earlier
\ncomments.<\/a><\/p>\nWe were fortunate that Stephen’s cousin Julian offered to
\nput us up for the first two weeks after our arrival here in
\nBrighton. Of course, if one is to believe Stephen’s account of
\nJulian’s apartment, perhaps the offer wasn’t all that fortunate
\nafter all. \ud83d\ude1b Myself, however, being made of far sterner stuff than
\nStephen, I found Julian’s apartment to be perfectly fine for a
\ncheap place to live. Now, you might not think that a £600\/month
\nplace is a “cheap” place to live but, given the housing situation
\nhere in Brighton at the moment, and the fact that Julian has a
\n3-bedroom, 3-storey house, £600\/month is almost reasonable. Cheap is
\nwhat enables us (and Julian!) to save so splendidly on heating.
\nAfter all, if the heating doesn’t actually function, then you can’t
\nspend a fortune on electricity attempting to use it, right? Cheap
\nis also what enables us to almost never have to vacuum. When the
\ncarpet throughout the house is the colour of dirty sand, you just
\ndon’t easily notice the dirt on it. Ahhhh! The luxuries of
\nthe bachelor apartment!<\/p>\n
For a cheap place, though, it has large windows everywhere,
\nsingle-paned to be sure, but large windows nonetheless. The walls
\nand ceiling even bear evidence of recent painting too. What more could a
\nbachelor ask for? Cable, mobile phones, PlayStations, VCRs,
\nstereo equipment, and sound editing equipment apparently. The
\nsandy floor in the living room (or lounge, as the locals
\nrefer to it) is festooned with high-tech music equipment, two
\ntelevisions, a PlayStation, and a digital equipment cordless
\ntelephone (DECT phone). This is very amusing when you consider
\nthat the actual inhabitants of this flat spend far less time
\nhere than we do. Maybe they’ve figured out how to use this
\nstuff remotely?<\/p>\n
I hope that the picture I paint of Julian’s flat is neither too
\ncontemptuous nor unflattering. I rather like it except for the heating and
\nthe carpet. I had secret plans to sell all of Julian’s stuff and just take
\nover the place in order to solve our housing problem. I figure that any
\nplace that is not home to more than 20 species of bugs (unlike some other
\nplaces in which I lived) is a fine place to stay. Any place where the roof
\ndoesn’t leak into the walls is also a fine place to stay. Any place where
\nturning on the microwave doesn’t interfere with television reception
\nbecause of ‘noisy power’ is a fine place to stay. If you manage to not
\nhave all these problems in one place then you’ve found a fantastic place to
\nstay, even if it doesn’t back onto a ravine!<\/p>\n
For some reason, completely unfathomable to me, Stephen decided that
\nfinding a place of our own in which to live wasn’t that high of a
\npriority. After all, what can you do with your own personal place:
\nopen a bank account, have proof of address to get cell phones, have a
\nplace to forward your business calls to, have a place to put all
\nof your stuff coming by container from Canada, have a place to
\nsleep after your relatives boot you out on the street? Those don’t
\nsound all that<\/strong> important, right? Well, apparently they weren’t
\nto Stephen but luckily I convinced him that we absolutely needed to
\nfind our own place to stay as we could only stay with Julian for
\ntwo weeks and then with Anna, a friend from Sussex University, for
\nthe month of December.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Finding a place to stay in Brighton lately necessitates a lot of
\nvisiting estate agencies. Apparently, since the last time I was
\nin Brighton two years ago, lots of people in the London area hit
\nupon the clever idea to move to Brighton because they could commute
\nfaster from here via train into London than they could navigate
\nabout London. The result of their cleverness is that the demand
\nfor housing in southeast England, especially Brighton, has skyrocketed,
\npushing prices for housing up and seriously impacting the amount of
\nhousing available. For us this meant that we could visit an estate
\nagency in the afternoon, peruse their daily list of available
\nproperties, and discover that 2\/3rds of them were already gone by
\nthe time we’d arrived at the agency. The turnover of rental properties
\nis really high.<\/p>\n
One of the first places we examined was a 1-bedroom apartment that
\nhad sea views from its windows. I think the 1-bedroom part of the
\napartment description was being overly generous. When the agent
\nshowed us the bedroom, I couldn’t resist commenting that I’d seen
\nwalk-in closets that were larger. The “bedroom” was just wide
\nenough to fit a single bed into and then be able to walk in the
\nnarrow aisle created between the bed and the wall to the window.
