I am now a proper North London dweller… or will be, once all these infernal bags and boxes are unpacked.

Back soon, busy being snowed under by my belongings!

"You know, I grew up in Wales, and when I became a writer and could choose to live wherever I wanted, I ended up going back… to Wales. I think we spend a lot of our adult lives trying to go back to where we were happiest as children."

Of all the insightful, delightful, and refreshingly honest things Jasper Fforde said this evening, in a quiet, little intimate talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, this was probably the one thing above all that hit home for me. For obvious reasons, I guess.

I said when I blogged about Terry Pratchett that he was like an uncle (an old one), and Neil was like a rockstar, as he has so often been called. Jasper Fforde? Is very… dadlike. I don’t have any uncles like Terry (and I certainly don’t know any rockstars personally so can’t compare to Neil), but Jasper Fforde was so uncannily like my dad, in his offbeat sense of humour and devoted geekery towards a subject. If you’d replaced the games with books, the stacks of Magic: The Gathering cards and multi-sided dice collection with the huge plywood painting of the Cheshire Cat that hangs, grinning, over Jasper Fforde’s desk at home as he writes (he painted it himself, he told us with a gleeful childlike glint in his eyes), the likeness would have been even more remarkable.

And what an absolute treat and privilege it is to listen to one of your favourite living authors talk about one of your favourite dead authors – and talk about his work with an assurance that showed he knew his stuff while at the same time always staying accessible. I didn’t agree with every single thing he said about Alice (e.g. he thinks Alice is bland and almost a secondary character, while I think Alice is the most important character because she represents the reader wading through Wonderland), but much of what he said had me, and many others, nodding fervently: the wondrous meta-naming White Knight scene in Through the Looking Glass, how brilliant it is that the illustrations of Alice going through and coming out of the glass are on the same pageleaf, how important absurdity and nonsense is not only to comedy writing but to the whole of English culture, how, when he came to the books at five, re-read them at 13, and re-read them again at 31, they were completely different experiences, how he had hoped to layer and texture his own books so that his readers could re-read them and pick out different things each time – and much much more than I can write about.

"I was in Oxford filming Quills and decided to make a pilgrimage to the museum there to see the dodo that Tenniel and Carroll would have looked at themselves, as the models for Tenniel’s illustration. So I stood there, in front of the dodo, standing by the case and looking at it like you do on a pilgrimage – you know, you think to yourself ah, they would have stood here, and you (shifts position) kind of stand there yourself… anyway, so I wondered, what if you had a Dodo Home Cloning Kit? And I walked over to the shop, and asked if they sold Dodo Home Cloning Kits. And because this was Oxford, and the lady there probably had 18 PhDs or DPhils or whatever they call them, she calmly said to me: ‘Come back in 20 years.’"

And voila, the dodos in the Nextian world were born.

Interesting info from other questions that were asked:

• Melanie Bradshaw wasn’t inspired by anything in particular, he just liked the idea of an inter-species love story
• His favourite Nextian invention is the translating carbon paper (he also likes the rice and lentils Entroposcope)
• It was deliberate that the libraries in Shades of Grey are all empty, as a counterpoint to the Bookworld Library which has every book in the world, he thought it fitting that his new series had libraries with no books at all
• In the original drafts Acheron Hades’ hideout was in a high-tech zeppelin floating in the middle of nowhere; his (also Welsh) wife complained that this was too sci-fi and geeky, and Fforde’s response was something along the lines of "oh, all right, let’s make his hideout in some remote cottage in Wales then, you… you… Welsh socialist!" – which is, apparently, the true story of why Wales is a Socialist Republic in the books
• The reason Jane Eyre was picked for the first novel was because, starting out, and wanting to be very accessible, it was the only novel he could think of that he was sure everyone would know something about, even if this knowledge was limited to "it’s a musty old Victorian book"

And finally – an unexpected bonus!

Jasper signed my book, and threw in a couple of extras as well :)

Only 2000 of them postcards in the world! Though, I must say, I wish I had got the Spoon Ishihara one.

If there is one activity that one most decidedly does NOT get better at the more you do it, it has to be packing. Like, big packing, to move. I reckon I have got the hang of packing for holidays by now.

色々な箱や荷物やかばんを詰めれば、詰めるほどもっともっと困るんです。そんなたくさん物の中には、何が捨てればいいですか？ぜんぜん決められない。

I’m aware I have a phobia and a mental block around packing which simply arises from having too much stuff, and I know I have to be harsh and get rid of anything I don’t need, especially as I will have less storage space at my new place than here. But somehow – it is never as easy as it seems in my head.

