It’s been yet another quite wild week! After Friday’s huge painting day, I had a quiet morning of packing on Saturday and then hopped on the train down to Burgess Hill. One of the girls from my book club works at a winery called Artellium, so she had organised a tasting and tour for a group of us. The weather was an extremely mixed bag so we started our day with a bit of tasting in a big barn space, before going on a walking tour around the vines, and then returning to finish the tasting and chat. Like most English vineyards, they had a lovely selection of sparkling, but they also had some really tasty still Chardonnay and rosé. I ended up buying a bottle of each of those, as they were quite different to anything I’d had recently and thought they’d be perfect for a sunny afternoon when we get one again! While I was enjoying this, Peter, Lee and Justin were finishing painting the bedrooms at the new place, so I headed back to the city and got back just in time to meet Lee and Peter at the Prospect for a pub dinner.

Very excitingly (although maybe that’s a bit sad), I had my vaccine booked on Sunday morning! After Skyping mum and dad in the morning, I headed in to Guys Hospital and got my jab before taking some bags down to Penge. Luckily I had very few symptoms other than a sore arm so it didn’t interfere with the moving process at all. When Peter woke up in the afternoon, we spent the rest of the weekend and Monday packing up the apartment.

Tuesday was finally moving day, so after Peter sleeping all morning following night shift, our movers arrived and we spent the afternoon shuffling boxes in and out of the truck. At about 5 we were all finished and spent a little while putting together the bed and unpacking some kitchen bits before heading to the pub for dinner. There’s a lovely pub with a really nice terrace area just up the road, and it was perfect to collapse onto a bench and have a prepared meal. 

We then spent the next two days alternating between unpacking at the new place and cleaning, tidying and patching up the walls at the apartment. An unpleasant surprise was to receive an email on Wednesday morning from our landlady containing photos of our moving van and saying she’d ‘received confirmation from a third party that we’d moved out’, claiming we’d broken our tenancy agreement (we hadn’t) and signing off with an address just around the corner from the new place. Considering that we never gave her our new address, and she’s never given us hers before, we inferred that meant that she’d followed the moving truck to the new place as well. Cue a visit to the police station! We made an online report from the flat on Wednesday, and shortly afterwards left the apartment to find the landlady right outside in her car. She left as soon as she saw us see her, but we got a phone call shortly afterwards from a police officer asking us to come in and make a statement regarding our report, as it sounded concerning. This was validating, so we did exactly that on Thursday, and explained the back story and the recent behaviour. If nothing else, at least we have it on the record alongside the police report we made in October. 

After finishing packing up at the apartment on Thursday we headed back down to the house and did some unpacking, including setting up a video camera doorbell for the front door, and got our bags packed for our Pennine Way trip!