Real world
On Tuesday, it was the first of July – and that meant moving out of our student house in Broomhill, and leaving behind student life forever. I'm writing this now in my new bedroom, in our city centre flat, from my new desk and over our new mobile-broadband-enabled computer network (which only took 3½ hours to set up... more on which later).
Moving day went quite smoothly, really. After an early morning trip to the estate agents to collect the keys, we had to move all our possessions downstairs and into the front room, ready for collection. It's quite surprising just how much stuff you can collect over the course of a year. I'd never have been able to carry it all home on the train, even if I'd made half-a-dozen trips, but luckily we had a cheery van driver from Dudley to help cart it all to the new place.
On arrival, however, there was a slight snag. OK, quite a big one. The front door keys didn't work. We were told that the same key would let us into the main building and into our flat. But after a quick check with a visiting locksmith (who let us in, ironically) revealed that the required keys looked very different to the ones we had been given.
Propping the door open with a shoe, I had to hobble back to the van to find a more suitable doorstop to avoid being locked out of our own building, and then unloaded all our stuff into the lobby. Meanwhile, frantic phone calls were being made to the landlords and estate agents... otherwise, one of us would have to be permanently stationed in the flat!
After an initial scare – one of the building's other residents telling us how he had waited two-and-a-half months for a spare key – an apologetic estate agent soon turned up with a new set of keys to save the day.
Having been here for a few days, the place is pretty much in order now. All the rooms have been cleaned, we've been to the shops and bought in most of the fixtures and fittings we need. The computer's been set up, the clocks set, the Freeview boxes tuned... and I'm really pleased with the way it's looking. Now all I have to do is find some way of paying for the place...
