be a”polish band” that asked for 540 quid to paint two rooms (may be they saw the merc that Hussein drives and though it was ours) , so we asked to a friend of a friend to come, an Argentinean who got the flu precisely the day he was supposed to come in. He seems nice guy according to the references but we already see ourselves painting the flat after Christmas, I know : lets give him a chance.

Besides painting, we have got ourselves ino the business of furnishing the flat last weekend as well. Indeed, all happened when we suddenly decided that moving flats was not torturing enough in itself, so that we should go to IKEA on a Sunday afternoon ( despite the day before we just moved in). Initially we thought we had an acceptabe time to go, may be slightly tight but still (we were still at home at 3pm). Now, it was in fact much worse than expected, instead of shutting at 6 (as we expected), they seem close at 5 on sundays, and rather than being an accesible place to get to, it took us about 20-30 minutes walk to get there. At the end, after running for a while and becoming kind of "anxious" (we really feared the idea of ouselves getting back home with nothing done) we got there. Accidentally, we managed to get in at 4.45 and Joan speeded up to buy all what looked attractive to him while Marta was more focused on the urgent needs. Besides Marta was busy removing from the trolley all what we didn’t need but that Joan emotionally managed to pick up, which happen to be lots at the end. Finally we succeed in buying some right stuff, not all we need though, so we have to go back or go somewhere else but it was good. We made our way back by hiring a cab. IKEA provides cabs to drive you home with the stuff bought; problem was that we were assigned a car who had already an assignment, so there wasn’t enough space inside and we were literally squeezed in somehow. An inexperienced driver managed to find the house thanks to a router and we got home safe. Hopefully from now on, the flat will not be anymore the object to our writings , let's keep hoping.