Marie's Web Log

No idea really. Ian is ill now too, and Amelia again. My cough still hasn't gone. Being cooped up with a sick child and an even sicker husband is no fun at all. The wind outside is still cold. Waiting, waiting. Ian has an interview at Plymouth on Friday to possibly get funding to do a PhD in sustainable rural development in their Geography department. Exeter University have already told him they can't give him funding, though they have offered him a place if he pays his own way (!). He's pinning all his hopes on doing a PhD, as he doesn't want to go back to the work he was doing before. Who knows if he will get a job after.

Read in the paper the other day that a normal price for a small terraced house in south London is over 400,000 pounds, the equivalent of almost one million Canadian dollars. Yet salaries are no higher than they are in Toronto, sometimes less. I certainly can't earn as much here doing editing, even if I could get any work. It's utterly insane, and very, very depressing. Many house prices have doubled in the last five or six years. Let this be a warning to you, those who may have wild fantasies of returning to live in England (or perhaps coming here for the first time) - you'll need to find a job paying in pounds what you earn now in dollars, in order to have the same sort of lifestyle. And there aren't many of those around. Stay where you are.