And when you are as much of a packrat as I am – packing is a surprisingly emotional process. You unearth so many things you haven’t thought of for ages and have been living happily without touching for the past, oh, year. And yet, once you see them, you can’t bear to be rid of them.

I guess the one thing I could really use right now besides more time is my dad, master packer, to ruthlessly cull all my belongings without me looking so that I will never miss them. But there’s just me. And I have to consciously free myself, now, from the things I am clinging on to, as no one’s going to do it for me this time.

Host: It is my great pleasure to introduce Terry Pratchett, who, in case you didn’t know, is the unbelievably best-selling author of the Discworld series –
Terry (in exaggerated, loud whisper): I think they know that.

Terry Pratchett is awesome.

In point form, because I’m all fluey and keep making typoes and can’t make coherent paragraphs:

• I think the only other author I’ve met before is Neil Gaiman. Terry had a very different sort of feeling from Neil – while Neil is like a rockstar, Terry’s like your uncle. He was very warm and fuzzy. Interestingly, I think this also sums up the difference between their writing.
• When asked about the translation of Nation from novel to play, his pithy answer was that it was of course incomparable because "a playwright has a whole orchestra of people and things to play with – including an actual orchestra (gestures vaguely to orchestral pit) – and all I have is one lousy alphabet!"
• It was heartwarmingly evident how much he loves Nation. He speaks about it with a great deal of affection. And during the Q&A, when people kept asking Discworld questions, he said at one point that it would be nice to have a Nation one (only for the very next question to begin "In the Discworld books…")
• My absolute favourite part was when someone asked him why he chose to set Nation in a parallel universe instead of our world, and his first response was exactly what had popped into my fledgling-writer mind immediately: "Because it’s a get-out-of-jail-free card!" (elaboration: "If I had set it in our world, someone somewhere would have triangulated the location of the cannibal island and it would have been inconvenient if it had turned out to be, oh, New Zealand or something")
• He did go on to give a much more detailed and thought-provoking answer about how parallel worlds, more so than purely made-up worlds, have the power to invoke elements of our own while allowing you to change things enough to turn it upside down – which is what G. K. Chesterton defined fantasy as: looking at our world in a different way. It reminded me of my dissertation work on fantasy and made me a bit wistful for academia…
• His favourite Discworld character is Tiffany Aching (which elicited some cheers from a Tiffany Aching contingent in the circle), because he is writing her right now, and, says Terry, he tends to get under the skin of whoever he’s writing right now – but second after Tiffany is, of course, Vimes (which elicited significant cheers from all over the theatre).
• Response to "which Discworld character is most like you in personality?": "Oh, god, my wife is in the audience, I can’t answer that. Ermmmm. Commander Vimes on a good day."

There’s something to be said for sitting in a theatre with one of your favourite authors and a horde of his fans :) the book geek in me is thoroughly happyfied. And just this afternoon I found out by email that I’d managed to score a ticket for a Jasper Fforde talk hosted by the Lewis Carroll Society, about Carroll’s influence on his work! Could that combination possibly get any more jaw-droppingly amazing? No, I thought not.

So having finally been driven over the edge by the tragic lack of central heating in my house, plus a series of painfully snowy journeys to work, plus the frustrating inconvenience of having to drag my laundry to a dodgy laundromat in freezing winter, plus a taxing sleep shortage thanks to the length of my daily commute, AND (the killing blow) a sobering afternoon spent doing my accounts and realising how much I could save living in a place that was 1) nearer to work 2) had a washing machine 3) had central heating… I wasted no time in house-hunting, and went to view a room yesterday.

I navigate my way there from work fine. It is blessedly nearby. I am there in no time at all. I permit myself dreamy imaginings of sleeping in on weekday mornings as I ring the doorbell, and am greeted by a smiley, shy-looking Middle Eastern lady who introduces herself as Iranian and a masters student in actuarial science (I nod as if I know what that is), and shows me the room and the flat and the kitchen. The place has everything I want and more on top of that, so I’m happy. I’m standing in the kitchen doorway wondering what questions I’ve forgotten to ask when suddenly, I am offered a cup of tea.

This totally throws my internal programming off (sadly, I am one of those people who have a system error in their brains when something unexpected happens, causing a mental BSOD). I have never been offered a cup of tea or any sort of hospitality at any flat-viewing I’ve been to before, so I’m not sure what exactly I am meant to do, but Mona is already putting the kettle on. She tells me that a few other people have come to see the room and everyone wants it because it’s cheap, but it is important to her to find someone whom she can live with. Suddenly, everything clicks! This isn’t just me viewing the flat, it’s her viewing me!

