The manual of accidents and mistakes

And a happy World Nutella Day to you too.

I feel a little bit homesick for Berlin knowing that, even though Nutella was banned from our household by Stevie who seemed to think that once it crossed our threshhold it would rapidly become the only foodstuff we'd want to consume.

Anyway, here we are, and day to day life continues apace. The plumbers are here as I type. I'm hoping it looks as though I am working from home. To sit on the sofa watching 'The Real Wives of Orange County' strikes me as looking far too much like what I really do, which is full time web surfer and tv watcher and occasional crisp eater. And patently we can't have that! The plumbers are fixing the leaks in the bathroom which will hopefully put an end to people spitting their toothpaste residue into the bath which is slowly but surely driving me nuts. Well, it's not so much that but the fact that once I have scrubbed the bath of toothpaste spittings, the next time I visit someone else has been in using the bath to wash out their paintbrushes and rollers and I have to stop myself from throttling someone with my Cilit Bang chemically-burned hands (which actually are starting to heal now that I have discovered a pack of latex gloves in one of the boxes).

Everything is starting to improve. I might finally be out of the woods with the DVLA, and hopefully will be in possession of a nice new driving licence by next week. Of course last Thursday it would have been nice to have had one, when after parking in the little car park in front of Sainsbury's I watched a woman not look as she reversed out and swing her car round and right into the side of mine. She looked at the car, then looked at me, then continued reversing to where I thought she must be parking up, but as I got out of the car to walk round and survey the damage (which admittedly was minor) she looked at me again, shrugged, and drove off! Outraged? I'll say! I think the factors that made me more so were the facts that she was in her 60's and looked very middle class and decent, and I was horrified by the sheer lack of good manners.

I phoned the police despite the fact that I wouldn't be making a claim and also wasn't sure I had got the last letters of her number plate right, and spent some time the following day at the police station reporting it in person (which is a requirement) in an area where I was sure the car would come to more harm than it had in the accident. The police were very nice and have told me to keep an eye out for the car as I am bound to see her again at the supermarket and when I do to note the number plate and let them know and they'll hopefully go round and have a chat with her about how bad mannered it is to just drive off after hitting someone's car. So obviously now I am scouring the roads to see this woman in her car again and no doubt will not rest until I have tracked her down.

Not having a driving licence to show the police worried me a bit, but I did have my drivers number and it seems they did check that I was ok to drive with the DVLA, for the DVLA have sent me a lovely letter to brandish stating my validity to drive and aid me in my fight against crime caused by the elderly.

The plumbers have finished and left me with this...

I think in modern circles they call it a wet room... well that's what I'll have as the shower enclosure is in the spare bedroom. Turns out the leak has been caused by the poor fitting of the enclosure in the first place, so Stevie and I have a joyous evening of stripping silicone and cleaning the whole thing up before stuffing a gap with silicone and refitting it again.

I've also just taken delivery of two bits of furniture that have been with the french polisher. I am amazed. The man is a genius. My coffee table and console table got scraped and damaged during the move from Germany amongst other things and while he managed to fix some things in situ, he took a couple away. I nearly wept with joy when I saw the coffee table again it's so beautiful. He's even managed to get rid of the well established paint stains that the kids have caused that I couldn't. So all in all, I'm happy. While it's rotten when things get trashed and broken, there's so much pleasure to gain from seeing things fixed and working again.

Living in between cardboard boxes

I'd like to say this is a 'before' shot, but it feels like it might be a 'during' and 'after' shot too. 

You never see Stevie's face any longer. If it's not at work, it's at the top of a ladder.

But here's mine. 

I feel like this move back into our old house is never ending. I've only just finished collecting stray leftover items from the 'holiday home' (as a friend named it, whose parents-in-law have spent longer on holiday in Australia than we spent in that house), and today (I'm hoping) I made my final visit to read the meters before we hand the keys back. I will be glad to see the back of that place.

