That’s been quite longer than one week since the last update. It’s been quite a busy time. Two of our applications for apartments were cancelled, as we learned later, because of our citizenship. We had a nice car trip to Oxford, London and Colchester. And ultimately we moved into a house that we rented through booking, although for a much higher price than initially expected.
We applied for an apartment over a month ago. They had been dragging things for over three weeks before finally cancelling it. That time they said it was because of the afordability criteria, although they never asked for our bank statement showing our savings. We then applied for another apartment. They were much faster and turned down our application in about five days. One of our references shared with us that during the reference process they had mostly had to persuade the other side that we were not some kind of “Russian spies”. The other side didn’t seem to be persuaded anyway.
I could understand many concerns, given current geopolitical situation, but spies… come on! What kind of looser spies we should’ve been to be looking for somewhere to rent for an adequate price for so long? Being unprepared for every step of the renting process? And my wife and children can hardly speak English, they’re just learning.
I have no idea what spies are like, but I would imagine they would have every document in order, definitely all housing questions arranged in advance. And they would speak the level of English that could make most natives doubt if they really can speak good English themselves. Perhaps, they would also know what they were looking for. That makes us a complete opposite of that image. And maybe I don’t know anything about spies, but this whole situation is ridiculous.
To distract ourselves from that very unsettling events, we decided to rent a car and go on a three-day trip to Oxford, London and Colchester. I wanted to show my family the places that I had visited 20 years ago. My memory failed me only in Oxford, where I couldn’t find the beautiful building that I had remembered before. All other places were just as I had kept them in mind. The trip was refreshing and entertaining. Everyone seemed to enjoyed the views. Mike had dreamed of seeing Big Ben, and he was impressed when he saw it in real life. And Nika was most interested in the places I learnt and lived during my stay in Colchester.
Last week was finally time for us to move out of the apartment that we were kindly offered to stay in during the process of selling it. We’d been thinking of buying a used car to save on £100 a day renting cars. We’d had two concerns with that, our non longer-term address and vague prospects of having nice insurance offer. But just on Thursday, the day before our move out, I called up three insurers and, on the final call, got a nice quote of £780. So we went ahead an bought a 2009 Ford C-Max. It’s rusty, has some issues that will hopefully be addressed by the dealership tomorrow. But it drives rather nicely, and it allowed to move houses on Friday.
And for the place to go, we’d finally given up on looking for normal rentals and went with an option from Booking.com. It cost us almost three times the price that we hoped for initially, but it includes the council tax, utility bills, broadband and parking. The area is nice. It’s a bit remote from the Sheffield city center, but with a car that’s not much of an issue. What’s more important, we didn’t have to go through that goddamn referencing which failed us twice just because of our citizenship.
So we’ve got a little bit of calmness now, I hope. The stress didn’t go without consequences, though. I fell sick the day after our moving in, when I could emotionally relax just a bit. And I haven’t been able work on the illustrations for Panda Pu because my hands have been trembling immensely since when I discovered why our applications failed. The reason meant that we just couldn’t do anything about it, and given that nobody told us about it openly made it impossible to even discuss any ways to resolve the problem. It was a big emotional hit for me. I’ve never had my hands tremble like that before. But I hope I’ll recover soon and will be able to draw normally.
Leave a Reply