The move

After four weeks of chaos, we are now safely ensconced in our new house in Cambourne. Like our old house it has three bedrooms, although it is much larger and feels exceptionally roomy.

The move itself went fairly well, hindered (or perhaps helped?) by the fact that Şencan disappeared to her parents' house in Turkey for the week. Good planning on her part, methinks. Fortunately the moving company (Bradbeers in Romsey) did an excellent job, meaning that I only had the problem of packing up all of our belongings.

And boy, do we have a load of stuff. Numerous boxes stuffed with books (including Şencan's Iain Banks collection and my Ian Rankin), plus, of course, my hundreds of maps and walking books. Then there was all the kitchen stuff, but at least we have got rid of two coffee machines since our last move, when we discovered that we had three between us. Our many DVDs and clothes also filled numerous boxes - I will have to go through them all and throw out all the trousers that (ahem) no longer fit me.

We got a cleaning company to go through the old house. They did a good job, especially as they had to work around a few of our remaining belongings. The gardeners were less impressive, although it would have been hard for them to make a stellar job of it given the time of year and the waterlogged ground.

Şencan has started her new job, and she is now faced with a fifteen minute walk into work rather than thirty minutes along main roads. So all in all a vast improvement.

One other note: in our previous two moves we had terrible problems with Internet connectivity. Virgin were bad enough in our second-to-last house, but they seem like Jeeves when compared to the hellish experience we had with TalkTalk. Every communication we had from them was like having teeth pulled, including frequent (sometimes daily) cold calls from them.

It was therefore with a little reluctance that we ordered Internet at our new home from BT. Frankly, we were expecting a poor experience. It is therefore with pleasure that I must say that we got connected in under a week - a day earlier than they stated - and it worked first time, out of the box. What is more the wireless connectivity was simplicity itself, and the hub had several neat and self-explanatory features. Time will tell if their customer service continues in this manner, but initial indications are positive.

Well done BT.