On the trials of buying a house

So over the Christmas holidays Mark and I decided; right Glasgow - we love this city, we're not going anywhere in medium-term future, let's buy somewhere to live. To be honest, the thought wouldn't have crossed my mind, but my husband is an accountant - nuff said.

So we decided that since we had a long holiday that extended a bit into January, on our return to Glasgow, we would blitz this buying a flat and nail it in a couple of weeks max.  We did manage to wade through a sea of mortgage providers and all that melarkey pretty successfully in that time period - Mark made a ton of spreadsheets, as he does, so that did the job quite nicely. We manage to view a good few flats in that time. But as for finding the flat, well it's mid Feb and considering the fact we still haven't found one we're happy with yet, we may have just been a little optimistic... See it turns out a nice flat in our budget is more than likely to have any of a whole range of problems.

Let me present to you three flats that we have seriously considered to illustrate:

Numero Un: Let's call it Knotweed flat - Great flat, convenient area for everything, good amount of space, has a converted attic (!!), very cheap!

Read the home report and... Japanese Knotweed in the back garden, asbestos in the roof, falling apart chimney (bear in mind this is a top floor flat) to name but a few "3" (the worst rating it could possibly get) level serious issues.

Do we take the risk or do we not?! A dilemma that we have yet to make up our minds conclusively about...

Numero Deux: aka Flat of Bling. This flat was in pretty much the same location as the first, had almost as much space minus the converted attic. Neighbours were nice (we even knew one of them!) Home report looked pretty good, the deco was in their words "better than average". Not sure if "better than average" meant tasteful; think silver sparkly toilet seat and multi-coloured lights embedded into the dining room floor.

Now you may think, what's the problem here, decoration is easy enough to change. But it's hard to consider changing it, when the less than likeable rather irritating owner gives a running commentary as she takes you round a tour of the flat on how much everything cost (a lot!), how she put her heart and soul into making it hers. As horrible as I found some of it, I didn't really feel I had the heart to buy it off her and then tear out all of her heart-felt blingy work.

Matter has been taken out of our hands at any case, because our solicitor thinks it's too expensive for what it is, and is currently trying to barter down the price. Secretly felt rather relieved about that.

Numero 3: "The house in a tower block" ticked all the boxes and it wasn't too far from where we lived now. The owners were really nice; that always sways me more than I think it should! But it seemed I was more attached to the area we had been aiming for because we thought we could afford it more than I thought, and the thought of moving further away from the beloved area where I work just now or some of my fantastic esol students who have recently also moved into that general direction was surprisingly less than appealing. We've had to change one of those tick boxes.

That's just a small number of the flats we've seen, and there have been some other possibilities on the horizon so it's not like this is all there is! But it most definitely has become more confusing and complicated than we thought it would become.

Here's some advice, if you ever fancy buying a place yourself and have never done it before.

- Have an idea of what you're looking for before you go looking for it - it saves time.
- Read the home report before you go view it. You get better at that the more you do it. I have become a master in home report skimming, I just keep my eyes out for those buzz words for example having a pitched roof is apparently pretty important, my dad convinced me on that one!
- An important question to consider, especially if it has any structural issues: is there a factor, and if there's no factor, are the neighbours nice and approachable?
- Turns out finding and buying a house/flat in 2 weeks is a little unrealistic, allow for a bit more time than that if you're gonna do it.
- Get a good solicitor you can trust, that helps a LOT!

Have to say, I'm enjoying the adventure of not knowing and having to let God lead us inch by inch.

Just watch this space.

pure dead brilliant

I have to admit, I am very easily influenced when it comes to accents and slang. My accent changes a lot depending on who I'm talking to. But I have found that a year and a half of working in Maryhill is more than enough time for the teenage lingo there to infiltrate my every day vocab and not just when I'm at work.

I have been inadvertently using: 

- The classic adverbs "pure" and "dead", as illustrated below in Prestwick Airport's slogan "Pure dead Brilliant".

- "actual" used instead of "really" e.g. instead of "Are you really!?" in Maryhill you will hear "Areyeakchul?!"

- "stay" where the vowel is /aɪ/ as in the vowel in "bye"

I have yet to pick up such beauties as:
- the past tense of jump "jamp"

- "am ar" = I am

You've gotta love the peculiarities that sprout from the English language!

A good walk to do.

The Fife Coastal Path - who would have thought. The East Coast, tamer than the West but rather pretty. We started at my parents, conveniently located a couple of miles away from the start from the path.

It's signposted by this.

(nice colourful logo don't you think?)

