Goodbye to all this...

Mountview Road, and a distant london landmark

The Greek restaurant Arocaria, Weston Park, our roof terrace and Bubba's garden.

Hornsey Town Hall, another Crouch End cat

Lovely Stationers Park, the Zombie shop from Shaun of the Dead
Ally Pally

Nelson Road and the Clocktower

End Note

It seems extraordinary that over four months after Dave was offered his new job for North Yorkshire County Council, I find myself still in Crouch End writing this. Such is the process of buying and selling property in the UK. We may or may not be edging closer to exchanging contracts but until there are signatures on dotted lines anything could still happen. So for now we live in York in the week and return to being CrouchEnders at weekends.

Monday to Friday (or Monday to Thursday in my case), we are residing in a horrible staff flat on the University of York. Its main advantage is its cost, being very cheap, something which is hugely necessary given we're paying our London mortgage as well at the moment. For our money, we have a lakeside view, three pet spiders (called Goose, Duck and Coot in honour of the local waterfowl), furnishings and fittings that haven't changed since 1963 and our own fridge, which freezes everything we put into it instantly. We sleep on an inflatable double mattress as the flat only has a single bed. My main problem was the layers of kitchen grease and thick black dust coating everything inside when we moved in. University housekeeping is clearly not what it once was. Humans are ever adaptable creatures and so I've got used to it now, but coming back to our flat in Crouch End and our gloriously comfortable Warren Evans bed always feels so luxurious. At least the food on campus these days is quite decent - in fact it's better than a lot of restaurants we've been to in York. (The chef is allegedly award-winning, though this of course could just mean he's been given an ASBO.) And it’s cheap (about £3 for a dish) so we aren't worrying about catering for ourselves with the somewhat ropey scummy student kitchen facilities on offer.

I am no longer a subtitler. There, I said it. My official title is now Lab Manager for the Infant and Toddler Language Studies Research Team in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. The vacancy came up with spot-on timing and I was thrilled to be offered the job. Being a distinguished alumnus with useful contacts probably helped. We have an ESRC grant to study the “dynamic interactions” between perception and production in infant language acquisition. 60 babies will be studied between the ages of 9 and 16 months over the period between now and the end of January 2009. They will be filmed in the home and come into the lab to undergo speech perception experiments (conducted by me). So far so good – it’s very stimulating for me to have a focus in my life again after years of meandering along with freelance work. It’s even better to have a guaranteed monthly income and paid annual leave and a generous final salary pension scheme, having had to wait up to four months for subtitling companies to pay my invoices in recent times. I suspect my job description will end up including mopping up baby sick and trying to pacify 10 month olds who quite reasonably don’t want to be shoved into a dark, bank-vault-like soundproof booth to have lights and noises flashed at them. But I have the impression already that I’m going to love every minute of it.

My old department seems pleased to have me back, though I feel like I’ve time-travelled, seeing all my lecturers suddenly having aged ten years all at once. Linguistics is now based in Vanbrugh College in newly refurbished but unbelievably hot offices. We used to have our own building, which is now on the verge of demolition...once they've removed all the asbestos. It’s very disconcerting watching men in radiation suits wandering around somewhere we happily sat in every day for three years as students. They're building a new humanities research centre in its place, with a budget of 11 million pounds. My old phonetics professor showed me the plans and it should be fantastic, even though 11 million doesn't get them as much of a building as they wanted so they've had to scrub some of the more romantic sides of it, like a roof garden. The infant language studies team will move into there once it's finished, but of course my particular project will be over by then so I may never get to see it.

Dave's happy with his new job too, though he's entering a new department which is still being set up and restructured so not everything is in place that he needs. It's all serious management stuff though - meetings and jollies and delegation. The journeys to and from Northallerton haven't been too bad but will improve once he can walk to the station. York has new purple buses that look like trams - they're rather fine. Obviously my commute is very easy – it takes me two minutes to walk round the university lake to work. Lots of ducks, geese and bunnies to entertain us, and giant carp in the lake.

