Be Excellent To Each Other

What's the next bit?

Play Hungry, Hungry Hippos.

Oh man, that sucks, I want to play-

No, no. As you were.

Chester Zoo, you say? Next Beex Meet:Zoo Edition?

I'm down for that, gives me a chance to visit my family.

I saw Mrs Paz say that the dinosaurs are back in residence

The first BEEX zoo outing was awesome, too. Must be about four years ago?

You guys and Dim and Helen, right? I think we met you afterwards in Birmingham

Do they let you in their enclosure?

Davpaz was there, and Malabelm, Rach and Ange... Others, but fuzzy brain. Maybe jazzy and Joans? I can't remember what we did afterwards. All I remember was that the dinosaurs weren't there.

There was a Chinese buffet in Chester. It was most delicious. Jazzy and Joans were there with a couple of kids.

This?

Where the hell are you buying a house for 130k?
Also, congrats. Also, also, never use the solicitor recommended or linked with the estate agent.

The midlands is full of decent three bed semis for £130k.
I sold my last house for less than that.

Anywhere from the Midlands up is pretty reasonable.

I bought a 5 bedroom semi on a double plot for £150k 4 years ago, for example

I'm itching to buy another one to do up.

*cries*

:cries:

Will if the London house bubble bursts because of brexit, maybe it won't all be bad.

Not going to happen, really, I would imagine that at best it might shrink a bit.

My 2-bed flat was £95k in a decent area of Nottingham. I could have got one for £60k if I wanted to live in a shithole.

Currently looking at 3-4 bed semis in the west of Edinburgh and can get some really nice places for under £200k.

£140k buys a bungalow 2 down from me. Imagine, Bobby, Imagine!

Christ. Our 3-bed bungalow was on the market for 235k when we bought it 18 months ago. And it had a 40 year old boiler, single pipe centre heating and no double glazing.... It had previously been on the market for 310k. Which is insanity.

We're aiming to get it revalued around November time. It's now got 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, fully double glazed, with a brand new C/H system. I'm hoping that a lower loan to value ratio will help us negotiate a more preferential interest rate - but who knows...

I do overpay my mortgage. For a while it was only by £22p/m which brought about 2 years off the mortgage (25yr term) then I increased it to £122 which would take nearly 6.5 years off... but I don't plan on living here for more than a couple more years so the goal really is to accrue as much equity as possible to give me a bigger deposit for when we upgrade, which is obviously particularly important for me as it'll probably be a PITA getting a mortgage now that I'm self-employed.

I still haven't backed up my computer, though.

eta: for ref, my mortgage is only £477p/m though, so it's not a massive ballache to overpay. Hopefully once Olly starts school (very very soon) I'll have an extra £400 p/m kicking around and can overpay even more...

omgwat

We paid £162k for 3 bed semi with driveway, garage and medium sized garden. We'll probably move before Thing One starts secondary school as the state ones around us are shit. primary schools seem ok.

I think I paid £102,000 for a 3 bedroom semi detached house which is big. It has 3 reception rooms downstairs as well as a kitchen. One of those rooms is my Command Centre.

Anyway, I think we pay close to £700 per month on the mortgage. We moved in about 8 years ago and will have it all paid off in about 6 years... hopefully.

Every non-Londoner can fuck right off.

I would love to live in London. It would just bankrupt me. Even London weighting wouldn't help much as I'm massively overpaid anyway thanks to the unions

The trade off is lower wages, poor infrastructure, lack of investment, northern people, racial segregation, lower prospects, poverty.

5 years and i have their chip on my shoulder.

I've lived half my life in London, and half in and around the rest of the country. Life for me outside London is better, and I think that is true of many people, as long as you don't see London itself as a self-aggrandising status symbol. My uncle does that, and so he lives in one of the five most expensive roads in the country, in South Kensington... In a basement. But it means so much to him that he can write his address in the way he does that he thinks he is several leagues above me whilst living in what is essentially an underground cupboard.

I remember once my uncle telling me that life was better in London because he could go to the cinema at midnight if he wanted. The fact that he never did didn't factor into it. He outright refused to believe that cinemas outside London showed films that late.

He also thought that streetlights outside of London switched off at 11pm.

I have no idea.

You know, people can live their entire lives without once even going to London.

Funnily enough due to cuts, some local councils are now doing this.

I'm not entirely sure that's not a bad thing to be doing for more reasons than the economic one.

Mine switch off at 01:00 am (in fact the one closest to our house doesn't work, and despite repeated reporting to the council, they've not fixed it) and midnight in the winter (I guess they don't adjust for BST)

I can see what you're uncle is saying about having access to things that you don't use. It's nice knowing they are there and you could access them if you wanted to. It's one of the things I miss about London.

Things like what, though? I can't think of anything I don't have access to now that I used to have.., unless you mean specific landmarks like, I don't know, the London Aquarium.

Too many negatives... So confused! Do you think it is good or bad, and what other reasons bar economic do you mean?

Only in the last couple of years, though. He's thought this was the case forever, and that literally every street light outside London went off at 11pm on the dot.

This kind of tells me he has never been outside of London after 11pm...

Just the variety of stuff and amount going on, I guess. The sheer volume of different places to eat, drink, visit and all that. I like having them there, even if I rarely venture from my usual haunts.

Plenty of good things about all sorts of places though.

The benefit of living in the Shire is that the Smoke is accessible but I don't need to live there. And the all-night bus back to Oxford was a real life-saver!

The biggest thing in London's favour is the Tube.

I don't believe Rich was saying anything about London being better, he was saying that non-londoners can fuck off with talking about their palatial mansions they've bought for a comparative tin of beans

Fast food after 23:00, transport home after 22:00, decent museums, access to theaters, wanting to buy something from a shop you can walk to after midnight. Lots of things like that.

FTFY

Leeds has this. Bradford probably does.

I've not lived in those places though, so I don't miss those places.

Beer sirens that summon Craster, Grim..., Curio, Gaywood, APoD, and Bobbyaro.

Dude, that hasn't been on since 1987.

It was only a couple of years ago I went and I'm 30.



One of the things I like about London.... If I call up just-eat on my phone in Broseley, there's 3 takeaways and they're all 5+ miles away which means the food is cold by the time it gets to you.

Once I crashed over at Lilian's and brought up just-eat, and there were something like 168 choices! And it was late at night! And they delivered without charging me extra!

Obviously I also had to deal with crushing choice anxiety but randomly stabbing my finger at the phone sorted that right out.

Yeah because Oxfordshire is cheap to live in.

See? Who needs London!

Also, Oxford has been the capital in the past, so we could take on the burden whilst the Palace of Westminster crumbles.

The superheroes Fitzrovia deserves.