The route from North Queensferry to Aberdour, starts in some nice woods. There were lots of dog walkers and I mean LOTS of dog walkers. Beware of over-enthusiastic wet dogs. We got clambered over twice.

Do this bit in the spring.

Then you hit the weirdest part of the route. As the woods open out and you can see the coast curve inwards, you pass a quarry on your left and a rubbish dump on your right. (Yes we are weird enough to have photographed it!)

Then you pass through the town of Dalkeith and as you come out and hit the coastline again, there are some rocks (if you're quiet enough you may come across an unsuspecting merman), and an industrial relic/musical instrument.

Then some more woods, beautiful views...

...blossoms, followed by a walk around a "dangerous" radioactive part of the firth, then finally long straight roman-road-esque paths lined with daffodils and more dogs of course (I banned Mark from the camera at this point as I was despairing that we would actually finish the walk what with the amount of times we stopped to take photos).

And finally Aberdour...

A good walk all in all.

I was tidying our room the other day and I found these (two of four, I don't know what happened to the other two) ...

In case you were wondering, yes both these cards are for me, and no I am neither a nephew nor a gran.

From some of my Chinese elt students of very low-level English. I love them :)

An urban afternoon out

Trawling the old blog posts which I wrote and never posted I found this - written in draft back in October. Sadly Mark didn't pass that exam, so we will have to repeat the trip after he sits it again (in May)!

Picture the scene. It's the day after Mark has his last accountancy exam. He's off work. I'm off work. We have planned for a wee trip to a beautiful loch, or some nice hill somewhere for some fresh air, a good climb, purty scenery. Instead we unintentionally catch up on some much needed zzzzs, surfacing around midday. We still wanted to go somewhere new but didn't really have time to go far as I was meant to be playing a gig that night. So we hop on a train for 10 minutes and arrive at the other end of town - the East End (dumdumDUM)!

It's not somewhere either of us have spent a lot of time. Although at one point I was going through to Parkhead roughly once a week to visit, get fed by and tutor an asylum seeker friend in everything from languages to computer programming. But it turns out the East End is a pretty interesting place, completely different vibe to the west end for sure, but also the south side or in the north where I work. We didn't quite follow this walk but we were inspired by it. Although I have to say, labelling Belgrove (allegedly one of the most unpleasant hostels you could end up in, in Glasgow) as "fabulous" and "Art Deco" did in my mind take it a little too far.

So we wandered about, saw the interesting clock tower and some of the derelict factories, noticed hidden studios and other gems, passed Celtic Park, had a nice wee chat with a lady in a burger van, had a couple of rolls and sausage, Mark had some Irn Bru. Well, when I say "had" I mean, walked down the street swigging his can with great show and pride (I tell you, the boy is just desperate to be Scottish!) Talking of Irn Bru, I have never in my life seen so many deals on Irn Bru cans in shop windows. Even the local fruit and veg shop brandished a hand-written sign - "4 Irn Bru cans for £1.10"! Had a very cheap tea in a huge mug. There are few things that irritate me more than food made to look "exquisite" which leaves your stomach making noises like an aggravated elephant, this includes tiny teacups of tea. Wandered through the Forge Shopping Centre - big place, easy to get lost - and caught the bus home just before it started to chuck it down with rain.

So yes - East End of Glasgow - great place. Despite the rep, it's still well worth a visit!

patter at the concert halls

I don't like working evenings or weekends, it may be a hassle to work around my daily routine, I occasionally enjoy the music and sometimes have to deal with some lunatic drunks but I kept my concert halls job on for one good reason - I love the variety of people I meet and get to work with.

The other day (while Mark was away in Dumfries and I was missing him a lot) I was very humbled when I chatted to a girl whose cohabiting boyfriend had moved away for a job as he wasn't able to find work locally when he graduated. They'd had to move out of their flat which they had furnished themselves and had to put all their furniture into storage because she couldn't afford to pay the rent herself. And I thought I had it hard!

This evening I learnt that Polish hairdressers who work in the East End often end up changing their names so people will actually let them cut their hair otherwise they think they won't understand them. Fact. From an East End man who knows a lot of Polish hairdresser students.

Love the people and love their patter :)

Lost and Found

I was so excited about this I had to blog about it!

This ring had been lost for over 3 months

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Thought it was lost in the flat, raked the place and couldn't find it. We'd almost given up hope that we'd ever find it, thinking it might have slipped through our big creaky old floorboards, which our landlady probably wouldn't let us pull apart to look underneath.

But last week, in Dumfries of all places, it has been FOUND!

It had been in Mark's work bag - he'd been unassumingly carting it about with him the whole time!