Back in Derby we are floor to (nearly) ceiling in boxes, and progress in unpacking has been painfully slow. Stevie had managed to paint the kids bedrooms before we moved in, but hadn't got on to any of the downstairs rooms. The plan was to put everything in the living room while he pained the dining room, but we filled the living room in no time at all and the dining room has ended up full of furniture which Stevie has had to shuffle around in order to get the walls painted.

It's good to be back in our old house. It feels better. I feel more relaxed. I think it's less stressful knowing that a least if stuff goes wrong then that's our problem and we don't have a landlord to have to negotiate with or to deny there is a problem or whatever. Admittedly there is a lot of stuff wrong in the house at the moment, but at least I know that we can fix it and it'll all be nice again. Even if we are still living in amongst the boxes.

I had a plumber out to price up the jobs that need doing in the bathroom this morning. Multiple leaks under the sink, the freestanding taps behind the bath seem to have been rocked back and forward until they have come loose and now lean at an angle that allows water down the back and through a hole into the kitchen ceiling, and the shower has a leak that drips badly through the ceiling but handily waters an orchid in drips that sits underneath it.

The kitchen ceiling is in such a mess that Stevie reckons it's just as well we moved back in when we did as the ceiling is about to cave in. Luckily we have a friend who is a plasterer who is going to re-plaster the kitchen and the hallway and the dining room.

We keep coming across little problems here and there the more we start to live in the house. We seem to have been able to fix the oven door that was hanging off ourselves, but then when I went to use it I discovered the grill pan and insert were missing. I found the grill pan yesterday rusting in the garden and covered in mud, but the insert is still hiding.

I have been complaining too that I can smell urine every time I walk into the dining room. Nobody else seems able to smell it. But it has been driving me crazy. Sometimes I don't smell it, and other times it seems really pungent and disgusting. But still Stevie and the kids can't smell it. I even smelt myself just.to.make.sure! Today I finally located it. Turns out one of our tenants has peed behind the dining room door. I have no idea why as there is a toilet about a metre away across the hallway, but there's just another reason I'm not sure I can be bothered being a landlord again.

So there we are. A boring little update featuring packing, plumbing, plastering, painting, and ...peeing.

The landlord begs to differ.

Tenant: "I really want to make sure I get all of my deposit back"

Landlord Fiona: "Great! That's what we want too. We understand that you need that money for your next place. So as long as it's in the same condition as when we handed it over (allowing for normal wear and tear) there should be no problem"

Tenant: "Ha, ha, don't worry! I think it's in even better condition than before!"*

Because there's artwork on the walls in all the rooms...

We've added 4 water features in the kitchen...

We've enhanced the bathroom....

Cleaned the place from top to bottom...

And added money-saving features...

Landlord Fiona: ".... Really??? really??"



I may be a little quiet for a while. Not least because my head is about to explode from the number of square metres I've had to scrub over the past month, but also because I may be a little busy, you know, doing a few small repairs, cleaning, replacing, painting, moving, etc. And just to add a little drama, wouldn't you know Orla has a stomach bug and is off school. To give her her due, she did scrub the fireplace surround excellently, though I'd also like to take this moment to thank Apple for inventing the mighty iPad which managed to entertain her enough today to let me get one half of the kitchen cleaned.

Now I know why people in the UK buy instead of rent. The citizens are animals**. Either they let you move into their filthy wrecked houses and pay a premium for that pleasure, or they filthy up and wreck your house, leaving you to pay for the pleasure... ANIMALS!!!!!!!

I'm done with this 'being a landlord/tenant' business.


