All change
The last couple of weeks of my have been particularly turbulent - not necessarily in a bad way - except that all change is inevitably stressful to some extent. When fate throws a couple of curveballs into the mix, I guess my stress levels rose a little more…
Just under two weeks ago I was moving out of my slightly grotty but well-located student flat in Clifton, Bristol, across town to a more upmarket one-year-old flat in a slightly less smart but still nice area of town (just off Gloucester Road). I’d spent a while packing boxes, throwing away rubbish, making lists of all the organisations I needed to inform of my change of address and so on. I was confident that by the Monday morning, when I’d planned to move out, everything would be ready.
At about 8:30 am on the Monday, I was still feeling rather tired after a weekend of night shifts for St John Ambulance (two of the biggest university balls) so when I heard a large lorry trying to get down the narrow road I glanced behind the curtain at it and promptly rolled over and dozed off a bit. An hour later I was up and dressed, pulled open the curtains, and noticed that my car, parked in the street opposite the flat, had a flat tyre. Marvellous. Just what I needed.
So I went out to look at the tyre, and found scratches all down the side of my three-month-old car, a chunk taken out of the tyre, two chunks taken out of the alloy wheel, and note on the window left by a neighbour who witnessed the lorry I saw earlier damage my car and drive off. So I spent the morning phoning the insurance company and visiting the police, and by about lunchtime could finally start the move.
The very British “it could have been worse” attitude kept me going - at least it only damaged paint and plastic and a wheel, not denting any metal, and so on…
The new flat is brilliant, especially after making a trip to IKEA (yet more stress) to get some furniture to store all the junk I’d brought with me in. However, due to a change of service provider there was no internet connection, meaning for over a week I was only able to read my email on my mobile phone. More stress.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, two weeks later and the car has been fixed (I still had to pay £150 insurance excess, which hopefully I can claim back from the other party when the legal expenses people get their act together) and I now have internet access, of sorts, by paying extra to T-mobile to use my phone as a 3G modem. (The broadband ISP apparently isn’t going to connect us until 4 July, and I couldn’t live much longer without proper web access). My stress levels have returned to normal, and things look good for the future, though I am still a bit pissed off about the car…