Made me want to have a "Found the ring party" which reminded me of this wee story. A person is definitely more exciting than a ring and God loves people a loooot more than I love my husband's wedding ring - woooft!

Also on the subject of lost and found:

The result of a three week long Christmas holiday beard growing experiment.

Where is yonder missing patch of beard?!

On the subject of food....

Humnomnom - my new over-used word.

Most memorable 5 foods/meals consumed in the last 5 months:

- In Portugal: bread made by housekeeper of the cottage we stayed in, and salad with avocado - mmmm with wine from the neighbouring vineyard - yummmm

- Tip top 4 course dinner with fantastic company: smmmashing crazy kebab with bread, rosemary, apricot jam, bacon, goats cheese starter, followed by full-on roast, followed by three desserts (trust Jamie to make 3 desserts including the infamous "gulrotkake" - look it up in a norwegian dictionary)

- Montellimar nougat - a gift from two lovely french lasses I met last week = impossible to stop munching.

- Flipping amazing "spicy canteloupe salad" - straight out of the recipe book made by these people which was a birthday gift from a lovely friend :)

- Hog roast at a yorkshire wedding, accompanied by the scrummiest salads, followed by a varied selection of yuuummm mini desserts, in a huge tent, on a beautiful summer's day, and there were open fires... need I say more.

Why do I feel so inspired to talk about food? Because I just took out a tray of brownies out of the oven and am trying very hard not to eat any :)

a few small discoveries

This week I learnt/re-learnt that

- With 4 weeks of training it seems my husband is able to jump from barely scraping half an hour runs without near exhaustion-induced collapse to being able to run a half marathon in an hour and 58 minutes (proud wife moment).

- Meeting and making new friends is amazingly fun!

- But really really good friends are hard to part with.

- Nougat from Montelimar is far too good to just eat a small chunk of, humnumnum

- To my surprise (though it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise) my old flatmate with almost non-existent French and new French friends with very little English have proven that with a little bit of effort and one or two common interests, language barriers don't stand up for long.

- And even more mysteriously, mediocre Scottish fiddle music can sooth the souls of pensioners inclined to bouts of grumpiness.

Back when the weather was good...

There were barbecues....

Lots and lots of barbecues.

Bowls in the park. Outdoor busking.

Freeeeesbeeeee

We celebrated our recent nupitals with a couple of scrummy cupcakes (courtesy of the McCullochs) out in the sun.

We celebrated the graduations of me ol flatmates at the art school degree show party with some boogying in the warm night air...

Oh how I miss the sun!

I click my heels

Aah such an amazing song, and the coolest piano riff at the end... siiiigh!

In snapshots

(thought I'd fill in the gaps since my blogging has been so infrequent this last year)


2009 began in the quiet English countryside near Worcester

I spent the best part of the first 3 months working on my maxi project

And celebrated in a sunny beer garden with Flat Stanley and others when I finished

I also came off commitee in February



Enjoyed the company of international students....

Finals were in April and May, and then I became a fiancée!

And then graduated in June!

The rest of the summer was spent attending balls, trying my hand at street charity fundraising, a trip to Jersey, applying for jobs, enjoying Glasgow in sunshine, attending several weddings, enjoying little second cousins

Leadered for the 4th time at SU Music Camp in July

Endured unemployment in August though this was made more bearable by the aid of a lovely temporary flatmate

Exchanged my female flatmates for a couple of boys, acquired a job, co-organised an international welcome team, started most of my volunteer work, moved church in September. Finished esol training, played with the band by the shores of Loch Ness in October

My mum was diagnosed with gall-bladder and secondary liver cancer (though the latter diagnosis was later revoked) in January and was completely recovered, cancer all gone and all, by November!

Party, party, snow, snow, work, work, celloing, conducting, seeing family, meeting the first of another generation in December

2009 ended in the quiet Worcester countryside with a rather terrifying (for me anyway) icy climb up the hills watching many fireworks down below

A crazy year with much in the way of happenings - and so much to be thankful for!r)

L'ironie francaise

It's been a while since I watched a good French film. I was just looking through this year's French Film Festival programme I'd forgotten how true the french film stereotype can be sometimes. Out of 12 blurbs that I read, 6 mentioned some kind of complicated sordid liason. Some of them are quite comical... my favourite has to be "Envoyés Speciaux" where apparently amongst the normal crazy lives of war correspondants in Baghdad, "Things also get complicated when Franck inadvertently sleeps with Poussin's wife before their mission." Inadvertently...?! Only in French films!