* His ACTUAL words!!!!
**Obviously, not all. Especially not the UK citizens that read my blog. I'm pretty sure you'd leave it sparkling like a wine glass from a Finish dishwasher tablet advert.

miniature disasters and minor catastrophes

Round robin's are not popular in my parent's house. They utterly hate them. "Here!" said my mum as she thrust 2 pages of A4 into my hand with a degree of force, "Read this. See what you think, but I cannot stand people rattling on about how marvellously well their lives are every year". Stevie thinks it's a uniquely Scottish thing; that 'hating seeing people do well for themselves' or rather maybe more that 'taking pleasure in seeing people's lives go wrong after they've enjoyed a bit of success'. I don't think it's that with my mum, but really just, well, I don't know. I don't think it's uniquely Scottish or even British, but I guess people can just sometimes not feel happy for people when things are going well, especially if they keep going on about it, eh.. once a year. No doubt it's got a lot to do with comparing it to your own life and feeling a wee bit like things aren't going quite as well for you. About not being happy with your lot.

I read it and I didn't hate them. I read it and I didn't even think that they were really 'showing off' about what marvellous things they'd been up to. Maybe I have been desensitised from reading so many blogs where people with perfect families are just having the time of their pretty, crafty lives where some new book deal or amazing sponsorship thing by Anthropologie turns up every second day, or maybe that's why my mum has no interest in the internet. I read it and it made me sigh and think, "My life used to be that good".

Let's face it, the return to Blighty has not exactly been a blast. Moving into a filthy, falling-apart yet ridiculously expensive house kind of took the shine off things, and then living amongst piles of boxes while we have waited on a cleaner's quote being approved for the whole of, well, to be honest we are still waiting. It's just not fun.

December was a pain. Aside from arguing our way out of our lease, I didn't seem to achieve very much by way of Christmas preparations. Stevie kept saying "leave it til next week" and I did, though god knows why I listen to him. It's always a mistake. So Orla got ill and was off school for ages and then just as she got better, Hamish got ill and then I got ill. That took us right up to the end of term. I felt so bad that I took myself off to the GP. I was suffering from something flu-like, but I knew I had a pretty bad chest infection as well, and normally they can't get away with just saying 'it's viral. There's nothing we can do'. Especially if you bring out your trump card - "I'm a diabetic". Usually that guarantees you some kind of medicine. The doctor listened to my chest and agreed that I had a chest infection but told me I just needed to go to bed. "But I'm a diabetic" didn't cut the mustard in this place. I blame the constant bombardment of adverts proclaiming that antibiotics won't help a cough or cold so leave the doctor alone. It seems that the doctors have finally noticed them and paying heed to their message.

So I left empty handed and two days later I ended up in hospital dotted with canulas. Or 'drips' for those of you who haven't spent as much time hanging around hospitals as I have. Turns out I really had needed an antibiotic after all. If I hadn't felt so angry I would have felt righteous. Mind you what didn't help was that when I got sent home from the GP's they told me to take ibuprofen for the pain in my chest, and given that it was in an as yet unpacked box and I just wanted to grab something and go off to bed to die; I grabbed the first box of ibuprofen I came across and decided those would do.

They were ones I bought in Germany, and I knew I should look at the dosage on them but I really didn't have the energy to be bothered translating the leaflet. So I took 2 and then 4 hours later when the pain hadn't  really been relieved much at all, I took 2 more. I continued this every 4 hours for 2 days, though by the first evening I had also started topping up with paracetamol because the ibuprofen just wasn't hitting the spot. So when I landed in hospital and they asked me what i had been taking, and followed up by asking me if I "had been feeling down recently". God, yeah! Well, the move had ended up being pretty stressful, and of course I had been worried about the kids settling into their new school, and well the house had turned out to be a total dump, and etc, etc, etc. But when they asked if I had "been feeling depressed for a long time", well I was a little taken aback. Hold on a minute, where are we going here?

Once it was clarified that they thought I was a suicidal chest infection patient, and the first bag of saline which they were blasting through my system was actually an attempt to flush out the ibuprofen from my kidneys before it damaged them, they explained that taking 800mg of ibuprofen every 4 hours is quite a lot. Still... I felt a bit daft whinging on about our crappy move. Anyway, I spent a few days in hospital worrying that I wouldn't get out for Christmas and the kids wouldn't have any presents.

Honestly, when they have to put handrails up to help you hike up the hill, it's just plain wrong.

