Moving House

It’s been a long time coming. We have been looking for somewhere quiet and suitable for two dogs, including a blind one, for a while. Most ex-pats with animals tend to stay in Chief Secretary Housing (owned and operated by SHG) as they allow pets. Unfortunately there are very few private landlords that permit animals and those that do; the property is not always suitable for disabled ones!


We had pretty much decided to stay at Piccolo Hill where we are settled, have an uninterrupted view of the Barn and Flagstaff and a safe garden for the dogs, but literally a couple of days after our return to the Island in September, the local person in the ‘know’ AKA as ‘Small Change’ got in touch to say he had the perfect place for us. No harm in going to look, we decided and the next day we were introduced to ‘Spring Knoll’, a fairly large imposing house on the opposite side of the Island, located in Scotland! Luckily it’s not as cold as the UK counterpart, but it does rain more than in Longwood. The difference is it rains properly. Longwood spends more of the winter month in cloud, making it damper in that respect.


We love the house and the location and it’s relatively dog friendly (and the landlord is happy with our dogs) Nothing in our world is ever that simple though. The house is pretty much unfurnished – not even a cooker, so having just left our furniture in storage in the UK, we now need it out here. We’d shipped some items from the UK during our holiday, arriving at the end of October, but nothing like we’ll need at the house!
A shopping frenzy ensued with items now en-route from the UK including a 4 piece lounge suite, bedroom and dining furniture, not to mention a cooker, washing machine and curtains! Expensive, but worth it we hope.
I wasn’t going to write about our move yet, but the car-share drive in this morning made me laugh out loud! We often have some hilarious moments on the drive in, recounting events and stories. This time it came from Martin. We were discussing using parental controls on the set-top box (I use that phrase with caution – it’s nothing like TV anywhere else and is very limited)
‘I’ve tried that’ he declared ‘Did you not here about my problems?’ He then started to tell us how he was trying to access the parental control menu, when he accidentally press the wrong button and ended up with Arabic subtitles! That wouldn’t have been too bad, but because he didn’t know how he’d done it, he couldn’t undo it! Having already had to recently call ‘Sure’ out for another TV related issue, he was reluctant to do so again. It took almost a week to remove the subtitles!
This for some strange reason, reminded me of a conversation Andy and I had had the previous evening.
He had been at Spring Knoll, building my new utility room and had been clearing the gutters of debris with Small Change. He brushed against the plumbing waste pipes on the exterior wall, serving the bathroom and toilet. The pipes were not actually fixed to anything – not even each other, so they collapsed like a pack of cards! (Luckily Andy is one of the people who can only see how to make good, so was actually pleased to find it, so it can be sorted!) It makes us laugh how such bodged things actually work quite well until you touch them.
Following Small Change’s inspection of Andy’s plumbing work, both in the utility room and externally, he has declared Andy ‘a qualified St Helenian plumber’