We just moved to a new flat over the weekend. What a nightmare. We hadn't wanted to move, but our landlord decided to sell the place, since the london real estate market has started what is likely to be a long dive. Of course, if we owned our own place we wouldn't be subject to the whims of a landlord, but buying a place now is a) very difficult for first time buyers, thanks to the property bubble, and b) probably not a good idea at this point in the bubble.

The new flat is not far from our old one, but it very close to transportation - we can see the tube platform from our kitchen window. We can hear the trains as well. Although they're not as loud as the place we lived last year, which was right next to the mainline tracks, combined with the busy street (with crosswalks that bleep every half minute or so) and air traffic landing at Heathrow, the background noise level is pretty high with the windows open. A compensation is the large rooftop terrace, from which we an see the London Eye, the Gherkin, BT Tower, and Wembley Stadium.

It's a recently building, one of these "luxury" flats which are the only new housing being built these days, i.e. a shoebox crammed with shiny chrome fittings. The kind of trendily designed place that shows very nice, but turns out to have various practical flaws once you actually try to live in it.

It's going to be a week or two before we get our ADSL line in - only 1 Mbps instead of the 2 Mbps we had at the old place (luxury my ass!), and the only wifi signal anywhere in this 7 story, yuppy-packed building is an encrypted one from a nearby estate agent that I can pick up, but not use, on the balcony. So my email access is limited, but the worst thing is not having Google at my fingertips.

Friends, family, I'll try to send our new contact details around once my data drip-feed is restored, in the meantime both of our mobile numbers are still the same.