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Long-winded update

There are two reasons I've been bad about blogging over the last couple days.

1. I've been having a fantastic time with Erin
2. The house thing has been so frustrating it's had me in tears

Erin has been fabulous. Together, we've pretty much packed the ground floor of the house. There are boxes everywhere, but somehow, the place is tidier now than it was when she got here. She's just that good.

Monday, we spent the day in town, to keep Erin away from bed so she wouldn't get jetlagged. The main task of the day was procuring anniversary presentage for James. This was accomplished at Selfridge's. We celebrated a task well done by buying (matching) coats at H&M.

Tuesday was my second anniversary! Wow! After a full day of packing, we met James in town and took Erin out to Simpsons in the Strand, a very famous, very British restaurant, and dined on champagne and yummy British fare - Erin & James had roast beef, I had skate. There, James and I exchanged gifts. He needed a new wallet, so I bought him one of those, and also I got him a Dolce and Gabana tie. James completely overdid it and bought me not one, but two Mont Blanc pens. One for my purse (a rollerball), and one amazing fountain pen with an ink well. WOW. They're crazy cool.

Wednesday was a packing day. Pretty much all day. We did drop in at our local pub for lunch (really amazing olive-crusted salmon) and had dinner at the Indian place. This is going to be pretty normal until we move, because we've now packed all but paper plates. When we finished dinner, we went out and bought Monty Python's Meaning of Life, as I've not seen it and James and Erin kept going on about the Mr. Creosote sketch. Which was absolutely disgusting. I knew about the exploding part but not all the barfing. It was pretty funny.

Yesterday, we went into town. Sushi for lunch, then we walked from Liverpool Street to the Tower of London, went on a beefeater tour, had cream tea, wandered around some other bits of the place, and were then herded out as it was closing time. Then, we walked to the Globe, where we saw Romeo and Juliet. The play was fantastic, well played. Of course, for me, it's never quite as good after Mercutio dies. We walked back to Liverpool Street station, then - over the Millennium Bridge, past St. Paul's. The river is so beautiful at night with all of the lights of the buildings up and down it. I don't know if I've ever quite seen it like it was last night, but it was really amazing.

Yesterday was unfortunately not perfect. I lost my keys at some point, which was very frustrating. On Wednesday night, I let myself into the house with them, I had driven home, so I know I had them. Then they went missing. We searched the house Thursday morning. Couldn't find them anywhere and ultimately took a taxi to the station instead of driving. The taxi driver suggested that someone had stolen them out of the door and they were waiting for us to leave so they could rob us and steal our car. Bastard.

I did find them this morning. Stuck in the handle of a box. It's not a wonder we hadn't been able to find, them, really, but we should've concentrated more on the area in which we found my purse than making a mad hunt around the house.

More than anything, yesterday was marred by house stuff. It is now a week after we said we wanted to exchange. A week after we made it very clear that we needed to exchange. We've paid a week's worth of rent to our new landlord, even though we haven't signed the contract yet, just to keep the flat. We were aiming for exchange today. Basically, our buyers, the Lis, are fairly ignorant about the process, and English is not their first language. Their solicitor is screwing them around, and so, transitively, screwing us all around. We were waiting on the Lis mortgage offer and the local searches. The latter were supposed to be applied for weeks ago, but obviously weren't applied for until last week. Which is intensely frustrating because we made no secret of our deadline. So now we're just waiting for the local searches and there's nothing anyone can do to make it go any faster. Further to this, the Lis' solicitor is blowing everyone off and not returning phonecalls and generally being a total prick. The revised date, I found out yesterday, is sometime next week. I was so angry I cried.

But then I Erin bought me a stuffed raven at the Tower, whose sole purpose is to peck out the Lis' solicitor's eyes. I feel better now.

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