After three cosy weeks living on an airbed, it was time to move out. We found a rental in London's south-east and were lucky that it had space for a BBQ (so we could fend off home-sickness). Moving wasn't an issue - we didn't own much and the rental was semi-furnished with white goods and furniture. However, what we did lack was cutlery. We realised this on our first night when we had to improvise with a plastic container scoop to eat our vac-packed curry meal from the local Tescos.
When you move to a new country as an expat, you realize a couple of things during the process:
- Firstly, you can't take everything with you and some of it has to stay in storage - thankfully our parents were very supportive with basement space.
- Secondly, you don't know for sure when you will be back home - so a 'free' and unlimited storage agreement is quite important.
- Thirdly, you need to re-purchase everything that you decided not to bring with you. This often means buying the domestic items that you already have / where given as engagement presents, but are inconveniently back in Australia in storage.
Stocking up on household items became a priority - we needed a new kettle, cups, cutlery etc to fill empty cupboards in our semi-furnished rental. We were faced with a choice between buying quality, comes with the benefit of being able to bring the items home as 'spares'; or buying with the intent to dispose at the local charity store when it is time to call it quits with our expat life.
However buying 'cheap' is often a necessity when you are unemployed and needed to fork out a considerable amount of money for rental bond and prepayment of rent - beware the 6 months policy if you don't have a guarantor or any sort of UK rental history. Lucky for us, we were well serviced by public transport and small businesses selling bargain household items - like a shopping trolley. We discovered that a simple shopping trolley is also the best way to carry bulky items like a mirror, iron, ironing board home from Argos when you don't want to wait all day for their delivery man to arrive.
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| Olie rolling our new purchases out of Argos |
Housewarming
After all the domestic essentials had been purchased, we invited Uncle Collin over for a BBQ but were soon thwarted by some fickle London weather. The gusty overcast weather kept our guest indoors with his beer whilst Olie braved the elements to execute the cooking.
The next set of purchases were focused on getting ourselves some home-comforts, including cushions for £2.50 from the local store, a pair of cute slippers, and venturing out to a haberdashery market stall to buy Voile embroidered material so that we could make our own curtains.
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| Cute and effective at keeping Mei's toes warm |
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Our new curtains
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This sub-title is based on our experiences with registering our names at the local medical clinic, as you need to do in London because apparently when ill, you cannot simply waltz into the local GP and demand service. After using Google to find a suitable local doctor and reading all the patient reviews, we settled for a small clinic up the road which offered a range of services spread over two locations. We also noted that registering for a GP is a bit like signing up your child to a primary school - you need to bring proof of address to see if you were lucky enough to fall within their catchment zone.
Armed with our rental contract and utility bill statements, we walked up to the receptionist and soon sat right back down with a number of forms to fill in. The first form looked rather innocent – personal details, dates since arrived in UK etc...However at the half-way point of the page, we noticed a need to categorize our ethnicity.
Olie then settled for the category on the bottom right hand corner ‘Other-Ethnic’ - the undefined minority classification.
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| Olie fell into the 'other' category |
The next part of the paperwork requested information about lifestyle choices. Questions focused on how often we exercised? Did we smoke? How much did we drink? To the latter question we had to think, stop and confer our answers - although it probably wasn't great to begin our medical history in the UK by lying to a doctor!
So how much alcohol had we drunk in the past week? Well, as we were still in a holiday mood, had not started working. We had in fact been indulging ourselves in the name of research to get a true feel for English pub culture. And beer is cheap relative to the price of other things. So we concluded that perhaps a standard drink in English terms is based on the standard piece of glassware, a pint. So surely our level of consumption hadn't been that bad!
So how much alcohol had we drunk in the past week? Well, as we were still in a holiday mood, had not started working. We had in fact been indulging ourselves in the name of research to get a true feel for English pub culture. And beer is cheap relative to the price of other things. So we concluded that perhaps a standard drink in English terms is based on the standard piece of glassware, a pint. So surely our level of consumption hadn't been that bad!
However, two days later we received a nice letter not only welcoming us to the council and for registering with the GP, but also a short note: "The health questionnaire that you filled in at registration highlights that you may be drinking to a level that could possibly be harmful to your health”
Hmm...
The letter then requested us to complete another questionnaire and provided the option of making an appointment with a ‘Health Care Assistant’, presumably to discuss our results. And there was a further attached questionnaire, ironically titled ‘AUDIT – Alcohol Users Disorders Identification Test’
So Olie and I audited our health.
Answering questions like:
How often do you have a drink that contains alcohol?
How often in the last year have you needed an alcoholic drink in the morning to get you going?
How often do you have 6 or more standard drinks on one occasion?
Note: A pint of regular beer / lager / cider = 2 standard drinks, also surprisingly does a 175ml glass of wine, with a significant 9 standard units in a bottle; hate to tally up how we fared on the day of the Royal Wedding
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| Our Royal Wedding stash |
Luckily we scored in the range of ‘8-15 standard drinks’ = hazardous drinking, as opposed to ’16-19 standard drinks’ = harmful drinking or ‘20+’ = possible dependence.
So to give our bodies a short-break, we decided to embark on an alcohol free streak. This lasted all of 3.5 days and ended when we received a complementary glass of red wine at a Spanish restaurant in Soho. Moderation is the goal - unfortunately our social life and lack of will-power just seem to get in the way.
So to give our bodies a short-break, we decided to embark on an alcohol free streak. This lasted all of 3.5 days and ended when we received a complementary glass of red wine at a Spanish restaurant in Soho. Moderation is the goal - unfortunately our social life and lack of will-power just seem to get in the way.
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| Walking around town after breaking our dry spell |
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