Well,
it's 10 October, and I’ve moved into my new flat. It has been incredibly
dislocating. I have been trying to schedule my time at the new flat around my
class schedule, which has been a bit of a problem, since I don't have a regular
schedule. It has been a huge mistake, and has meant that my routines have been
all over the place.
While
I didn’t invest in broadband, I had a plan to use my phone as a ‘mobile hotspot’
for my laptop. Sorted! Or so I thought. It turns out that my laptop is older than my
phone, and doesn’t recognise my phone (‘is it a camera? Yes, it’s a
camera. You want to do what with it now?
I don’t understand’). I managed, through
a convoluted process, to set both my phone and my laptop to Bluetooth and get
them to talk to each other (yay!) but this meant I spent an hour trying to submit
the four pages of a home insurance quote, after which my laptop informed me I
had been timed out of the server and would have to try again later. Brilliant. Clearly, using Skype to speak to my husband
wasn’t quite such an achievable plan after all.
Hence my blog entries are now being recorded on my phone to submit when
I’m back at home with a good signal.
It
seems that I can't leave the house without bumping into someone I used to know.
I have been extremely happy to become reacquainted with two or three people
with whom I've lost contact over the years. I’ve also been glared at by someone
who treated me really badly, and had an old acquaintance (who was always short
of money) try and cadge a meal. I do love
this place (and its characters), and leaving the area two years ago was complex
and required a lot of thought. Coming back seems to have reignited a whole lot
of unresolved issues - which I don't have time to resolve. I need to study!
It has
been great running into old friends, but each time, I'm a little terrified. Do
I have time to see them? My idea for the new flat was to have a purely ‘work’ space,
which my husband, only half jokingly, refers to as my ‘monastic cell’. I
intended to work solidly for the time I'm here, and then go home and have a
weekend of gentle reading before coming back.
I haven't factored in issues like going for coffee with friends. Maybe
it’s just because I haven’t settled into a good routine with work yet, and once
this is in place, perhaps I’ll feel more relaxed about things. Yet at the moment, I’m just anxious about
work all the time. My concentration isn’t
up to the standard that it will be after three years, and I’m having trouble
focusing without distractions (in an environment where everything is new). I deliberately chose to move with some of our
furniture, so at least I’d feel I was in familiar ground (another cunning plan),
but even so the fridge is in a different place, and I haven’t got a desk or a
table yet.
Oh yes,
the desk. Yes; I had decided there would
be no need to take a table with me, as I’d have a desk in the short term and
could get a table at some point later.
What I didn’t think about was the difficulty the ‘man and van’ would
have getting the desk out, and that I would be moving with neither. It also turns out my ‘spare bed’ mattress is
terrible, and gives me backache. So, I’ve tackled this in another cunning plan,
and am using the futon mattress off my sofa bed until I can get a new
mattress. Unfortunately, this means now
I also don’t have a sofa.
Due to
the absence of both any fixed writing surface or a sofa, I find I’m spending my
days at the flat reading in a chair facing the window, writing on a notepad on
my knee. This was okay until I realised
the house opposite wasn’t empty, but also occupied by students. I found this out when they took a cigarette
break, and hung out of the front windows smoking. I realised that while I had been ‘staring
into space’ thinking about the book, from their perspective I had in fact been staring
in the direction of their rooms. Lovely.
Please
let my second hand table arrive tomorrow as promised …
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