The last time I was in France I did however see one that didn't fit all the stereotypes - for one it had French actors speaking English!! Welcome is definitely worth seeing, being beautiful, thought-provoking though unfortunately also heart-breaking. You can watch the trailer here. Some of it is in English so hopefully you'll get the gist! Though good luck with the accents... Anyway I highly recommend it, go and see it while it's out in the UK during the festival!

items of stuff

Highlights from the collection of dust-collecting objects I have rescued from my parents' from a fate of inactivity, sitting in boxes or on shelves in my house untouched for years...

- 2 Calvin and Hobbes books = comic genius!
- "Baby Lion" my maneless, noseless oldest stuffed animal who in his long life has been lost and found several times, been through the washing machine, washed in the bath (didn't do wonders for his mane though) and played countless imaginary games.
- a photo album of the first ever photographs I've ever taken, most of them being of my sister (a grinning 4 year old, arranging her dolls in lines in order to teach, bathing them and posing in a variety of clothing - she hasn't changed much!)
- lots of old diaries - some rivetting entries from 1994 included:
"April 9th; we went to Dunoon by car. I was bored."
"January 16th: I tidyed my room" and then again on December 30th "I tidied my room again. It was my last chance." Apparently some things don't change...!

On the highs and lows of street charity fundraising

So I'd been trying my hand at this melarkey for just over a week... I got good at stopping people on the street, bantering with the ones I didn't stop, talking about the charity but as soon as they hit me with excuses I crumbled.
"Oh I'm really skint right now..."
"We're going through a transitional phase in life right now, we've had to cancel a lot of our standing orders to charities..."
"I'd like to think it through. Do you have a website?"

"Oh that's ok, don't worry about it, I totally understand..." is supposed to be followed up with what is called "objection handling" in charity fundraising which is a form of arm-twisting, or as they call it "allowing people to see things from the charity's point of view" but I could never bring myself to do it! So I've temporarily lost my job. Temporarily because I'm apparently a nice person to work with and good for team morale so they want to give me another bash at it. So when they move onto another campaign I'm going to try my hand at it again if I don't find something else in the mean time. Anyway it definitely wasn't a wasted experience even if I don't go back. I certainly learnt a lot, including such valuable knowledge as...
- How to stop people in the street (you have to stand in front of them and start chatting to them from a distance, not side on or close up or they'll just walk straight past)
- People are very friendly even in Edinburgh! (or at least when it's not raining)!
- I am not in any way, shape or form a salesperson (though I think I kinda knew that already)
- fundraising is a tough job... show some respect for your local street fundraisers!

To do Lists

I loooove to do lists, especially when I have lots of things to do or lots of things to look forward to. My post-exam to-do list was a rather long one including such items as "get hair cut" which I accomplished fairly quickly and easily and others such as "tidy room" which I still haven't quite got round to. The other week, inspired by a throwaway comment about how making a baby giggle was up there in my top 10 favourite things to do in life, I wrote a top 10 things to do in the summer list... which is as follows (in no particular order)

1. blow bubbles outside (and watch them sparkle as they burst)

2. amuse a baby or two to the point that it induces contagious giggling (Random I know - but it was what inspired the list in the first place. Also something that is easily achieved on a long sunny day in the park)
3. enjoy some live music (either some live jazz in somewhere like the 78 or Brel or something that inspires silly dancing like Samba Ya Bamba)

4. eat strawberries, sugar and cream very slowly (mmm mmm)

5. walk on grass in bare feet

6. paddle in the sea

7. eat copious amounts of icecream (in cones and outside)
8. go to something at the West End Festival (so I can accomplish 3. on the list)
9. jam (preferably outside in the park)

10. read at least 3 books (have already read one and a half and it's not even been 2 weeks yet!)

I realise many of these depend on sunshine however I seemed to have done most of them over the last couple of weeks so I guess that would be a good sign!

Another to do list which I had been forming in my head for a while now is one for the ensuing 12 months which sort of answers that terrifying question - "so what are you going to do now you've finished uni?"

The list is as follows...

1. Get married to Mr Mark Spybey - who is pictured below (this is liable to happen sometime in spring next year :D!!)

2. Learn a language (I can't quite make my mind up between Arabic, Mandarin, Polish, Russian and Farsi, though the first is looking to be the most likely option at the moment)
3. Keep hanging out with foreigners in some capacity (doesn't get more specific than that just now I'm afraid!)

I think I like to do lists as much as I like bullet points! :)

the final push

Things that have been getting me through the final push...

