Living in Edinburgh (mostly)

Its over two years since I wrote anything blog- like - mainly due to our peripatetic lifestyle and in all honestly, because life just got too complicated. I do NOT recommend living in three countries simultaneously!
We loved Malta but its really best suited to holidays and definitely not suited to living on one's own as a married woman with an often absent husband. I became a threat to a lot of married women and that got tedious.
So we moved to Edinburgh after only 5 months and arrived in Edinburgh in June 2007.
I had already registered for Summer School at the Edinburgh College of Art whilst in Malta, and was looking forward to finally getting some painting done. We arrived just in time for Wimbledon - so I sat glued to the the tele as things sank in, that we had actually moved to my dream city, Edinburgh. Then Summer School started in July and gosh, was that exhausting, especially on the back of the move.
In August of that year we had to move out of our flat in Johannesburg and get the contents to Cape Town and into storage where it remains to this day.....and by December I was suffering from severe burnout due to 3 major moves in 8 months.
Again, I do not recommend moving so often in such a short space of time.....but often these things are unavoidable.
We rented a lovely 3 bedroomed flat in Stockbridge for a year as we looked for something to buy.
After 9 month of looking and 2 failed bids on two different flat, we eventually managed to find our dream flat, also in Stockbridge but closer to the village. This was April 2007, post Lehmann Brothers and just prior to October when the banks collapsed.....a stressful time to be buying but with hindsight, perfect as we managed to secure a superbly good Bank of England tracker mortgage, the likes of which we will probably never see again!
We renovated for a month using a superb team of Polish workers - removing all the woodchip on the walls and ceilings, sanding and painting the floorboards, reclaiming 3 fireplaces, putting in a new heating system and boiler and painting throughout....
Its a wonderful pad, very light and bright and a Main Door flat with its own stairs.....we only realise now how great an asset that is as we sit there on summer evenings basking in the sun.
Its now June 2009 and we have been living here exactly a year - Wimbledon is about to start, the Festival follows hot on its heals and this year we are staging two different events in our drawing room.
I am curating an art exhibition with South African, Scottish, Japanese and New Zealand artists and Oliver is hosting some creative thinking workshops - see: www.eventmanange.co.za/number1.htm
Its a lot of work but an exciting proposition.
We will use the exhibition to market our company, Spiralbridge (www.spiralbridge.eu) and hope to use the venue more often.
We are in Cape Town at least twice a year to visit family and attend to business and properties there.
I shall try to write more often.
Edinburgh is a wonderful city and life is good.
To be continued......