I really, really want the room, as it is, as previously noted, cheap and lovely and very near work. I feel a bit antsy and nervous and like I am in an interview. But then we sit down in the cosy living room and she tells me about these nightmare Polish party girls who have come round to see the flat, and we chat about why there are so many people moving to London (including ourselves) when the weather and the transportation system suck, how people in the north of England and Scotland are much nicer, what exactly my job entails (I always find it very difficult to explain), what exactly actuarial science entails (which she also must have found difficult to explain because I don’t understand it very much better than I did originally), how difficult it is finding a job now… and before I know it I am nearing the end of my tea and her phone goes off because the next person viewing the flat has got lost and needs directions.

This alerts us both that said next person will be here in 15 minutes’ time, and I should probably be off before she turns up, so I thank her for the tea and tell her I’m really keen on the room, and ask if more people are coming round to view it. She says there are a couple more but I needn’t worry – she’ll hold it for me, but it would be good if I could move in ASAP. I promise her I’ll negotiate my leaving date with my landlord. We bid each other goodnight and I skip down the stairs back towards Finchley Central station, feeling hopeful.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you would call an adventurous or impulsive person; the unfamiliar unnerves me, I am generally very nervous about new people, and sudden changes, like I said, induce mental BSODs. So even I was surprised and slightly flummoxed to find myself agreeing, at 2:30pm today, to move out in 2 weeks’ time, and signing a document to that effect in my landlord’s office, and discussing dropping off of keys and return of deposit.

Considering that on, oh, Thursday, I was totally not aware that I would be moving at the end of January, I think I can be excused a brief period of dazedness. But looks like it’s gonna be bags and boxes again, very, very soon.

The last time I wrote, it seemed unreal to me that only one week of January had gone by, it seemed to have been 2010 forever and the world seemed to have marched right on as if the year had never changed. Today, the opposite is true – I am surprised that two entire weeks of January have flown past already, I wonder where half the month has gone, and I am striving to hang on to the bright promise of the year ahead that I felt so strongly on January the first. It’s hard at times not to be mired in the trivial and inconsequential, and not to get bogged down in seemingly endless slogs, but I haven’t lost it all. I still feel it – that livewire spark – that glimmering, teasing hint of great things to come.

Work commitments are piling up, not just in the office but out of it – events, training workshops, things at which I am to be a delegate of the company, which is still new enough to me to be fairly exciting; I am looking into moving to North London and possibly sharing a house again (much as I truly enjoy living alone it is far easier to move into a house where internet and bills are already sorted), I am still trying – this ongoing, neverending journey – to get to know the city better because however many of its nooks and crannies I explore, it never seems enough. And I am thinking, albeit somewhat vaguely and inconclusively, on the future and what I plan to do now that I have a permanent job. I am asked that a lot; I don’t have any answers right now. I wish I did.

I thought to myself on the Tube this morning that if I do wind up moving, perhaps the time will have come to really, properly audit my possessions, to cut everything down to whatever I can carry in whatever luggage I have (1 big suitcase, 1 medium suitcase, and a backpack), and either throw out, donate, or ship home everything else. The amount of stuff I have after over 5 years in this country is, naturally, astonishingly voluminous. And given that I am likely to be a nomad for the foreseeable future – perhaps it is time to pare it all back, once and for all, and do the nomad thing properly, in the appropriate spirit of liberation from material goods.

Highlight of the day: finding out that this July, I am being sent for my very first proper-proper all-expenses-paid conference! This is exciting because

1. it’s pretty much the biggest arts marketing conference in the UK, taking place over 3 days, and usually with about 500 delegates from nationwide
2. it is very rare to be sent for paid conferences in my industry because we’re usually broke (I have only ever been for free/cheap events), and this is the one big thing that my department always springs for once a year, and
3. it is taking place in Leeds – not that I am particularly excited about Leeds as a place, but I am excited about 3a) getting out of London for a change and 3b) its proximity to York! Though it occurred to me that probably no one’s going to be in York by the time late-ish July rolls round, so I might not get to see anyone anyway, which is a shame.

Other highlight of the day: fiddling around with SIA’s online miles redemption booking, and discovering that, amazingly, for the first time I can recall, that I have finally accumulated sufficient miles for a round trip from Singapore to Sydney. It seems unbelievable that I hadn’t hit the mark earlier, considering how many miles I rack up every time I make the UK-Singapore-Sydney round trip, but there you go. Now all I need is to find a suitable London-Singapore ticket that doesn’t blow one month’s salary… and I’m set for December.