I do feel very old suddenly though - it's ten years this week since I graduated from York, and seeing this year's ceremonies made me very nostalgic. (Sad too, remembering being there with Mum and how proud she was of me... It would have been her 61st birthday tomorrow.) (And how strange to think Dave and I didn’t even know each other then, though our third wedding anniversary this September also marks the tenth anniversary of our meeting, beside Grey’s Monument in Newcastle-upon-Tyne). This year for graduation in York they installed a chocolate fountain on campus - none of that in my day, so plenty of reason to make the most of it now.

Recent events make it appropriate to tie up my CrouchEnding blog for good here as so many things I have written about have suddenly become relevant again. England is now smoke-free, which makes all of the real ale on tap in York pubs taste even better. Mark Morris was back at the Barbican with his simply divine Mozart Dances. London once again came under terrorist attack. Breast cancer patients are still not being diagnosed in time in the UK.

I will blog again, but in a different guise. If we ever actually get to move house, that is.

REBECCA

(The picture is taken from http://www.crouchender.co.uk/)

A River Runs Through It

It is only fitting that, with under two months left in London, we spend some time exploring its lifeblood, the River Thames. The sights along its banks have changed enormously since I have been in London – when I first started work in town in November 1998 there was no London Eye, no new Hungerford Bridge walkways, no Millennium Bridge, no Aquarium, no Portcullis House, no Tate Modern, no Gherkin, no City Hall, no St George’s Wharf, no Dome. There was only one tower at Canary Wharf and hardly anywhere to eat. It’s been thrilling to see the area develop and thrive.

The last major development in recent times on the South Bank (other than the appearance of some turf on the side of the National Theatre and some rather rather sexy Antony Gormley figures on the rooftops) has been the renovation of the Royal Festival Hall, which is now nearing completion. Dad helped the funding appeal for the building works by buying a seat in the balcony of the auditorium in Mum’s memory. This meant that he was sent free tickets for a preview “acoustic tuning” concert this week, for which I joined him. And we were completely blown away. Not only does the hall look stunning - it's kept its 50s retro look but it’s been enhanced, brightened and made totally übercool - they've employed one of the world's top acousticians to work on the sound. And it is breathtaking. I have never heard an orchestra sound so fantastic - and we were in the cheap seats. Every instrument rang rich, warm and perfect. There is no room for mistakes as everything is crystal clear. (They had brought in quite a dodgy choir and there was no masking that fact, alas.) I can't believe we're leaving London just as it gets a world-class concert venue on a par with Symphony Hall in Birmingham in terms of style, space and engineering, and even better in terms of its glass facades and picture windows, which afford Thames and Parliament panoramas to die for.

Another thing Dave and I did recently was to climb the Monument, something which I have avoided doing in my time in London because once the London Eye opened, it was a less tiring (if far more expensive) means of exploring the metropolis skyline from a great height. However, the vertiginous climb up the 311 spiral steps inside Christopher Wren’s column is very much worth the effort as it affords a completely different vista of the City than you can get from anywhere else (unless you happen to work in an office block nearby, I suppose). Plus you get a special certificate to mark your legs’ achievement. Our legs were so proud of themselves that we decided to continue on from the Monument along the Thames Path to Greenwich. Or rather to Canary Wharf, where we found the riverside path closed owing to yet more building work so had to cheat and hop on the DLR for a couple of stops. It was a gorgeous day and a gorgeous walk – past the Tower and Tower Bridge, St Katherine’s Dock and the surprisingly pleasant Wapping High Street with its apartment-converted warehouses and historic pubs, the most famous being the Prospect of Whitby. (It’s a policy for us at the moment to drink only in establishments that have a Yorkshire theme.) The Gordon Ramsay catering machine has just taken over the Narrow inn near Limehouse. The place was rammed as we walked past, but no sign of anyone eating his much-promoted faggots.

Canary Wharf has styled itself into a pretend form of London where everything works, unlike in the fusty and creaking traditional City. Dizzying skyscrapers, incredibly plush office suites with everything on tap, underground shopping malls, an efficient high-level monorail, slick bars and drones in pinstripe suits galore. I find it hellish. Greenwich is more my cup of tea with its olde-wolde drinking houses, naval background, Germanic style brewery and wonderful markets. It’s just a shame its famous pie and mash shop closed a few months ago.

