And so....back to London. The weather’s as Mediterranean as it was when we were in the Mediterranean! Even greeted by the hottest day of the year. Following a small mishap when we arrived back in Heathrow (we had parked a suitcase several weeks earlier in the left luggage office in Terminal 5 only to realize that we’d arrived back in Terminal 2. Anyone who’s tried it recently will know how challenging it can be to get between terminals at Heathrow, particularly with the quantity of luggage we travel with....) we make our way to perhaps the nicest part of London - Notting Hill - where our digs for the next few days are (courtesy of Airbnb) to await the arrival of Benjamin, Kimberly and Bennett.
The house is easy to spot - by the bin outside the front gate filled to overflowing with rolls of wallpaper. Rosie, our interior designer host explains that anyone in the neighbourhood with stuff to get rid of but not necessarily just throw away, leaves it outside the house for any interested passerby to claim. And within 24 hours of our arrival, the wallpaper (and the bin) had duly disappeared! Nobody around here bothers with putting out a trash can - just take your rubbish (carefully sorted of course) down to the Catholic church on the corner, where there are communal trash bins. This is the true sharing economy.
As was the house. The house, all of it ours for a few days, is Rosie’s home. She’d moved in to her business partner’s house while he was away somewhere on a trip and left everything to us. Why anyone with a home so lovingly and extravagantly fitted out would move out and allow complete strangers to move in is a complete mystery to me. Rosie evidently runs her interior design business from the house but seemed quite unconcerned to have us there, even popping back in to reboot her computer (in her office which occupied one of the home’s several landings) so she could access her business records from her partner’s house and as she told us, catch up with her invoicing! Bennett’s bedroom (the warmest room in the house so he told us) was also the room where Rosie stored much of her samples and inventory, which neither bothered him, nor it seemed Rosie!
We’re just a street or two away from Portobello Road market, probably the most interesting and colourful in London, streets of trendy boutiques, numerous pubs, restaurants of all shades and descriptions. I lived for quite a few years not more than a mile or two away but this is certainly not the Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill and Westbourne Terrace that I remember
And....numerous Zipcar/car club parking bays. Long live the sharing economy....!!