So far, January has been a breeze compared to December, but give it time. Guess what!? We're going to be moving house in around 2 weeks! Won't that be fun???? Sorry, I got the words round the wrong way. I meant, that won't be fun.

We'll take it!

I could be wrong, but I think there's some irony there.

Myths about life as a returning expat:

No.1 You might not like being back but you will be ecstatic about being able to do everything in your own language.

Living abroad is excellent fun, until you have to deal with a problem in a language that is quite foreign to you. My first experience of this if we don't count having to ask in Kaisers if the mince contained any horsemeat, came as a dreaded phone call to Kabel Deutschland as our pin code wasn't working. Talk about a cold sweat. It still gives me nightmares.

Eventually after overcoming numerous problems in a combination of poor German and excellent mime, you can't help but think back to life in your home country and think "there would be no problem big or small that I couldn't solve! Phone calls would be a breeze! Returning faulty goods would be something I would actually do! Oh the exotic plethora of words I would spill onto council officials and call centre operators!".

And to a degree this is true. You have a problem; you know all the words you need to describe said problem; you understand the response, and bingo! Problem *should* in theory be solved.

But somewhere along the line I wonder if I thought the problems wouldn't be as frequent or as frustrating in my own land. And now, on our return I find they are. The house we have moved into is awash with problems. As I have already listed them in a 32 page inventory that took me hours to complete, I won't go into detail again here. But suffice to say, it does not feel like it has been easier. From front door keys that won't lock the door from the inside because they are either snapped or bent, to french windows that leak so badly that when it rains the carpet soaks right up to the bed which is a metre away from said windows. *sigh*. Oh and everywhere was filthy. So dirty in fact that we couldn't have the boxes unpacked. *double sigh*

I couldn't bath the kids for most of the week because the bath couldn't hold water as the plug had no seal and there was a big crack in the bath which we weren't sure was leaking or not. Nor could we stick them in the shower as it was veering from freezing to boiling and back and forward between the two. The boiler needless to say is so old that it makes it quite difficult to listen to each others moans as it sounds as if someone is repeatedly starting up an old tractor in the utility room.

But don't worry. The landlord says we are "difficult tenants". So that's that sorted then. Problem solved. Except that it's not and he isn't very keen to do anything and when I raced down to the letting agent the first morning after we moved in to ask if there was a 'cooling off' period or a way out of this contract I was told that no we are stuck here for a minimum of 6 months because we signed the contract. You don't even want to know how much rent we are paying for this place. And I can't tell you because I might start wailing and not be able to stop. Ok, let's move on.

No.2 You might not like being back but you will be ecstatic about being able to do everything in your own language.

What? Yes, it's the same as number 1, but shoosh! wheesht! I'm thoroughly fed up and I don't care. Do you remember I lost my phone on the u-bahn a few weeks before we moved? Probably not, but anyway I decided to wait until I was back in the UK to get a new one.

So then I started looking at which phone I liked the look of. Wrong, wrong, wrong, said Stevie. You need to work out what functionality you want and then decide how often you would be on the internet etc. Having never had the internet on my phone before it was nigh on impossible to guess how often I would use it in reality. But he had me doing spreadsheets comparing deals with data, text, and calls and phone cost across a selection of the major mobile phone providers. Then, he had me researching the deals offered by the companies that offer mobile phone contracts bundled with home phone and broadband and tv. I hadn't even chosen a phone at this point because beyond knowing I wanted one that looked nice, had the internet, possibly had sat nav and a half decent camera, I didn't know what else to really look for. So I narrowed it down to approximately 3 phones, but multiply that with innumerable phone contracts and you have at least a few evenings of thoroughly boring work. And that's not even factoring in the fact that I don't know what I am doing in Excel.