On Saturday, we headed in the opposite direction along the river and ended up in Barnes, at the Wetlands Centre, another place on our list of things to do before we move. It’s such a tranquil place – we simply could not get over the quiet of its lagoon. Perhaps we were lucky with the route of the Heathrow flightpath that day. All you could hear was the twitter and cries of the birds, who are of course the star attraction. Is it a sign of approaching old age that I found myself rushing with great excitement towards a three-storey bird hide? It was surprisingly relaxing to sit in silence with a pair of binoculars to see what you could discover with a bit of patience. Sand pipers, herons, cormorants and a strange tufted bird that none of us could identify – had we inadvertently discovered a rarity? One area of the site is given over to unusual species of duck and geese from around the globe, all of whom are breeding at the moment, the resultant bundles of fluff on webbed feet seriously enhancing the cuteness factor.

The city we are moving to, York, also has a beautiful river with a giant Ferris wheel called an Eye and a smattering of parks, ancient pubs and palaces on its banks, albeit of course on a less grandiose scale. And just as the Thames is tidal, the rivers in York are also known for their surging and variable heights, but more because of their terrible tendency towards flooding. It’s actually quite hard to find a house to buy that isn’t blacklisted on the Environment Agency’s flood maps. Thankfully though, walks along a steady, flowing, majestic river will continue to dominate our lives.

REBECCA

Gold Mother

A happy event in Stationers Park: a mother duck and no less than 14 happy ducklings were seen waddling towards Weston Park primary school last week. That’s one hell of a multiple birth (and as a York University graduate, I’m quite a duck expert). A welcome and cheering stress relief from the recent weeks of living at the mercy of estate agents and getting nowhere.

Gold Mother – one of many wonderful songs performed by James at Brixton Academy on Friday night. After calling in at our friend Barry’s book launch party, we headed off for the night of our lives. How amazing that something you think you have lost forever can suddenly reappear in your life, even more beautiful than before.

But also how amazing that just when you think you have subtitled your worst ever programme, something even more extraordinary comes your way. This week it was live surgery. On the internet. Is this what the world has come to? So peed off with the appalling state of the NHS in Britain or too poor to have health insurance in the US that your only solution is to learn how to perform operations yourself from webcasts? Actually, it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared – it was a piece showing surgeons how to use a new-fangled type of stent in repairing aneurysms (to give it its full mouthful of a title: Replay of Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm Repair Featuring Cook Zenith TX2 Endovascular Graft and New Z-Trak Plus Introduction System) and so crushingly dull that you’d have switched off at the first angiogram. Learn more at www.or-live.com, but for God’s sake don’t try this at home.

REBECCA

The Big Brecht Fest

Our first trip to the Young Vic since it reopened after its rebuild and it did not disappoint - a double bill of early and virtually unknown Brecht plays. Rory Bremner's hilarious translation of bourgeois farce A Respectable Wedding was brilliantly played out by a stellar cast confined to a minuscule self-collapsing set, and The Jewish Wife, showing a woman packing her belongings to escape from Berlin in a menacing political climate in the 1930s, was so subtly tragic that it was simultaneously utterly compelling and almost unbearable. This was not the Brecht that I studied for German A-Level and it was so, so much the better for it.

REBECCA

Four exhibitions

..and four very contrasting views of London. Over the past fortnight (spurred on by the knowledge that soon we shall no longer be living on the doorstep of several world-class galleries), we’ve been to see the Hogarth at Tate Britain, Gilbert & George’s Major Exhibition at Tate Modern, Canaletto In London at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Unknown Monet pastels and drawings show at the Royal Academy.

Being more or less contemporaries with each other, I expected there to be interesting parallels to be drawn between the Hogarth and the Canaletto. Canaletto’s original wide-angle lens viewpoints of the city were perfect, fascinating and visually delightful, whilst Hogarth concentrated on the characters living within this architectural skyline, the harlots, rakes and social-climbing couples. What I hadn’t anticipated were the links between Hogarth’s witty, mildly anarchic sketches and parodies of London life in the 18th century and the massive photographic works of the oddball duo of Gilbert & George. Both use religious symbolism in their work and both have a determination that their work should be designed to reach mass audiences. Both have a fascination with the East End underworld, with sex and death and disease and bodily fluids. Whereas Hogarth stuck mostly to painting giant boils on the faces of syphilitic whores and philanderers, Gilbert & George take bodily fluids to whole new levels, examining them under microscopes and filling walls with humungous turds.