The snow has let up for today but the chill hasn’t. We’re supposed to be in for the coldest night of the winter tonight; curled up here beside my heater and looking out at the ice and fog, I can believe that. We cancelled a workshop today because of the weather, and the one person who made it in, a young man from Romania, expressed surprise that such a dusting of snow should cripple London so because it was about a bajillion times worse in his country. To their credit however, I have to grant that TfL has done admirably keeping things moving over the past couple of days – the fact that I’ve been able to make it in to work and back with little trouble all this week is impressive, even if the ever lovable Northern Line has thrown up all kinds of delays along the way. Perhaps I really ought to start thinking more seriously about moving.

Here’s how out of it I was at work today:

R: Ugh, all the tea towels are grubby! I really want new ones!
Me: I know… they’re really gross. We should just go to Poundland and buy some. They’ll only be, what, a pound?
R: Ooh, they’ll only be, what, a pound? Really? Are you sure? A pound exactly? From Poundland?
Me: …right, home time.

It was weird. Even though I’d been at work for every working day of the holiday season, today still felt oddly reminiscent of the first day of school all over again, with the office suddenly bustling back into life after the quiet solitude of Christmas and New Year. I’d grown accustomed to the Tube being pleasantly deserted as London gradually emptied itself out over the holidays; this morning’s jam-packed crowd at the Victoria line platform was something of a nasty shock.

I don’t normally dread waking up for work, but today was pretty tough. Not to mention very, very cold – I put that New Year’s resolution of walking more into practice this morning, and walked where I’d been bussing back and forth since winter started – and the heavy, misty chill crept right into my bones. One of my colleagues said this must be the most depressing day of the year, when you find yourself back at work in the first week of January, and I’d be hard-pressed to argue with that. Though perhaps depressing isn’t really the word for it – more… strangely disorienting. -1°C / feels like -6°C. It’s only going to get colder – got to wrap up warm, now.

I wanted to write about the New Year, and seeing York again, the warmth of hot apple pie and camaraderie in the Evil Eye, curling up with Inkheart and tea in the homey familiarity of Halifax College, walking through snowfall in the dark and gazing out at the undisturbed layer of white in the Wood Court courtyard.

But then I had a long and tiring journey home, and a list of things to do that caught up with me, and I dallied over fixing dinner and tidying the kitchen, and before I knew it I was yawning over code and Photoshop and thinking aw crap I have to sleep because I’m really tired and tomorrow starts my first full 5-day week since before I went on holiday :(

So in a nutshell, three things:

one: Long, long overdue new layout is up – or perhaps "re-coloured layout" would be a more accurate term – as I’ve basically stopped varying the basic 3-column liquid layout (it is perfection and one shouldn’t mess with perfection).

two: The beginning of this year’s Project 365 is up here (RSS). I remember saying to Louis that I would do it this year if he did (which he is), but even before that I think I was already toying with the idea in my head – I have a woefully patchy documentary record of my life in London so far (heavily biased towards food, the South Bank, and baking), and it would probably be good for me, if for no one else, to have some sort of impetus to take more regular pictures. Maybe some will even have people in them!

three: I always think I’ve properly said goodbye to York, but then every time I return, I can’t quash the swelling sense of joyful anticipation inside me. Try as I might, I feel like a part of me is always going to think of York as my happy place, but at least, I think, I’ve now made my peace enough with the fact that that part of my life is in the past.

Last year, I silently resolved to:

1. Eat more healthily, which I think I have done fairly well in, considering I probably ate more vegetables this year than all the other years of my life combined, actually voluntarily bought and put carrots into my stews (unbelievable!), and have finally given up white bread in favour of wholemeal – though I will never, ever be able to give up deep fried food
2. Blog more regularly – check
3. …I definitely had another resolution, which I am fairly sure I kept, but amusingly enough, I can’t remember it right now

A while ago I decided 2010 would be the year of little changes that make a difference, starting with:

1. Making my bed in the morning, which I have failed to do for the entirety of my life so far, but which I have actually realised is quite a pleasant thing to come home to
2. Not skimping on lip balm/moisturiser as I am terrible at this and am perpetually feeling dried up
3. Walking more Having a bus stop right at my doorstep, and a travelcard that means taking the bus costs me no extra anyway, is making this really difficult. But I shall perservere
4. And finally reading more – I have fallen well out of the habit of reading and only recovered it slightly recently when on holiday with my family, whereupon I devoured 3 books in quick succession, and was pleasantly reminded of how enjoyable a good read really is

Hopefully this will also be the year I finally get to take the JLPT, get to spend Christmas with my family for the first time since 2003, and manage to come up with the greatest wedding toast ever for two of my best friends before the year is out. Lofty goals, I know! Roll on, 2010.