Oyster Card

Over in London this past week for two days with Mr. Jules.   We are looking for a place to live.  THE BIG NEWS IS that as from next September we are transferring over to the UK for a couple of years.  I KNOW!  I’m excited.

 As you faithful readers of this blog already know, Ollie, my eldest,  is in the UK, studying binge drinking and rugby at Loffbro Uni and his departure changed the whole family dynamic and my “raison d’être.”  I wasn’t the only one.  Early in 2009 Sophie-G. started her offensive with the winning sentence:

“I can’t stand the idea of studying Maths and a science until I’m eighteen and I know I will have to give up my dancing in the final year of my Bac if I am to get anywhere near a pass.”

  She was preaching to the choir having hopeless failed my maths O level with a U grade.  The A level system was starting to look a better option for her and when we  found a school with a dance and theatre programme just outside London it all started to make sense. It was time to move on.

 I realised that I too had to think about growing up along with the kids and so I’m looking at an MA programme in Creative Writing at London Uni which is my old stomping ground and so the circle is complete.  Plus Mr. J. rather likes the idea of going out with a student.

The trip over last week was great – Mr. J. proudly drew his Oyster card from his wallet as we got off the plane whilst I had inexplicably lost mine – saw lots of friends, drank too much and viewed many, many apartments which you can imagine is not easy with a Swiss property developer in tow.  What the public school boy/estate agents call “charming” i.e., windows that no longer fit in their frames, dodgy pipes and drafts that could knock an infant flat, Mr. J. calls dégueulasse, dangereux and gonflé.  But what was really nice and genuinely “charming” were the manners of these chappies who showed us around like glorified butlers managing large estates.  We went to see an abandoned project in Basil Street on the market for a king’s ransom and it was an oscar winning sales performance given by Harry as he avoided the bags of cement, bricks and old pipes strewn around the floor.  Mr. J. needed a sit down and a double decaf to recover from that one.

Delightful Edward got very excited about a property he wanted to show us.  “It’s very quiet, all you can see are views of the park.”  I had a hard time convincing him that I essentially live in a park in Switzerland and what I want is to hear the rumble of traffic with the wiff of a London bus in my nostrils as I skip along to the wine bar and M&S Simply Food on the corner.  

 You will still get updates from the riveting life of a Swiss village because we will be here in the school holidays so if it this that you are thirsting after (and not the neurotic musings of a writer/mother/wife trying to make sense of the world) it will be here alongside London life in the shoes of a more-Swiss-than-she-thinks returnee.  Sort of Heidi goes to London review.  For once Mr. J will be  the foreigner with the dodgy accent.   In a sense I will also be a bit of a foreigner in my own country having last resided there in 1982 and never as a tax paying adult.

I hope you will continue to enjoy reading the new blog, with a London slant, as I monitor my progress in one of the world’s most exciting capitals.