Day 06 - Wednesday 18th May

We must have been suffering from some jet lag because we had a restless night's sleep. At breakfast at the B&B, Jackie our hostess said we must have brought the rain with us because there had been light rain over night - their first rain in more than a month.

After breakfast, we caught the bus to Nicky's place. Nicky had planned to take Amelia to "Monkey Music" at a childcare centre in Hampstead shopping centre at 10am. We arrived at the apartment in time for Suzy to go with them while I stayed at the unit to update holiday photos etc. I met them at the childcare centre at 10:45.

The first stop was to go to the ATM outside Barclays Bank to get some more UK pounds. All was going well at first. The ATM accepted my card and produced a large wad of bank notes. I took my card out of the machine but, as I was putting it away, the cash suddenly disappeared back into the machine and the hatch closed shut. Horrified at seeing 500 pounds vanish in front of our eyes, we went inside to inform a teller what had happened.

He got the manager and she went to the machine to investigate. After a few anxious minutes, she returned with our cash and handed it over to us. We were very relieved. She said the ATM has self-checking mechanisms and takes back the money if it thinks there was an error in the process but it keeps the cash in a special location in the machine.

The next stop was the post office to deposit some of the cash in my new CashPlus MasterCard. It was a long wait because there were not enough staff on duty - just as slow as Australia Post used to be in the bad old days.

Next we went to the Vodafone shop to organise UK SIMs for our iPhones. Originally, I planned to use my new UK cash card but they wanted to use Nicky's debit card because she is a UK resident. The main advantage of having UK SIMs is cheaper rates for data in the UK and Europe - although you can use a mobile phone to make phone calls, this is no longer the main purpose of having a mobile phone.

We bought some baguettes for lunch and some wine for dinner and headed back to Nicky's unit after an eventful shopping trip.

After lunch, we went for a walk in Hampstead Heath and stopped in the children's play area. Amelia has no fear. For example, she climbs to the top of the slippery dip and then throws herself headfirst down the slope. It's a two-person supervision task - one to watch her as she climbs the ladder and another to catch the kamikaze pilot before she crashes into the ground at the bottom.

John was working late - as he often has to - and so he wasn't home for dinner. After dinner, Nicky went to a meeting and left Suzy and me to babysit. This was easy because Amelia was already in her cot and sleeping like a baby. Once Nicky got home, we caught the bus back to the B&B at Golders Green after another eventful day.