Every time I move, and I tip the sand in my zen garden back into its packet, I never get all of it in. Inevitably, some of the grains spill out of the sides. And every time I unpack the zen garden, it’s got just a little less sand in it than before.

Many, many long hours of thought, an email back-and-forth, and a phone conversation with my parents later, I think I have finally come to a decision on what to do next year. Much of the finer detail still needs to be worked out, much of it is a plunge into the unknown, there are things I need to research, people I need to inform – but at least I know which fork in the road to head down. I think. I think. I hope.

I would love for a day to come when I no longer have to worry about losing all the sand in my zen garden. I’d love to tip it out once and for all and sit it on a windowsill for the rest of its life and mine, as zen gardens should be – still, tranquil, immovable havens. That day is not to be… yet. But I’m slowing down; if my wandering days aren’t quite yet over, there is, at least, an end in sight.

I promise to be a little less vague about all this when I actually get round to acting on this decision (rather than turning it over and over in my head fretfully). In the meantime – life, and more steadily trickling grains of sand, await.

I have been thinking a lot, lately, about lasts, and firsts, and leavings and beginnings. Our director and my manager have gone on maternity leave one after the other, there are new bosses to get to know, new responsibilities and tasks to get used to at work, a new room in a new house – though I have settled in so well here that it feels I’ve been here far longer than a week. My housemates are great, things are really, really relaxed, and I couldn’t be happier.

But then, as always, there is the future. And it is the future mainly I have been thinking of; it is becoming increasingly likely that this may be my last year in England, depending on how things go visa-wise. Where do I go from here? Do I buy a return back to Singapore in December so I can come wrap things up here before leaving for good next year? Or should I just buy a one-way… and not look back? Should I settle in Sydney with my family? Go straight back to Singapore? Or… try my darndest to wrangle immigration laws into my submission and find some way of staying here? I feel there is still much I can learn from being in this country, and if I do leave next year it wouldn’t be by my choice, but sometimes there is a lot more going on that’s larger than you.

There is a whole world out there, and… I guess I needn’t restrict myself to the warm and familiar when considering my next move. There are many places I could go and many things to see. And I know, for certain, that this is the time to keep working overseas if I want to; I’ll never find a window of opportunity like this again once I settle down in Sydney or Singapore, or at the very least – it’ll be that much harder to just up and go. But then – do I want to? That’s the million-pound question, isn’t it. Are my wandering days over? Is it time to stop being a nomad and set down roots, at last? I don’t know, I just don’t know.

so today in the spirit of reconciliation and friendliness i made the mistake (or possibly wise move. i have yet to decide) of asking the flatmate if she had any particular concerns so far about my electricity usage, living habits etc that she wanted to talk to me about… and got an impassioned earful about how, when i bake, i not only take up electricity with the oven, but also take up all the space in the kitchen, which meant that she can’t cook, and that last night she really wanted to cook something for herself for today, and now had to eat a marks and sparks ready meal because she didn’t get the chance to cook last night. because of me.

if it had been anyone else, she said, she might have thrown them out right there and then, but she thinks i’m just having trouble adjusting to living with someone again after living alone so long, which results in me forgetting to consider her kitchen needs, which is a habit that can be inculcated with time.

well. if last night had me almost in tears, this conversation had me so utterly shocked that i was too stunned to cry; there was a lump in my throat but my eyes stayed mercifully dry. i protested that she should’ve just told me she wanted to cook and i would then have shifted all my stuff to accommodate her (for i am, usually, nothing if not accommodating), but she said she felt it was i who should’ve thought about her, who should’ve considered that she might need the kitchen, and make allowances for this, and she was being polite by not insisting on using the kitchen last night.

have i really grown so inconsiderate of others in my year of living alone that i don’t realise it? is it really the done, normal thing to warn your flatmates when you’re using the kitchen…?

and then there was this whole kerfuffle about how much stuff i had brought with me. but i’m just going to ignore that, or try my best to, because i definitely feel that i am in the right here; if you’re going to limit storage space, you should say so to your tenant before they move in. and you shouldn’t seem all okay with it and then suddenly bring it up out of the blue while having a go at her about something else. i actually feel i have not been given the storage space i deserve because i have about 1/4 of the kitchen cupboards and half of the wardrobe in my own room.

sigh. how do i make this right? i never thought i was a hard person to live with. i always thought i had really easy, tolerable, pleasant habits. but apparently i’m rude. and unthoughtful. and just. sigh. okay. i think i can have that cry now.