Can you make sense of what Gilbert & George have tried to achieve over the past 40 years from this colossal retrospective of their work at Tate Modern? I’m not entirely sure, but I definitely feel closer to understanding them than I ever have before. There is a bleakness and isolation in their Dusty Corners series that many Londoners experience on a daily basis. The Dirty Words images of ‘70s graffiti, with the vibrant scarlet lashed onto the black and white palate, hit you more directly in the gut than punk music. There is poignant loss and grief in the homage to their friends who fell like flies to AIDS in the ‘80s. Their recent focus on the symbols of religious extremism is chilling and thought-provoking to the point that you felt bereft that their final Six Bomb Pictures, produced specifically for this exhibition and partly as a response to the July 7th attacks, was consigned to a corridor outside the exit, as it just seemed so important, so now, so in-your-face relevant, that you wanted it to blast at you from all sides of a giant room.

The Monet exhibition contains only a few pastels of London but I mention here simply because whenever London life has got me down, one walk over Waterloo Bridge at sunset, looking at the views which have changed immeasurably since Monet painted them yet retain his sense of openness and light, reminds me of what makes this city great.

REBECCA

Yorkshire bound

Finally, finally, Dave has found the secret skeleton key that allows people into the impenetrable fortress that is senior management in local government. The excruciatingly gruelling recruitment processes he has been through over the past year is something that only he can write about. Suffice to say, what can you do when time and time again you’ve been told that you gave the best interview on the day, did the best verbal and numerical reasoning tests and gave the best presentation, but still haven’t got the job because another candidate already did the same job for a different council?

He has been appointed as Performance and Outcomes Manager for North Yorkshire County Council, based in Northallerton, which means that we are going to move to York, the city where I did my undergraduate degree, and which has a giant soft spot in my heart. A strange step back in time to cake in Café Concerto, matinees at City Screen, snoozing in the Museum Gardens by the river, ale and folk music at the Maltings and dodgy ska bands at Fibbers.

Soon, we shall no longer be CrouchEnders. Soon, we shall be able to live in a three-bedroom house with a garden and two kittens of our own, rather than a one-bedroom flat looking out at Fluffy the cat playing in the park. Our flat, incidentally, has just been valued at 310,000 pounds, which means that it would be completely beyond our budget to buy now and that the London property market has finally gone completely insane. But to our advantage at last.

I am desperate to leave London, but sad to leave London. By the time we move, I will have lived here for eight years, first in Clapham, then Tooting, then Earlsfield, before marrying Dave and settling in Crouch End. I love Crouch End. If we could have afforded a house here and had the lifestyle that we were continuously reminded we could not afford, I might have stayed forever. I get a kick out of being bohemian, of anonymously rubbing shoulders with celebrities, of Indian tapas, bento boxes, Lupa pizzas and badly named Thai restaurants, of simply enjoying that indescribable London buzz whilst feeling you're in a green and leafy village. But I also need to have a garden I can grow vegetables in, to have enough space to have the piano that has sat idle in Bishop’s Stortford for over 15 years, to have the option to have pets and children and a guest bedroom. I need to not go on the Tube on a sweltering summer’s day. I can’t procrastinate my life any longer. I have to give it a go.

Two years on...

Flowers in memory of Mum at the Bishop's Stortford Methodist Church yesterday.

None of us can quite believe it's been two years since we lost her. Grieving is a process that never leaves you; it lurks beneath the surface whilst you put a brave face on your daily life.

A rare appearance in church for me, but it was nice to catch up with some of Mum's old friends, who were all pleased to see me. One couple lived in Crouch End many, many years ago on Weston Park and Ferme Park Road and seemed entirely shocked when I said that houses on Weston Park now sold for well over a million pounds. They remember it being somewhat less desirable. I bet they almost wished they'd stayed now. Weston Park is one of my favourite streets in London; I love the trees, the semi-Dutch style gabled roofs, the colourful tiles in the porches and the fact that each house has original painted stained glass windows in its front doors. If I had the time and the permission, I'd photograph them all and publish a book of the prints.

Mum, wherever you are, we all still miss you so much.

REBECCA