Onward!!

Arriving back from African sunshine to a bright but breezy and cold London was a shock in a multitude of ways. Not only was my body unused to the temperature and artificiality, I got a few big pieces of news as well. Two rooms in our house are becoming empty as some of my housemates are getting a smaller place together. I do believe their assurances that there is no acrimony involved in their leaving, because they are all very dear to me and have significantly improved my experience of living in this city. I really hope the changes don’t impact the house dynamic or atmosphere too much, because our place is kind of special in my opinion.

The news did hit me hard, I won’t lie. I spent a good hour and a bit ambling around North London to clear my head on Sunday a week ago, wandering vaguely on a circular route that ended up being around five miles.  I will definitely have to do that again, as the lack of a camera prevented me from capturing some really nice shots, from young rowers on the canal to boarded-up post-industrial gloom of trackside business premises long abandoned.

So, to get the house full again, I’ve had to make my room look as presentable as possible for a prospective female housemate, because gender balance tends to help with things. If anything, it’s made me think about how I can effectively store my meagre belongings once I move up a floor into one of the departing housemates’ rooms. It’s been pretty stressful on the whole, having viewings/housemate auditions pretty much every night, coordinating schedules and other admin at the same time as working full days. Oh, and racking my brain about another development I’m not sure what to do with.

I’ve been offered a job that would start much earlier than my current contract finishes. Apparently it’d be mine if I applied for it, and the colleagues would be enthusiastic to have me. All good and great but though it’s more money, I can’t help but think I would have wanted something more career-oriented as my next job. I don’t want to say too much about what this offer would be but somehow I feel this’d be an easy way out, perhaps too easy. I like the field (it’s vaguely academic) but as much as I’ve never thought about career advancement, the lack of immediately visible prospects from it bothers me.

And I know I should always be looking out for number one, but telling everyone I work with, fixed-term and temporary as my current contract is, that I’d be leaving for greener pastures fills me with dread. There would be no coming back, I don’t think.

Going away for two weeks with no internet access and scarcely any phone contact made me think about the interconnectedness of these times. Who among us blog-reading (and -writing) folk doesn’t have a list of RSS feeds continually ticking new information to our screens? Who isn’t on social networking sites getting live updates on what our friends are up to?

What happens when you go away and leave that to go to Zimbabwe for two weeks? Email piles up, and not just boring work things. Invitations to parties, events and concerts, message chains among friends still in town and links to pictures of amusing animals pile up unread. But is there something more significant that one misses when away like that? Why do I feel uncomfortable about the prospect of marking a lot of emails and feed items “read” or deleting the lot? I feel equally uncomfortable thinking about reading them all and “catching up”. How much of it matters in the end?

Well, radio silence once again, from now until the end of the month. The sound of the rain outside is cold and miserable. It’s hard to even imagine +30 and sunshine, and rain that is warm and pleasant when it does fall.

Neither my body or my mind have quite grasped that not two weeks from returning from a constant -15 or lower, I’ll be jetting off to the heat of southern Africa. I’m not a complete newbie to the place, but the last time I was south of the Equator in Africa was around ten years ago. It might be high time to go back. I’ve got all my required vaccinations, I’ve changed currency (crisp new US Dollars are actually quite nifty, but don’t look like real money at all to me) and all that’s left is one day of work. Oh, and packing.

I’m on the fence with shoes (trainers or walking boots?) but will definitely be wearing my new sandals, considering they cost an arm and a leg. It’s really not the time of year to be buying warm weather gear. The number of t-shirts to take is a little less certain, and I guess all depends on how tight I want to ram my rucksack. I’m probably overpacking, considering there’ll be washing facilities etc. What else do I really need? The pair of jeans I’ll be flying in, the hoodie I’ll be wearing, and a button-up shirt or two for evening meals, right?

List for last-minute panic-buying: Insect repellent and a copy of Private Eye. I guess that’s it.

London is in the grips of the coldest weather in memory and the supposed “extreme weather” is on everyone’s lips, if only in relation to their commute. I took off from home yesterday morning ten minutes earlier than usual, and took a different route to work from normal due to transport disruptions. The result? At work a good quarter of an hour earlier than normal. The roads in central London were quiet, and buses had pretty much free reign. People with cars must have avoided driving due to the icy conditions, which suited me just fine.

To drive away the cold and the gloom, we holed up in a cosy pub with some housemates in the evening. It, too, was pretty empty, probably owing to a lot of people leaving work early.  Didn’t matter a bit to us as we had a fantastic time, from the initial chat with just three of us, to eventual rowdiness once more people joined. Somehow we ended up spilling out of the pub at closing time singing Hava Nagila, until it was remarked by someone in the group that the song had, in fact, become “too commercialised”. I don’t know either.

Having fun like that kind of made up for it being even harder than usual to get out of bed this morning.

I couldn’t help read an email a gentleman was typing on his Blackberry on the tube this morning. In the throng of the rush hour, one’s eyes are almost inevitably somewhere inappropriate. Anyway, this gem with interesting grammar was what he wrote to someone named Jinny:

Praise the name of Jesus
His my rock.
His my redeemer.
That is why I praise the name of Jesus.

I mean, the guy is generous, giving his rock and redeemer away.