Tue, 25 Feb 2003

author Tim	location Golders Green, Greater London, England
posted 21:49 GMT	section Europe2002/Europe/UK/England/London/Working in London 1 ( all photos )

Some Great News! ( No photos )
Hearty congratulations to my brother Peter and his girlfriend Inshirah who have announced that they are engaged to be married! The news came through whilst on night-shift this week, and it has taken a little while to sink in. Tentative plans put the date somewhere in November, so perhaps we now have a definite end-date for our Europe trip.

The work-all night thing finally caught up to me, and much of the weekend was spent asleep. I'm back on day shifts now which aren't so bad.
It has been back to the drudgery this week a little, although things are looking up for Liz as she now has two shifts this week, the first of which is tomorrow. They are once again at the Charing Cross hospital (nowhere near Charing Cross), and are great to get her out and doing things. She has also applied with a few other agencies, and has two interviews this week. Now she's a busy girl!
We are probably planning on moving either this weekend or next week, since we have agreed to start paying rent at the new place. The person we are taking the room off has been quite kind in holding it for us for this long, plus we are pretty keen to get out of the current place.
Our interest in getting up and travelling again has been renewed, and tentative plans for selling Percy and obtaining a Kombi called "Ethel" (can't quite remember how we made up that name - it's not like we have picked one out yet!) are taking shape. We think we will try and buy one here (as in London somewhere), load it up with gear and drive over to the continent. Seems easier than attempting to ship everything over there, the trade-off being that they are quite a bit cheaper to buy over there.
We made one un-successful excursion to The Van Market on Caledonian Road, not far away from here. While it was a nice drive, and the greasy spoon breakfast was better than expected, we couldn't find the market. It was just for research anyway.
Today Liz met me in town and we caught an old Routemaster bus (my first!) down to the Strand where we trundled off to Australia House (no Kombis for sale outside there, although we hear they usually are). This journey was to find out what we have to do to vote in the up-coming state election. However, the answer we got from the officially-dressed but Aussie-speaking desk clerk was "don't need to". A little suspicious, we probed him further - "It's not like they are going be able to find you in the middle of a Brazilian forest, is it?". Well, no, but we think we might vote anyway. Turns out we can get the postal vote form online and do it that way.
After that we wandered back down the Strand, intending to work our way to the TNT (Aussie magazine over here) offices to pick up a T-shirt I ordered. Ducking into a tiny little pub squeezed between two enormous buildings that has been there for several hundered years (love this part of London), we ordered a pint while I attempted to work out where we were going. Turns out I didn't have any details with me, but Liz didn't want to budge, so we spent a little while there before jumping back on the Tube home.

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