Nearly five months...

Hiya again

Apologies for not posting for quite some time. I was away last weekend and am still catching up.

But it's only a few more days before I can "celebrate" living here for five months. Am hoping to have a proper party on the half-year / six month-"semi-anniversary" :)

As those of you who have been reading these posts on a regular base will remember, for the first few months, I had a rough time getting enough sleep. This is a noisy old house (76 years), a former council-house with six flats to each "close" (entrance) and three such buildings in a terrace. There is only a simple dividing wall between the closes so you can hear almost everything that's going on in the other flats, which took a bit of getting used to.
I had to call on the management, the council and the police to help me with the people who rent the flat below: father and son and girl-friend were used to coming and going at all hours, their dog barking at anyone passing by, the people shouting and slamming doors -- driving everyone else who lives here to distraction.
The young woman, her daughter and their dog upstairs were almost equally noisy, but more in response to all the commotion than from their own inclination.
The other tenants/resident owners had either moved out or had long given up hope of any improvement. It obviously did take me and my experience of living in rented accommodation elsewhere to improve the situation -- and the fact that, about a year ago, management of the Council's houses went to a new organisation, one of whose aims has been to make sure the worst tenants are either persuaded to toe the line or thrown out. That has since happened in a few well-publicised cases, which seems to have made an impression on others.
The long and the short of this is that I have had a lot of support and the situation has become acceptable if not ideal. At least I no longer need to sleep over at friends' places just to get a good night's rest.

Apart from that, everything here is just perfect. I even love the wet and changeable weather. Changeable means that we get to see the sun almost every day -- today being an exception, perhaps... :)