Flat Out

Whether it's true or not, there's a commonly held view that among the top five most stressful things in life are changing jobs, changing house, and divorce. Fortunately, my job isn't in jeopardy! But sadly, I have to find another flat! My landlord's new-millennium property mania is wreaking serious financial havoc, and she has to off-load my flat. It's presently under offer, and can be expected to settle in the next four to eight weeks, but maybe longer. In England, property settlement can occur within a week of the actual handover. And there are no guarantees that the sale will go through until the contracts are exchanged, very late in the process. The real problem arises when there is a chain of sales. Person A is selling to Person B who will only buy if they can sell their existing property to Person C, and so on and so on. If there are five parties in this chain of sale, just one of them can encounter difficulties and pull the pin on everyone else. So you can spend weeks or months waiting for a sale to go through, only to have it fall apart on the actual date of settlement. At first, I wasn't too worried about the impending sale, because of the possibility of a chain and months of delay. Unfortunately, the prospective purchaser is an investor! Now I just want to move and re-settle as soon as possible.

With my day off work today, I took the opportunity to look at two flats. The first is in the Seven Dials district of Covent Garden. It's a first floor studio, in need of refurbishment, in a c.1835 building that has a hardware store on the ground floor. The flat is clean, but old, and the asking price of £195/week is reasonable (it scares me that I actually believe that). But the property is just a touch too old to make me happy. For £195/week, I'd like to live somewhere that doesn't have sticky old lino in the kitchen and bathroom, and I prefer to have heating in a spacious, drafty kitchen.

The second flat is in the beautiful art deco complex of Florin Court, which faces on to Charterhouse Square. The building piqued my set-jetting sensibility, as I knew it to be the fictional home of Hercule Poirot in the Poirot television series. There is a basement pool, and sauna, and a beautiful 10th floor rooftop garden with stunning 270° views of the City, St Paul's, the London Eye, the West End, and so on. The only problem is the shoebox apartment. All the studios in this building are embarrassingly small. The futon-style sofa-bed almost completely fills the room, and the less said about the broom-closet kitchen and bathroom, the better. Let's just say that the Poirot producers employ considerable dramatic license.

The NHS and Argos

I took a day off work today to deal with a cold. It's mostly asthma-related, and somewhat self-induced. On my return from Australia, I discovered that my inhaler had run out. At first I thought I'd be fine. But by Tuesday the cold air was taking its toll. That's when the bastardry of the NHS (National Health Service) started to wreak it's usual havoc on a sick person's life. In the UK you can't just rock up to any doctor's surgery like in Australia. You must register at a surgery in the immediate vicinity of where you live, and that is the only surgery you can visit under normal circumstances (ie not travelling around the country). You can't even register at a second surgery near your workplace. To make matters worse, my surgery only has one doctor on staff, as I was rather rudely informed on Tuesday when I called to make an appointment. That meant the earliest I could get in was Friday afternoon, and not anytime sooner. I shouldn't be so harsh on the NHS, after all, it's completely free to see a doctor. (I can almost remember when it used to be like that in Australia). Better yet, the NHS only require a co-payment of £6.50 per script, and that might even give you two months supply. Drugs are cheap in the UK. And once the surgery has issued a script, it's possible to simply request a repeat from the surgery nurse, without enduring the trial of making an appointment.

But none of that was going to help me deal with my asthma. The only solution was a night-time visit to the St Thomas A&E department. In the mythic film world of London, this is the hospital that places the start of the action in 28 Days Later (although only exteriors were filmed here). I thought of that film's dystopic alternate-reality as I wheezed in my present dystopic-reality in the waiting lounge. Apart from giving me the ability to breathe freely once again, the next best-thing about my visit was to see the hospital's uber-cool robotic medicine dispenser. Rather than having to trundle through aisles of medications, the clerk selects the medication by computer, which sends an instruction to the robotic arm to find the right box. The medications are organised in the shelves according to physical size to maximise storage space, rather than by name, category, or manufacturer.

The UK is home to a rather-unique retailer, Argos, that organises their stock in exactly the same way, and for the same reason. Despite having 650 stores, Argos' peculiarity is that they do not have display stock. Customers pore over a catalogue of 1000+ pages, or select items from their website, to find what they're looking for. Each Argos store is the size of an Australian bank branch, with a set of tills where you pay for the item, and a service desk where you wait to collect your purchase. The same process applies regardless of whether you're buying a pack of CD writeables, or an office chair. Apparently, each store has an extensive warehouse where items are stored by box size, a not-so-obvious benefit of not needing display space, as shoppers shop by product category, not box size! And without display stock, stock theft is negligible to that found in normal high-street retailers. The quality of merchandise varies from crap to okay, but Argos' low prices, and the store's novelty-value, can't be ignored. It's easy to understand how it's become a national institution in it's short 33 year life.

The Firm's Atrium

I've previously commented on the exceptional build quality of The Firm's offices and facilities. I snapped this photo of the elevator atrium on Monday. The palm trees are in the basement, just adjacent to where I work.