\nThe rest of the apartment was likewise small, even if it did feature
\nan “electric shower.” This device, not intended, I’m sure, for
\nauto-erotic stimulation, heats up your shower water to the desired
\ntemperature using electricity, thus eliminating the need for a
\nhot water tank which never has enough water anyway.<\/p>\n
On another day, we were able to view two<\/strong> potential places.
\nThe first was a relatively modern apartment with two bedrooms,
\npartially furnished. There wasn’t anything much exciting about it
\nexcept that it may have had cable and it cost £700\/month! It was
\nneat, cheerful and bright, but BORING and expensive. Definitely not
\nEinMaterial.<\/p>\nThe other place we were to scope out the agent was reluctant to show us.
\nApparently they’d had trouble renting out the place and it had stood empty
\nsince the end of August. The property in question was a converted mews.
\nFor those of us not in the know (like me!), a mews was a place where horses
\nand carriages were stored and often featured a space for the grooms and
\nhorseboys to live above the horses and carriages. The original building
\nwas constructed in 1860 and featured “unusual decor”. This sounded more
\nlike it. We were far more enthused than the hesitant agent. I loved
\nit from the moment we stepped in, even if it did smell somewhat musty.
\nLots of brick. Lots of wood. Lots of windows. Lots of stairs. Every
\nsingle room was on a different level than the others. There was a bedroom
\nupstairs with two beds, a lounge at the front of the house, a small
\nsitting room with french doors out to a sunken garden, a small, efficient
\nmodern kitchen, a bathroom with a nice deep tub, and the dining room. <\/p>\n
It was the dining room that featured the odd decor. The two walls of the
\ndining room had been papered from floor to ceiling in a gold wallpaper that
\nhad yellow flowers and vines crawling up it. It sounds rather odd but
\ngiven the light in the house and how what little light there was reflected
\noff the gold paper, it worked wonders to lighten up an otherwise quite
\ndark area of the house, despite the number of windows. The house did
\nhave windows but they all face west and most of the house was down from
\nstreet level. It was, however, a mere block from the sea. If we looked
\naround the corner from the mews, we could see the sea. We could definitely
\nhear the gulls.<\/p>\n
I loved it. I had to have it, even if the place was furnished was already
\nwell furnished with antiques and rugs and wall hangings and we had a big
\nwhack of stuff arriving from Canada. The agents had recently reduced the
\nprice from £650\/month to £600\/month in an attempt to get
\nthe place rented out. We had to have it. We pestered the agents
\ndaily. We would have pestered them hourly if I had thought it would
\nhave helped. They provided us with a set of three two-page forms. One set
\nfor each of us and the third set for somebody who would act as a guarantor
\nin case we decided to skip town. Having only just arrived from Canada, we
\nof course didn’t have any UK credit history which is what they wanted to
\ncheck. We had to provide details of our jobs, our places where we lived,
\npersonal references, and get all this stuff from our guarantor, too.
\nAgain, Stephen’s relatives came to our rescue, with Maggie providing the
\nneeded guarantor reference. Indeed, she turned out to be a Class A
\nguarantor, just in case anybody else needs one in the future. Even
\nwith her all checked out pure as the driven snow, they still gave us
\ngrief. Stephen’s personal reference turned out to be out of the country
\nand they were going to hold us up just on that even though everything
\nelse had worked out. After several anxious days, we were finally given
\nthe keys after we gave them £1450 (or more than $3600 CDN)! That’s
\nalmost enough to have a down payment on a house in Edmonton. This was only
\nthe deposit and the first month’s rent and we only have the house until
\nAugust. I guess we’ll do the whole thing over or maybe consider buying.
\nIt’s almost as cheap if we could come up with the 15% deposit. <sigh><\/p>\n
Well, at least we’re housed now. Stephen can concentrate on his
\nnumber one priority: making us rich so we can afford to shell out
\n$1500\/month in rent. (:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Now that I’ve been in England more than one week, intending on
\nbeing a permanent resident, I feel I have the right to make
\ncryptic, cynical pronouncements about life in England. Enjoy this
\nhumorous and somewhat barbed rebuttal to Stephen’s earlier
\ncomments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[166,177],"tags":[193,228],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-br1ght0n","category-sm-adventur3s","tag-brighton","tag-heating"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/einiverse.eingang.org\/ein2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}