beloved bel

Last week we experienced a proper heatwave here in the UK.   It was really hot, and we had five days of consistent above 30 degrees C, two of which were the weekend. On sweltering nights with neither air conditioning or the electric fan, I could only rely on a piece of paper and fanned myself to sleep, whilst K went to sleep on the sofa in the living room as it was cooler there.  Boy was it hot!  We do have an electric fan back home (remember, we are still renting) but it's lost somewhere, probably in the shed and we didn't think it would be that warm to warrant us going back to search for it.  The tube was very stinky with no air conditioning as you can imagine and everyone's just sitting there perspiring.  Not ideal, but thankfully weather temperatures such as this is uncommon and lasts for a few days, although it has to be mentioned that the UK has not seen a consecutive 5 days of >30 deg C weather since June 1976!  Anyway, as I'm typing now on a Sa...

News these days are really depressing and somehow London has been on the news with the Borough Market attack, and most recent, the big fire at Grenfell Tower.  It's really sad, this fire that tore through the massive building, during the stealth of night, where most people were sleeping.  When I woke up that morning and saw the news, my first thought was "oh no, another terrorist attack?".  Soon it was all over the news and my eyes have been peeled on how the situation has evolved since that fateful night.  It is extremely sad to read of people yelling for help whilst trapped in that building and then being burnt alive.  For sure, the death toll will increase as they say there was an estimated 400-600 people in that building. Stories are now emerging of individual people who lived in that block.. really heart wrenching.  My colleague's friend's son was a firefighter who was called to report for duty at 1am that morning.  He worked tirelessly until th...

This must be one of the longest silence I have on my blog.  Well, life has been busy.  Very busy actually.  Lots of big decisions, many of which involve the house renovations and more.  We have had hiccups with this massive house project.  I haven't really blogged about what we are doing to our house so maybe I should do it now so you can understand the situation we are in. Truly I can call 2017 the year of dilemmas - I'll leave it a bit ambiguous for now. For some reason K has been, to my surprise, lamenting that he doesn't like our current house.  He doesn't like the location (esp after experiencing our Southeastern trains), he doesn't like the house decor; he doesn't like the finishings of the house; he doesn't like this and that.  Beginning of the year, we went to do some house viewings in a completely new area, somewhere in zone 9 - yes even further out of London, but amazingly with better connections into London than our current zone 4. ...