Thursday 3 May 2012

Cafe Oto, 18 - 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, E8 3DL

Yesterday did not get off to a good start. I was awoken at 8:30am by a bald cockney yelling at the top of his lungs whilst standing on the garden wall. He then preceeded to jump into my garden and charge towards the house with a man dressed in a hoodie. To say I was enraged was an understatement. So I threw the bedroom window open and screamed. I'm not sure who was more scared by what came out of my mouth. The bald cockney, the hoodie, me or The Wig who was minding his own business  standing in his pants in the corner of the bedroom. Luckily it turned out that we were not being invaded by baldies or hoodies, it was just my next door neighbour having some scaffolding erected but requiring access from my garden. Thanks for the warning guys! To be fair, after I'd calmed down, I did feel slightly bad about my reaction but this is one incident that I will blame on the hormones. My protective instinct seems to have kicked in, and was even rewarded by a bottle of wine from the neighbour last night which I will save for a later date. I don't think he'll be jumping into my garden again anytime soon, not without telling me first at least.

Next up for putting a dampner on the day was the realisation that we had bought the wrong ruddy paint for the sodding bathroom. This was a very rookie mistake to make (basically, we didn't buy bathroom paint . . . ) which I will also blame on the hormones. So we had to swap the paint at Homebase and have somehow managed to come back with exactly the same colour that the bathroom was painted originally. All my hard deliberations about a new colour and all the money spent on tester pots was a complete waste of time and money. Moron.

The day improved somewhat though when I went to meet the NCT / Ante Natal class girls for a hot drink in the afternoon. I thought that we wouldn't meet up until after the babies were born, but we are all off work now so one of them suggested meeting up anyway. They are a really a nice bunch actually and even if I hadn't learnt anything on the course it was worth doing just to meet local people who are in the same boat as us. Not only was it nice to catch up it was also a bit of a reality check since 2 of the girls were unable to come as they had gone into labour *gulp*. One of the group said it was like being in a horror film and we were gradually being picked off one by one... It was good to learn though that I'm not the only one who cant do their shoelaces up at the moment.

We met at a cafe in Dalston called Cafe Oto. Another cafe up the road I'd never heard of but quite a nice place with lots of room which was lucky for 6 tubbies. I'm not quite ready to expose the dark corners of my mind (ie this blog) to the girls so only took one photo of this place on the way in. I felt too self conscious taking photos of the mugs, chairs and toilets in front of them. You'll have to take my word for it that the carrot cake and hot chocolate were very nice.



Cafe Oto is a cafe / music venue / private hire place that has apparently had performances by Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon (along with loads of other groovy people I've never heard of)! How groovy. Its quite stark in its decor although it looks far more fancy from the outside, but very convenient if you end up at Dalston Junction Station (its opposite) and fancy a hot drink in spacious surroundings.

Then the day took another down turn. As we need to move quite soon we have started to look at a few houses this week. The only problem is the area that we want to move to now seems to have gone up so much I don't know if we will be able to afford to do it. We first looked 2 years ago but couldn't move as I had to wait until I had bought the Freehold/extended the lease. As it's taken so long to do this we now can't afford to move to where we want to! What a ballache! London is so expensive its almost criminal. The place we saw yesterday was in a fairly good location but we would need to: render the outside, damp proof the walls on the ground floor and upstairs, change the damaged windows, move the bathroom upstairs, put in a kitchen, decorate every room, sand all the floors and sort the garden out which has been concreted over. This wouldn't bother me so much if it was just The Wig and I but I don't want the baby to be born into a world a stress. I want to enjoy (as much as possible) our first few months together, so we decided to walk away from this particular place. Good luck to whoever buys it but it wont be us. So, it's a bit of a frustrating situation but we'l just have to look elsewhere.

You know those days when you should just stay in bed? On reflection, I think this was one of those days.

No comments:

Post a Comment