Hello again,
We thought it would be a good time to give you another update on our day to day lives here in London.
Alot is up in the air at the moment (including Tim’s contract at Macquarie) and we are trying to embrace the uncertainty. Ryan is heading to Canada via Iceland on Monday so we are hunting for a new flatmate. We’re sorry to see him go, but the good news is he intends to come back in a few months time and settle in London for the longer term, so at least we’ll still be able to go for the occasional pint.
To prepare for our new tenant we have been sprucing up the place, replacing cardboard boxes with an actual coffee table and covering marks on walls with various pieces of art. Tim even spent half a day repairing our saggy old couches (pictured) with some rope based on a video he saw on youtube. This included teaching himself how to tie a bow line – on the umpteenth attempt when he finally got it he exclaimed ‘Garry would be proud’.
We’ve learnt that the UK has no climate, it just gets buffeted by weather. To sum up, the last few months have been COLD. The picture below shows Tim out the front of our place in his gym gear as it snows. Thankfully, the days are starting to get longer, and the sun is making an appearance slightly more often. We are both looking forward to the summer months, and the thought of actually using our backyard. To highlight that point, we had a potential tenant over this week to show them the flat, and embarrassingly when we tried to show them the backyard we couldn’t figure out how to get the door unlocked! We had to show them pictures on the laptop instead haha.
To mix things up during the week we signed up for an 8 week introductory wine tasting course at the West London Wine School. This meant that each Thursday night for 8 weeks we got to sample a different wine region (old and new world) with a group of about 20 other people. This was great fun, and a relatively cheap night out. The only tough part was occasionally overdoing it on the wine / cheese or both! We liked it so much that we’ve enrolled in further courses there, including a Greek wine tasting night (which we did this week) and a 4 week Italy course which we are pumped for. Through the course we have discovered Chilean Carmenère (Tim remembers it by saying ‘Carmenère, hell yeah!’), which we can highly recommend.
Lesley has also been doing a few cooking courses with her friend El at the Notting Hill Recipease (pictured), Jamie Oliver’s food and kitchen store chain. This has included Japanese and Mexican street food themed nights – Tim was lucky enough to sample the Mexican recipes last night and is eager for Lesley to do more lessons (in a good way)!
On the weekends we try and get out as much as we can. One of our stomping grounds is Holland Park itself and the Whole Foods Market nearby at Kensington. The shot below shows Lesley in the Japanese garden section of the park, which is overrun by squirrels and even peacocks. Ryan was lucky enough to have a squirrel run up his leg there once and pose for some great photos…we could make a joke about nuts here but that would be a bit lowbrow…
Because it is so easy to get into a routine, we have set ourselves the challenge of doing one new thing every Saturday. One day trip that we did was to Oxford in January. The city is well known as a university town – Oxford University is the oldest in England and indeed the oldest in the English speaking world. Whilst the sandstone certainly one-upped the campus at Sydney uni, we were a bit underwhelmed, and felt perhaps that it was more of a summer destination. We’re keen to compare it to Cambridge (which we are yet to visit). Lesley is pictured below in front of the Radcliffe Camera, one of the particularly photogenic old buildings.
Among other things we have also checked out Westminster Abbey (which Lesley adored), the Natural History Museum (which Tim adored) and the Churchill War rooms which were very impressively preserved. We also recently did a day trip to Greenwich to the National Maritime Museum, mainly to see an Ansel Adams photography exhibition there (he was a very famous American landscape photographer). We visited the Greenwich markets after the exhibition which were loaded with great stuff and some amazing food (pictured).
Today we went to high tea at Claridges, a luxury hotel in Mayfair. This was actually a Christmas present from Tim to Lesley, but there was a 3 month wait list for the next available Sunday! It was certainly a classy establishment, and Tim was distinctly under dressed in his jeans and hiking boots – but that didn’t stop us enjoying ourselves. The picture below shows Lesley and a selection of scones and cakes.
So there you have it! Other than that we do the weekly shopping, go to the gym, iron our shirts on Sunday to get ready for the week ahead, and otherwise endure full time work, all the while thinking we need more holidays! Speaking of holidays, in a couple of weeks we are off to Venice for five days over Easter. For both of us this is our first time to Italy, so we are pumped. We will keep you posted as always.
TL
timandlesley 