It’s still raining, which is why I find myself sat blogging at 0049 instead of snoring. One of the downsides of living on the sixth floor is that we’re the very top level of this side of the apartment block, and for some reason known only to the creative individuals that designed this place, the top floors aren’t concrete-and-brick construction like the lower levels but instead are clad in something that looks like zinc sheeting. It’s quite a striking effect from a distance, and certainly makes the block look different - but it does mean that the top levels tend to be coolish in winter, warmish in summer and have acoustic properties not dissimilar to your average orchestral timpani. I mean, landing pigeons hit with a ‘clang’ that is enough to wake me from a reasonably deep sleep, so the several inches of rain that have dumped themselves on top of Leeds in the past hour or so have made sleep a virtual impossibility.
The other downside of this particular apartment is the dodgy window in the main bedroom. It’s the roadside window, which means we have the benefit of traffic crossing Crown Point Bridge at all hours - being just up the road from the traffic lights, your average HGV driver has his foot to the boards and is just about to change out of first gear as he comes abreast of us, so the fact that the window doesn’t seal properly means it’s a tad noisy at night. Eventually you do get used to it - in fact, the last time I slept in the house in Aylesbury it was almost creepily quiet - but if I’m teetering on the brink of insomnia to start with, the traffic noise can be enough to dreive me to nocturnal blogging in the living room. That’s river-side, which means the roar of the weir is about the only thing audible if the balcony doors are open, so talking on the phone gets difficult if you want both oxygen and communication at the same time.
The window has been bust ever since we got here - to look at it, it’s been caught by a gust of wind whilst open at some point, and has gouged an impressive rent in whatever the technical term for the inside surface of the window apeture is. Needless to say the managing agents have found an impressive variety of reasons not to do anything about it, so most of last winter it was sealed up with masking tape in an attempt to keep the worst of the draughts out, and it only tilts rather than tilting and turning. And as there’s only two months of the contract here remaining, I’m not overly hopeful about it getting fixed before we leave, assuming that’s what we decide to do. Personally I’d be happy to stay, but that’s subject to the rent dropping to a slightly more sustainable level - my impression of the rental market in Leed is that the general level of rents have fallen, and are set to fall further if the laws of demand and supply are anything to do with it. There must be at least another 2,000 apartments in construction already, and there has to be a finite number of people who want to live in the city centre. So although this is a great flat in a well-situated block, we may well be heading off somewhere else if the price ain’t right…
