Looking out over South West London

I'm sitting in my new flat, watching the planes on their final descent, flying away from me towards Heathrow. Having been out of contact and in the middle of the best kind of house-related stress for the past few weeks, I figured it was best to drop a short line, in case anyone is still sporadically checking the blog.

We've been in the new place for a fortnight now - in some ways it seems like we've been here for much longer (Dulwich seems like an absolute lifetime ago), but in most it has flown by. Half our stuff is still unpacked - in part due to the severely limited storage we have, and partly just because.....well, it's a bit of an arse, really.

I've managed to achieve a long-held dream in the past week - nothing so worthy as raising money for charity or scaling Everest, but every bit as impressive were you to ask my 14 year old self back in 1992. I have Sky TV, my friends. Oh yes. 100 channels of top quality entertainment at my fingertips. Ignoring the fact that I have just scanned through them and could find absolutely nothing to watch. Such amazing options as "Horse & Country", "Nigeria Movies" and about 15 Evangelical channels are right there, just waiting for me to come home drunk enough to watch them. When I was young, I imagined that by the age of 24 I would have a riverside apartment, be a loaded City hotshot and have every channel available on Sky. I now am 31, have a lovely flat in Brixton, a respectable but at least reasonably secure job in Tower Hamlets and the variety and knowledge packs on Sky. I'd like to look at it as a glass half full kind of situation.

The flat is everything we hoped it would be and we're very happy so far. The past two weeks have been somewhat uncharacteristically kind to us: J found out she has passed her Masters after two years of stress and hardship, whilst I was nominated for an award at work and have secured a new "grown up" job which starts in January. Not discounting the fact that the credit crunch has done away with both my Christmas party at work and the prospect of any sort of foreign jolly should I win said award, it's been a pretty shit hot time for us at the moment.

We can only hope that it continues for a little while longer - Christmas is just around the corner and plans are already afoot for Christmas trees and all that palaver. Magic.