Someone’s blown a fuse again

In 1974, in the London suburb of Carshalton, there was a power cut. I was quite young at the time but remember it being about some blokes striking because they wanted to keep their jobs digging out dirty black rocks deep underground. I think it was the same reason my mum had to queue for an hour to get a bag of sugar. Anyway the power was off several hours. The same thing happened in 1987, but was only off for about two hours. Apparently the cause this time was that some storm had annihilated most of Southern England causing hundreds of millions of pounds of damage.

The weather is pretty good here, hot sunny, barely breeze above a mouse’s fart yet so far in the last three weeks we have lost power three times. The last time was last week, whilst I was sat at my computer typing some inane and boring blog that I do to fill my days. All of a sudden the screen went blank, Duran Duran disappeared from my headphones and the fan suddenly circulated even less air than normal.

Fortunately my laptop was charged so I concluded my inane scribing on that, then watched a couple of TV programs I had downloaded (don’t mention that to anyone). 

Odessa with electricity

That took a couple of hours and the end of which the power was still down, as of course was the internet. Boredom drove me back to the laptop to watch some more TV until the battery ran down on that. Ever resourceful I picked up my iPad and started to read some books on the Kindle app. For me, time disappears when I am reading, unless of course its this blog, and when the fan suddenly started to push tiny puffs of air in my direction again, six hours had passed. An entire six hours without electricity and not for the first time.

The following day with copious amounts of electricity coursing through our Soviet wiring loom, the internet went down. This happens anywhere so at first I was not concerned. After an hour of incommunicado I had look at what was going on. No Ethernet connection. This was unusual because if it was the internet service provider, the Ethernet would generally still be connected. Tania called them and they said that the line must have been disconnected somewhere. They would send someone out to check. They didn’t say when.

So without my cyber lifeblood I decided to take a cooling bath cleanse away the sticky humidity. Relishing the cool refreshing water I turned on the tap to the sound of echoic gurgles and very little else. The tap was notable by its absence of activity at either extent of its rotation.

Better in the old days?

So in the space of two days we had lost three services, two of them essential and the water. The water was down for about two hours but it took until the following day for the internet to return.

Fortunately, its all up and running now, until the next time somebody trips a fuse, digs up a water main or cuts our internet cable. Still I wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s the unpredictability that makes living in this country so interesting.  So if this article suddenly stops you will understand exa

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All Estate Agents are Equal

Lying, cheating, swindling. These are all words that spring to mind when describing estate agents. In the UK they are renown for their high-pressure sales, ruthless behavior, pinstripe suits and BMW’s. Its exactly the same in the Ukraine, with the exception that the pin stripe suit has been replaced by jeans and a leather jacket and the BMW is replaced by … err, well nothing. Of the several agents we have met here in the last few weeks, the most striking feature has been the lack of wheels. Not a Lada between them, nary a Trabant in sight.

Fortunately, the money grabbing ruthlessness is still much in evidence.   One of the agents we were using continuously allowed Tania to pay his bus fare when travelling between properties. When we put in an offer on a flat, it turned out his fee would be in the region of $2000. And for that, we would be sorting out most of the documents on our own. To put that in perspective, $2000 will get you a very good Lada with low profile tires and an almost matching spoiler.

The Ukrainian property market is not unlike the Klondike gold rush. An unregulated and tangled madness, with everyone digging for gold but quite often getting stung when the mine collapses.

Let me explain a little. In Soviet times, life was pretty simple. You lived in a flat. The flat was owned by the state. You paid a little rent. Easy. When communism collapsed, in many cases ownership of the property went to the occupants, either for free, or for a stupidly small fee. Overnight a country of tenants became a country of owners. This was all very nice until some owners starting getting knocks at the door from complete strangers clutching fistfuls of documents. These documents, it turned out were the ownership papers from before 1917. They had been handed down generation-to-generation and now the pre-bolshevist ancestors were laying claim on their properties from beyond the grave. Except in many cases they weren’t. Sensing some easy money, some enterprising people set about forging papers and trying to evict people from their own homes on the basis of a 1917 document printed on an Epsom inkjet and aged with weak tea. It was a mess.

Adding further to this mess is the tax regime. If you sell a house within 3 years of buying, the seller has to pay 5% tax, the buyer 2%. Now, the wonderful estate agents, explain to the sellers that although the house will sell for say $40000, we will declare its value at only $10000. Wonderful, thinks the seller, I will save a huge tax bill. Whilst this is all very nice for the seller, the buyer moves in to his $40000 flat, and finds his insurance company will only insure it for $10000 and six months down the line, there is a knock at the door from the tax man trying to work our why your lovely home has devalued $30000 in the last 18 months and presenting you with the previous owners tax bill.

The estate agents know all of these problems but being silver tongued wankers, they manage to explain away all these problems with all the easy charm of a conman cheating his own grandmother. The problem is, most people fall for it and as such, the mess just gets bigger and bigger. We however are boxing clever. We are using a solicitor to advice us on these situations, and they are good solicitors. They must be, they drive BMW’s

A Pint with Pushkin’s Brother

Last night, I was temporarily evicted from the flat as Tania, my gorgeous wife, awaited our landlady. The reason for the eviction was simple, I am foreign which means I am money. Tania did not want the rent to suddenly double when the landlady hears me speak pidgin Russian with a broad Surrey accent.

So I went for a beer. There is a little bar at the end of our block that sells a quite palatable Ukrainian beer called Avalon for 10 Grivna a pint, about 85p or $1.20. Seeing as my pidgin Russian does extend to “Good evening one large beer please”, I found myself with aforementioned beverage on a comfy seat in the Dolce Vita bar on Shevchenka Avenue.

I had barely put hops to tongue when a late mid aged guy came in, bought a pint, and carefully avoiding the thirty or so spare seats in the café, plonked himself down next to me. Very next to me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, and I am not one incidentally, to work out that he was drunk, exceedingly drunk.

He started chatting to me in Russian despite my valiant efforts in Russian to tell him I was English. Eventually the penny dropped and he started to talk to me in pidgin English, the pidgin being the identical twin to its Russian Surrey counterpart. He was a writer, he told me, brother of Pushkin and Chekov he added. I was surprised at this, as although I would never win Mastermind using 19^th Century Russian authors as my specialist subject, I did know that a. Pushkin and Chekov were not related and b. they died a long long time ago.

He continued, mainly in Russian swapping into English to say something derogatory about the lady owner of Dolce Vita before whipping out a book. It was his book he told me. He was going to write a dedication in it and give it to me, he declared. So he got out his pen, which oddly had no refill in it. Did I want the dedication in English or Russian he asked, I dodged the question fearing that this gift would require some for of payback, either monetary or alcoholic.

It took some moments for him to realize that despite his frenetic scribbles inside the book cover, nothing was happening. He looked over at the young waitress and asked her for a pen. Whether she saw the pain in my eyes, or whether she was just the world’s most inefficient waitress, I don’ know, but the fact was, she did not have one. I breathed a sigh of relief, gulped the last 200 mls of Avalon, made my excuses both in Russian and English and bolted for the door.