Thursday was full of ups and downs! We had a lovely home-cooked breakfast with Hugh and Caroline in the morning and spent the morning chatting before he drove us in to Corbridge to the Post Office. For some ridiculous reason, we’re required by our tenancy agreement to post our notice (one of the reasons the landlady is claiming we haven’t given notice) so we were attempting to post another letter. There was all kinds of fuss with Peter’s pre-bought QR code shipping label so we ended up giving up and planning to do it in London, so Hugh dropped us off at the station and said goodbye. We were about 10 minutes into our train trip from Corbridge to Newcastle when Peter got the call from the conveyancers to say the house sale had completed… before the phone cut out due to poor reception. Luckily they sent him a message a few minutes later clarifying that it had indeed completed and we were free to go and get the keys when we wanted. We’d already planned in advance to get the keys tomorrow, so that was that! When we got in to Newcastle we had 20 minutes to spare, so went and got some lunch sandwiches, snacks and a bottle of champagne for the big train home.

It was about a three hour train ride back to London, and we mostly just caught up on reading and watched some Fringe. We got back at 2:50 and quickly headed across the road to a Post Office to send off the letter of notice, as we wanted it to be delivered by tomorrow. We then headed back to the apartment, which all seemed in order (aside from some sad plants), to throw on a load of washing and do our Covid tests which were required for a Covid pass for BrewLDN.

At about 6, we hopped on the train down to Surrey Quays and found our way to Printworks, the venue for BrewLDN. It was a huge factory-type space with open halls for food, music and beer, and after our tickets and Covid passes were scanned we made our way inside. It wasn’t too busy, and even later in the night it was very spaced out and quite easy to distance – good to know that everyone had to have a negative Covid test reported to the NHS to attend as well. We had a great evening of trying a range of interesting beers and had delicious steak and chips for dinner. It felt like an apt celebration of the house sale going through, particularly considering it was just around the corner from our apartment and is the last event we’ll attend before we move.