Hope springs eternal

Hope springs eternal, originally uploaded by Racmol.

I rather like the light in this photo, taken one sunny day last week. It looks like we're going to have a good showing of bulbs this year.

Jules is a bit gutted as he took Sofia out in the garden a while back and they each planted a tub of bulbs. He planted his carefully at the right depth and discarded any showing signs of mould.

Sofia went to town with her tub, stuffing in every bulb she could find randomly, including rotten ones, and scarcely covering them at all. A few weeks later, her tub is showing about 5 green shoots and there is zero growth in Jules's tub. Maybe when you're planting as late as the end of January, you should disregard the instructions and plant very shallowly.

Yesterday we went for our first explore of a London suburb we don't know. You'll be hearing a lot more on this subject as we try to find a house we like in an area we like, at a price we can afford.

My money is on Surrey, which looks (at least on the internet) lovely, but Jules fancies a move north, so we thought we'd take the train from Queen's Park to Watford Junction. Willy likes trains, so at least the day wouldn't be totally wasted, was our thinking.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with the train so we had to get out at Harrow and Wealdstone, and then service was suspended north of that point.

It started to rain. Jules's phone had no coverage and couldn't produce a map for us. We walked up the high street on the Wealdstone side of the station (chicken n chips, kebab shops, Iceland) and when we got to the top Jules said 'In a word, no'.

Next week we'll go by car. The problem with taking the train is that, for example, you know there's supposed to be a nice bit of Harrow but it's not so easy to find on foot. Also the troops get rebellious after a bit.

Next week we'll go south west. I like the look of Sutton, Cheam and Surbiton. I'm trying to prepare myself mentally for the fact that any house we find in Surbiton will not be like Tom and Barbara's from The Good LIfe - but even so, it still looks nice.

What happened to the idea of moving back to Wellington or Auckland? In a word, money. While it would be lovely to see more of our families, we're not sure how much more we would actually see them and we ARE sure that these are very expensive cities where we wouldn't have a lot of disposable income.

Still very keen to mind Sara and Luke's farm for them for a few months/a year if they want to go away again though :) New Zealand is beautiful if you take the property ownership side out of the equation.