I ordered another pair of those, too. Alpine MusicSafes were much nicer than my current Vater ones, so I figured why the hell not.

At least, that’s kind of what it feels like reading the description. I’ve been looking at it for a few days now, while furiously trying to piece together whether I am hopelessly underqualified for it, and in the hopes I am not, trying to get my CV to look the part.

Someone once said that in order to get a job you have to behave like you already got it. If feeling like seeing oneself totally fitting in it and the company culture is any indication, it should be a walk in the park.

But of course it won’t be.

At least I’ve got ambition, right? If I could couple that with stellar skills in writing applications, I’d be golden.

(I’m hesitant to mention any specifics in public, not least due to some sort of superstition)

It smelled exactly the same just now, when I grabbed the last pile of things and carried them out. It looked the same, too, when I put up the long red curtains that were there when I moved in. I’m only moving upstairs to the room vacated by a couple who are leaving, but it feels quite momentous. The dynamic in the house may very well change, considering the leaving flatmates were giant, affable personalities. They’ve taken quite a bit of things with them, which of course they are entitled to, but it too has contributed to a feeling of change in the house.

The mattress topper I have is slightly too big for the bed, and most of my things are spread across the floor. That reflects a bit of how I feel, too – a little uncomfortable and scattered. It remains to make this room, gutted to the bare minimum, feel like home. I guess I’ll have to spend money for that to happen, though I wouldn’t want to spend too much considering I never know where and when I’ll be moving next and moving with lots of stuff is a pain. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to spend money on throwawayism in the form of a load of flat-packed fibreboard furniture which you can’t really transport once assembled.

I’ll have to do the same thing I did a year ago and try it out. It’ll settle, as will I. It’s just made me think of how I have no clue where I’ll be in a year’s time from now.

Google opened Street View for Finland today. While the Finnish press is going on about the privacy implications that have been rehashed with every new launch of the service in a new country, as well as asking readers to find “sensational” or “funny” scenes captured by the camera vehicles, I’ve been spending time feeling painfully homesick for the place.

The company has photographed large swathes of the country in springtime and early summer, and I think that’s significant. Seeing delicate birch leaves framing slivers of brilliant blue water on a sunny day just makes me ache for an ice cream cone and a walk down the seaside. In a way it’s creating a mental image that never quite existed, a desire for an amalgamation of all the perfect days I’ve spent there. Still, I’d take an imperfect one too, if I could fast-forward time a few months to, say, early June and get a flight ticket to boot.

Interestingly, the places that have strong memories attached but I haven’t visited for a long time gave me the biggest kicks. Thus, seeing my childhood house was no big deal, as I was there only a month or so ago. Seeing my ex-girlfriend’s place, though, triggered a longing for her mother’s cooking, the shelves of the local library (what the hell?) and the smell of raindrops hitting the dirt track I used to walk next to the train tracks to the nearby station. Oh, and barbecues at the allotment, shopping for a sneaky and (barely-afforded) six-pack of beer for an evening with friends, and a thousand other memories I never hope to lose.

Pirkka Aunola writes about experiencing a similar feeling, and notes the power that completely unposed, “neutral” scenes can have. I can agree 100%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been back in London mere hours, and I’m finding myself missing Finland a lot. Somehow it being really cold and really wintery, completely different from London, made it that much more attractive. London seems dimmed and grey, even bleak, compared to the strict monochrome of Finland where, even in the silver moonlight, there was mostly just black and pure white. While walls grow with Ivy here, they’re subdued in their green in a way that is hard to describe exactly. It’s ironic, there being more colour around here.

I’m due back at work tomorrow, and I think I’ll have an early night. My body is, after all, two hours ahead, or at least something that is not GMT. Thanks to everyone that made this break really good and met up with me, and apologies to those I didn’t get to catch up with. I’ll definitely try to be back as soon as resources allow.

Walking the dog this morning, in the stillness of fifteen degrees below zero, all this came to me. What’s changed to make me feel so excited at the prospect of a good few hours trudging through snow, or to wish for a good, clear, cold night for New Year’s? A share of it must be proper equipment and a feeling that putting on that extra pair of thick socks doesn’t take any more time or effort. Another part must be down to feeling a need to appreciate nature, even in this petrified and still state, livign among the urban pulse of London most of the time. And of course, having a mere four hours of proper daylight, you get a feeling of wanting to make the most of it.

And then, of course, getting old. Has to be.

And it was immense.

London is dark too, but not in the same way. I keep thinking to the last several years aside from 2008 when I’ve spent the holiday in the house I learned to think of as my childhood home, messing about with my brother and sets of old video games and things. The smallness helps, the familiarity and the feeling that upon my arrival everything is as I left it. So much changes in my life, and there too, but enough stays the same for me to consider it home, I guess. I don’t think of many places in my life like that.

The last week and a bit (and next week too) have really been rather extreme with engagements. I’ve had work parties to go to and still have to make an appearance at one, and have met some lovely-seeming people at Christmas-themed house parties. I also did an absolutely outrageous thing with some friends and spent 15 hours in Paris seeing Rammstein for the hell of it, before doing my day at work the next day, feeling only mildly out of it. Despite of how much fun it has been, I really feel like it’s time to take a breather, some time out and just relax. Read a book. Play something silly on a computer. Listen to, I don’t know, some jazz or something.

I’d love to add “start living healthily” but that’ll have to wait until the inevitable and thoroughly expected home-cooked Christmas food is out of the way. I really was inspired today, at a party where most people were either serious about their Kung Fu or Capoeira. I don’t know if I’ll be trying either (though I was being thoroughly persuaded by an Italian girl who actually trains at the LSE) but I’ll definitely be doing something come the new year. So I guess that’s my promise, clichéd as it may be.

Until then, I’ll be obsessively checking weather forecasts and looking at silly things like weather cameras like the picture above, which allow me to live the diving temperatures from a distance, and reminisce about childhood car journeys taken in the night, with the yellow streetlights sweeping rhythmically over the car. In other words, I’ll be missing home.

I most enjoyed the linguistic humour he had going on in the second half, with his play on Latin word endings having the audience going “quod the fuck?”. The show-ending piece about the environment, the Moon and God(’s non-existence) tied everything together in a wonderful sentence: “If humans have left the Blue Thing, and gone to the Gray Thing, you’d think that the guy would be there to congratulate the beings he supposedly made in his own image, saying ‘Very fucking well done’. We’ve lasted the twentieth century, let’s see if we last the twenty-first.”