Pong…pong - how the unemployed spend their days

Five gruelling days of jobhunting later, Jules has a telephone interview on Thursday for an actual job (albeit a permanent one) and I have two interviews lined up with agencies. And somehow we dragged ourselves away from the phone and internet connection to go to the tennis at Queen’s Club on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon so it hasn’t been all gloom and doom.

The tennis at Queen’s was a great experience – we only had to queue for about half an hour and we got to see some great matches. On Wednesday we got charity returns (i.e. 5-quid resold tickets) for Centre Court and watched Lleyton Hewitt and Mark Phillipoussis lose at speed to Bjorkman and Mrinyi. Since then we have been watching on TV and even Wom is getting quite into it.

We have been to see two flats. The first was through an agency, in a mews complex. It was a nice modern two bedroom flat which would have been fine, except that it was (gulp) 300 pounds a week and because we don’t have jobs the agency would require 6 months rent in advance. Which, in case you were wondering, is about 9000 pounds once you include 6 weeks bond! So we thought we wouldn’t do that, on reflection.

The second one was a raised ground floor flat on Grafton Square, which as the owner said repeatedly, is the street in Clapham. It was a very small one-bedroom flat for 265 per week. The kitchen and bathroom and bedroom were all fine but the living room was small and somewhat grotty – ancient grubby carpet and only one non-fold-out couch. However, it did have an amazing garden. You went down some steps from the kitchen onto a decent-sized lawn, a paved area with six-seater outdoor table, and behind that a moat with goldfish, a little bridge and a fountain at one end, then behind that a raised brick area with two sunloungers. There was also a beautiful resident cat – the people who own the flat own the whole house and have recently moved out of the raised ground floor flat into the upper stories after having a baby but the cat still seems to live downstairs.

So we dithered about it, decided that we could cover up the grotty carpet with a rug and get a few potplants, and finally texted the guy to say we liked it but we would need a table and he texted back to say fine – dining or coffee? Then this morning Jules got a call from an agent about an ‘excellent contract in Cambridge’ and I started to have fantasies about an actual house, where I could lie in the garden all summer waiting for my husband to come home with a sack of cash. So in the end Jules has been put forward for the job in Cambridge and we turned the flat in Grafton Square down. To be fair, it wouldn’t have been any good for visiting relatives.

Tomorrow we are off to Potters Bar to see Geoff and Heike, who have rented a 4-bedroom house. Hopefully that will be good positive reinforcement of the decision not to move into a shoebox! But if anyone else has anything helpful to say at this point we’d like to hear it!