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Christmas has been... rather on the hoof.
I don't own a car, and 99% of the time find that public transport serves me fine for work or pleasure. (I also, thanks to Kindle, always have plenty to read with me, so don't mind even lengthy train journeys - although I also bring noise-cancelling headphones to make sure that they're bearable). But this time of year seems to be the 1%, with extensive train shutdowns just as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darth_hamster and I want to be heading around the country. So I went online, and found out that Budget not only had an office about two hundred metres from my Birmingham flat but also lived up to their name. The VW Golf I ended up with was very nice, too - spacious for its size, nippy and with the sort of features I assumed until now were top-range only, such as the parking sensor system that shows how close obstacles are.
(Slightly surprisingly, it didn't have GPS. I may be a little cynical and wonder if rental companies specify cars with lots of nice extras except satnav so that they can rent it out to you for an extra fiver a day.)
From Birmingham down to Cambridge to meet DH and then on to a very enjoyable meal chezms_cataclysm before heading down to London to pick up a mound of presents and drive down to Woking to see my mum and brother. Christmas was a fairly small and quiet family affair, which after hectic last few weeks for both DH and me was fine with us. Doctor Who was rather a disappointment though; I may write more on this later, but in short I feel that the character of the Doctor is being progressively infantilised in a way that is taking the series fast downhill.
Back to London for more picking up of stuff and then on to Birmingham, andpurpletigron now has my old G5 PowerMac and G WINOLJ my hardly-ever-used NAD amplifier. Together with purplecthulhu we had a go at Dominion, which I'd got DH and myself for Christmas. As is usual in a game she's never played before, DH won :-)
We didn't have to hand the car back until Wednesday afternoon, so DH and I spent the day touring around those areas in and near Birmingham we're considering buying a house in sometime towards the end of 2012. Solihull, Hagley, Barnt Green and Hampton-in-Arden are lovely but very expensive; Moseley has less-expensive bits but suffers from not being on a train line; Olton is OK and very close in and if the right house comes up may be worth looking at. Our goal is to live within half a mile of a rail station itself less than half an hour from central Birmingham, as we have the nasty feeling that given our likely respective work patterns we might end up needing two cars otherwise. We're still a long way from committing where to live, but we now have a much better idea of what some areas are like.
Back now in London for a quiet couple of days before more socialising at the weekend.
I don't own a car, and 99% of the time find that public transport serves me fine for work or pleasure. (I also, thanks to Kindle, always have plenty to read with me, so don't mind even lengthy train journeys - although I also bring noise-cancelling headphones to make sure that they're bearable). But this time of year seems to be the 1%, with extensive train shutdowns just as
darth_hamster and I want to be heading around the country. So I went online, and found out that Budget not only had an office about two hundred metres from my Birmingham flat but also lived up to their name. The VW Golf I ended up with was very nice, too - spacious for its size, nippy and with the sort of features I assumed until now were top-range only, such as the parking sensor system that shows how close obstacles are. (Slightly surprisingly, it didn't have GPS. I may be a little cynical and wonder if rental companies specify cars with lots of nice extras except satnav so that they can rent it out to you for an extra fiver a day.)
From Birmingham down to Cambridge to meet DH and then on to a very enjoyable meal chez
ms_cataclysm before heading down to London to pick up a mound of presents and drive down to Woking to see my mum and brother. Christmas was a fairly small and quiet family affair, which after hectic last few weeks for both DH and me was fine with us. Doctor Who was rather a disappointment though; I may write more on this later, but in short I feel that the character of the Doctor is being progressively infantilised in a way that is taking the series fast downhill.Back to London for more picking up of stuff and then on to Birmingham, and
purpletigron now has my old G5 PowerMac and G WINOLJ my hardly-ever-used NAD amplifier. Together with purplecthulhu we had a go at Dominion, which I'd got DH and myself for Christmas. As is usual in a game she's never played before, DH won :-)We didn't have to hand the car back until Wednesday afternoon, so DH and I spent the day touring around those areas in and near Birmingham we're considering buying a house in sometime towards the end of 2012. Solihull, Hagley, Barnt Green and Hampton-in-Arden are lovely but very expensive; Moseley has less-expensive bits but suffers from not being on a train line; Olton is OK and very close in and if the right house comes up may be worth looking at. Our goal is to live within half a mile of a rail station itself less than half an hour from central Birmingham, as we have the nasty feeling that given our likely respective work patterns we might end up needing two cars otherwise. We're still a long way from committing where to live, but we now have a much better idea of what some areas are like.
Back now in London for a quiet couple of days before more socialising at the weekend.
