Australians in London, A Guide For The Bewildered.

I have been meaning to write this for a while, but since Brian and Louise are coming over in a few months I’m spurred to get it done. This semi-structured rant is a keyboard-dump of some of the things I’ve learned since being here in the mother country.

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Making sawdust

Finally got to spend some time in the shed – interspersed with dealing with the dog , and a bunch of running around. We got the roof rack on the Panda early Saturday morning, went Wickes (which is the English equivalent of the Australian Bunnings) and loaded up the roof rack with ½” ply and a dozen 2″x4″x8′. The timber calculations were… rough… so I was not sure that I would get two benches out of what I had or not. So I spent about 10 hours over two days turning the pile of bits into the first of two putting-stuff-on-top-of benches. At the end, I found I had estimated correctly, and I have exactly enough timber left to make a second one, which I will begin next week. This week has to be about preparations for the Towton walk.

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Cheaper Than Therapy

I’ve finally – thanks to Delia seeing something on Facebook – gotten a lease on a space that I can use as a workshop. It’s a few minutes bike ride up the Thames, in a converted shipping container (or rather two, joined together). The rent is reasonable, and the space is probably more than I really need. It’s pretty rudimentary and will probably be freezing in winter, but it’s definitely A Shed. I’ve moved all my tools in, and started settling.

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First World Problems

So we have installed Rocki units in three rooms in the flat – the lounge, the bedroom, and the library. I just started playing a Clannad album from my laptop to the speakers in the lounge. Much to my bewilderment, a moment later a different album started playing in the bedroom.

I thought it may have been coming from my phone, so shut that down. Kept going. From my iPad? Shut that down. From my partner’s phone? Shut that down. Something bizarrely broken with AirFoil on my laptop? Shut down the laptop. Has someone managed to hack our network and is pranking us for lulz? Is it the NSA? MI5?

Nope. One of the cats had sat on the stereo remote control in the bedroom and started playing a CD.

I need a simpler life.

Woolwich to Old Street

I’ve been meaning to write up some of the routes I take through London. Or Mordor, as a cycling acquaintance calls it, which adds some frisson of terror to the whole exercise. One does not simply ride into London. I will try to pepper this with relevant Google street view pictures, but won’t be attempting to embed maps. I find that their tools for doing that are decidedly unfriendly, and seem to assume you are working on a 24″ screen with a tablet rather than a 15″ laptop with a trackpad.

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