- coursemates - I love doing such a socially-conducive course! Studying for French oral exams was naturally a communal thing and certainly made for a less boring day! (I know what you're thinking Potter - they were real exams!!)
- And there's the fact that part of studying for french involves reading newspapers (in french of course) :D
- episodes of Doctor Who on iplayer
- copious amounts of jazz especially the Esbjorn Svensson and Brad Mehldau Trios - can't beat that piano-bass-drums combo!

11 days to go! Not that I'm counting or anything...

On accent imprinting

Lately Mark has started to pick up a wee Scottish twang which I can take at least some credit for, mostly consisting of him rolling his "r"s herrre therrre and everrrywhere. Words like "tomorrra" and "allrrright" sound slightly out of place in amongst his Midlands vowels but I'm hoping those will soon get Scottishified too!

Accents are contagious! Until the age of 4 I had this kind of well-spoken non/almost Sri Lankan accent. As soon as I hit nursery this became a broad Queensferry accent which I can still turn on like a tap, and since uni my accent has got somewhat corrupted by northern-irishness amongst other things. Bizarrely enough my mum thinks I start to say "like" more often between words when I've spent a bit of time speaking french! Ben c'est comme ca quoi!And then there's all those little habits and turns of phrases we pick up from people. I've picked up all sorts, from adding the suffix "-ness" to the end of all of my adjectives and talking endlessly about "the ban'er" in my school days to adding "so I do" at the end of my sentences and saying everything is "actually ridiculous!" - that would be your fault Michie! Sometimes I pick them up accidently like when I start imitating someone's accent or mannerisms out of appreciation or just to tease them and somewhere down the line it becomes part of my own repetoire.I have a friend who picks up mannerisms from international students and keeps them for at least the year after they leave. It's as though they've left their imprint on him or that it's some kind of prolonged emotional connection.

I think there must be some kind of emotional connection or subconscious choice involved. I never picked up speech habits from people I didn't like or feel some kind of affinity with. Needless to say Mark likes Scotland. And I picked up the Scottish accent with such force when I was little because I was adamant that I was Scottish through and through, nothing more, nothing less. But there's more than just choice involved. I only pick up speech habits when I've spent a lot of time with someone. I do know the odd person who picks up an accent as soon as they start speaking to someone, even if it's one that's reasonably unfamiliar to them, but I am definitely not like that! I quite often forget that it's something similar with us and God. I long to be more like Jesus in character. But in order to make it happen, I need to spend time with him, to really get to know him. And I need to make some kind of conscious or subconscious choice to imitate him. The veil has been taken away and that's a huge deal! ...so why do we so often forget, take this for granted... why don't we just look to Him.

On voice neurocognitive psychologists and diagrams

On Tuesday, my sort of supervisor showed me what she'd done to my data the other day to put in her own paper. It was this intelligent and beautiful rainbow spectrum of a graph, all blue, red and yellow, and where data overlapped it became purple and orange... it was preeetty! And it was the data that I'd collected! Sadly I won't be using it for my own project cos that would feel too much like cheating. Turned out she wasn't the only working on pretty diagrams. That same morning, one of the other francophones in the lab also showed me his crazy complex multiple graph diagrams that he'd been creating. And then yesterday (after a right cuffufle of forgetting the right usb stick with the version of my project that I'd been intensively working on over the last couple of days) I got some highly useful feedback from my actual supervisor.
At least half of what he said could be condensed into this:-
- "Put in some cool diagrams here and here and here and here"
(it may have been a summary of what he said but I assure you, the word "cool" made an appearance on several occasions). So I had a go at some "cool" diagrams today. I made a reasonable effort I think, but none of them come even close to the rainbow spectrum graph I saw on Tuesday :( siiiigh...

Lessons for the week:
- Programming matlab is a useful skill to learn
- Voice neurocognitive psychologists like "cool" diagrams
- Never put your usb stick in your jeans pocket so you don't lose it. You will inevitably forget to take it out the next day

Man am I becoming geeky... see what final year is doing to me!

Des bizarreries d'aujourd'hui

Today I was a little perplexed by

- my dad refusing to put ham in his sandwich this morning which contained the apparently satisfying and tasty combination of humous and chilli sauce
- a very lost and confused Indian woman with near incomprehensible english running very late for a job interview, who I went on a wild goose chase with, first looking for Buchanan Galleries, then Buchanan Bus Station, then for a bus to Bearsden. She was hoping that I spoke Hindi...
- a giant (at least 6 feet high and 12 feet wide) Adidas shoe box, literally blocking my path, in the middle of the square round the corner from my flat

Ah the joys of those petits bizarreries which render life all the more interesting!