By the time I had finished I was pretty sure I could live without a phone if it mean avoiding having to do this kind of thing, and Stevie's popularity rating was reaching an all time low. But I did end up with a phone which was nice, though the relief from being done with the dreaded spreadsheet was only temporary as Stevie announced that we were going to get a Parkers Guide, fire up Excel again and let it tell us which car we should buy. Can I just say, many, many days later, we still are no closer to knowing what we are going to buy.

Now let me tell you what would have happened with the mobile phone in Germany. As indeed when we arrived in Berlin I needed to get a new mobile phone. All I knew at that point was that I wasn't going to get a contract as we weren't sure how difficult it would be to get out of it should we decide to leave before 2 years. So we went to Saturn, the only place we had seen that we knew would have them. We wandered around and had a quick look at them and then I said "That one looks ok, doesn't it?" and Stevie said "yes" and we bought it. None of the faffing about that you see above. Why? Because we didn't have the knowledge to know where to find deals and bundles, and we didn't have the language skills to ask about them. And that was the way we bought a lot of stuff in Berlin. If someone told us you could get tv through Kabel Deutschland then we went to Kabel Deutschland. When we needed a new washing machine we pretty much bought the one that we saw first and looked a decent enough price. And maybe it cost us a few more Euros but it was easier and didn't involve Ex-bloody-cel and dark thoughts of boyfriend hatred.

Goodbye to Berlin

Hello. It's been a while. We've been a bit busy. The movers came, packed a gazillion boxes, and then flung them out the window on a little lift. During all this Stevie and I set up office in the shower room and planned our attack on the crayon marks and flooring scuffs armed with baby wipes and Cif. 

Instead of painting the walls at considerable expense, we spent probably around 60 cents more on baby wipes and around 73 times more man hours scrubbing them clean. It was fun... sort of. At least my finger nails were bleachy clean. Then once the boxes were packed up we moved into a lovely hotel near the Ku'damm which we all thought was utterly excellent due to the single fact that we managed to pocket 17 very nice biros from a glass that they kindly replenished daily. By day we cleaned (and the kids continued to go to school) and by night, well, we pretty much dropped into bed and fell fast asleep stinking of bleach.

We did a bit of wandering around Berlin, caught the Christmas markets before the snow and the real festive feeling arrived, and visited the KaDeWe with the kids and saw their kind of Dumbledore Santa. I liked him for being so different, and also for sneaking me some chocolate from his pocket. Is it just me, or does that look like the beginnings of a "Santa? Yeah, whatever..." face on Orla? Ah, no, you're right, it's just her "God I'm sick of my mother taking photos" face. Phew!

And then, on the 4th of December, it was time to go. So that was a bit rubbish. Exciting, I'll give you that, but rubbish. The kids were over the moon to move into another hotel for a few days, us grown ups less so. And then! And then! after a few days we got to move into our new house! Boy were we ready for it! We were chomping at the bit. We dropped the kids off at their new school and raced to the letting agents to sign the papers and collect the keys. Woo-hoo!

Now, what could possibly go wrong.........................................................................???

I love the KaDeWe at Christmas

I love Berlin. I am going to miss it so very much when we leave. I also love the KaDeWe, Berlin's version of Harrods.

Christmas is something special at the KaDeWe. It's shiny, it's excessive, it's less 'less is more' and more 'more is more' with a whole bag of more thrown in on top.



Who doesn't need a mouse in a crown? Who doesn't want to be transported into another world? The KaDeWe can give you it all.

This year's theme is 'Alice in Wonderland'. Giant chairs, a giant teddy, a giant fireplace with giant Christmas stockings hanging from it.

You walk into a huge room lined with giant bookshelves which on it's own would be pretty outstanding. But with all it's beautiful things piled up and sparkling and shining and tempting, it's just gorgeous.

There aren't many things I wouldn't happily take home with me. I want bowls full of baubles decorated with fine glittery scrolls.

I want tables stacked high with golden cake stands and silver candelabras and one hundred snowglobes each one with Santa.

I'm pretty sure my new house would feel more homely were it filled with stars and flowers and golden dishes and incense.

I love this place. This is how Christmas should look. Marvellous.