Maybe, in the spirit of fairness, I should begin by saying upfront that my flatmate Mona is not a horrid person. Neither is she grossly unreasonable. She is actually quite agreeable and understanding. She doesn’t object to me blasting the heating because she thinks it’s unfair to make me live in cold conditions in the name of electricity-saving, and she doesn’t object to me using the kitchen and cooking at all sorts of odd hours, or frying bacon in the morning and smelling up the whole flat.

We have, however, had oven issues, which came to a head today. She walked in on me making muffins and immediately objected to my use of the oven, very firmly, albeit politely, and explained that the oven ate electricity like a black hole, and that she never used it herself for this reason. Therefore, she said, if I were to keep using the oven, I would have to fork out extra for electricity.

Feeling extremely put-upon I protested (probably weakly, as assertiveness is not my strong suit) that this had not been made clear to me before I moved in, and that I had never ever had problems with using the oven elsewhere before, and that I felt it was a given in ads that said “all bills included, use of kitchen” to mean that I was free to use the oven as I liked. Whereupon I was told that in Mona’s 5 years of flatsharing she had never shared with anyone who used the oven regularly, if at all, and that she had in fact lived in a flat once where her landlord expressly forbade use of the oven because it was expensive.

This rather flabbergasted me so I was kind of speechless for a while. It seemed impossible, and ridiculous, to me to restrict oven use in this flagrant manner, and more importantly, to just assume that I would know about it without making it clear from the start. I pointed out that my frustration in this matter stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t informed of this upfront, and Mona’s (again, apologetic, but firm) counter-argument was that had I told her upfront that I liked baking, and used the oven lots, she would have quoted me a different rent. The oven, she said, cost ten times as much as the gas stove, and she didn’t think it was fair on her to be paying for it since she doesn’t use the oven at all, and she is charging me very cheap rent anyway.

Again, maybe this is just me, but is oven usage really the sort of thing one needs to be clear about when negotiating tenancy?? Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m just… ignorant, and stupid, but I felt (and still feel) so much that the onus should have been on her to tell me about the oven policy, rather than on me to tell her about my oven habits. Who discusses oven usage when meeting prospective housemates/landlords? For that matter, who has draconian oven policies like this anyway? The most bizarre thing about it all to me was that while Mona seemed to think it was entirely normal, I just… couldn’t (and still can’t) quite wrap my mind about it.

It was pretty clear to me anyway at that point that we were at an icky deadlock; while we both understood where the other person was coming from, we both felt that it was the other who should’ve been upfront about this matter from the start. I was close to tears and I didn’t want to argue anymore, so I told her I would pay the extra during billing periods when I had used the oven, and not when I hadn’t. We had some semi-reconciliatory banter about muffins, and she left me to finish up.

The thing is, financially, I don’t mind paying more, since it is true that my rent is incredibly cheap. I suppose ultimately what really bothers me is that I wasn’t told about this right off the bat. I suppose, at the end of the day, it is one of those frustrating, annoying, hair-tearing matters of principle; whatever principles of fair play I have are screaming out against my capitulation and telling me I have been very unfairly dealt with, that I should fight for the right to use the the oven, as it was on that assumption that I moved in, that I should at the very least stand firm and refuse to pay extra for this month (but do so for future months now that I have been informed).

I don’t know what to do. I tried not to cry about this while baking, though the heart had gone out of me; it was in a very dour and joyless fashion that i finished baking my muffins. I don’t even particularly feel like eating them now (which is good news for my office I guess). I don’t know if I am just being a whiny baby. I don’t know if I should feel as upset and ill-treated as I do. I just… sigh. And I don’t want to write this off as a bad flatshare and go out of my way to keep to myself. I want to try and make this work. We’re both civil and polite people with similar interests, so it must be possible to reach some kind of equilibrium, right?

Living alone as I have, for over a year, I’ve grown used to having this absolutely private safe haven, an impenetrable bubble. Suddenly it rankles when my well-meaning flatmate tries to be helpful and does things like point out my pot isn’t big enough and proceed to transfer my bubbling stew to a bigger pot before I can say anything, or turn off the fire on said stew without telling me when I had intentionally left it to simmer for a few hours, or transfer my food to a tupperware and pop it in the fridge when I am out, or take my dishes out of the drying rack and pile them up on the counter for me.

The thing about all this is that none of these actions are harmful to me (well, except maybe prematurely turning off the fire, but my stew was okay, if not as tender as I had intended). In fact they were mostly beneficial, and I would probably have performed them myself eventually had she not intervened. But I don’t like other people doing it for me; I don’t like, I suppose, what I rather paranoidly perceive as an intrusion into my space. You can do what you like with your stuff, but just – hands off mine. Is that rude? Is that overprotective? Am I just feeling the inevitable effects of having lived alone for too long?

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.

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.

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.

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.