Okay this is it. I have definitely found THE house. I have never been surer of moving into somewhere, not even the lovely house in Norman Street in York which I still think back on quite fondly, or my dinky little studio in Stockwell. I swung by this evening for what was meant to be a brief second viewing and meeting with the other housemate, and we talked for such a long time we all totally lost track of time and the next person came to view the house while I was still there, which made it all quite awkward (and funny, on hindsight). I was then solemnly told that the two of them would confer about who they’d like to offer the room to, and that I would be contacted by tomorrow evening one way or another.

Feeling hopeful, and probably smiling quite stupidly to myself, I made my way back to the tube station, and hadn’t been gone for 5 minutes when I got a call to say that it had taken them all of a few seconds to decide and I would have to get packing because they’d really like me to come stay. It took me, similarly, all of a few seconds to accept. Having been told independently by both people currently living there (while the other wasn’t around) that the other person was lovely, that they’d had no problems at all, and having been there again just to be sure of my first impressions, I felt absolutely certain. Sitting in the kitchen with them over drinks felt like hanging out with old friends. It felt right. And aforementioned stupid-smile-to-myself is still on my face; there’s this deep, satisfying sense of being really, truly happy with this decision. That house felt like a home to me. And I guess at the end of the day, that’s really all there is to it.

My family are the greatest. A phone call from my mum and a long MSN chat with my brother, and I’m feeling on top of the world. I guess it’s easy to romanticise Chinese New Year when you’re not around for it and haven’t been for 5 years, and I definitely remember things I disliked about it, but there are many things I miss: the camaraderie, the food, the festive feeling and the red, and sitting round the steamboat on New Year’s Eve with the fishballs and oyster sauce strategically in front of my plate.

London’s big, full-on celebrations in Chinatown and Trafalgar Square aren’t till next week, so it’s all been strangely muted so far. I took myself out for a saunter down Regent Street yesterday. It was decked out for Valentine’s and I spotted a mind-boggling number of people, girls and guys, with bouquets and roses in hand, as well as an inordinate number of shop windows with hearts in them. I grabbed a pre-dinner flat white from Sacred at Kingly Court, one of Time Out London’s top coffee places, and sipped it slowly as I walked. For a non-Monmouth coffee it was pretty impressive. People-watching comes naturally when you’ve nowhere to go; you learn all over again the pleasure of walking for walking’s sake, not as a means to an end but the end itself, doing the whole Victorian flaneur thing as you stroll down the pavement scoping out the buildings and the rush of the crowd around you.

It started pouring down with rain later in the evening, so I retired to Euston where I camped for a good hour or so with a copy of PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. I finished The End of Mr Y late-ish last year and enjoyed it, but I’m liking PopCo even better – it’s really a book of puzzles wrapped in the guise of an smart, sassy, very adult story, and if you, like me, enjoy lateral thinking, games, codes, paradoxes, the Monty Hall Problem, and the occasional mathematical stumper, PopCo is your book. It also contains a recipe for a vegan cake, which I fully intend to try out once I am safely relocated into an oven-friendly household.

Today’s my last day off till June so I am planning to enjoy it to the fullest, which naturally involves gaming (check), Monmouth Coffee (planned for this afternoon) and reading in bed (planned for tonight). In between I’m also hopefully going to settle this question of moving out once and for all, with a second visit to my prospective new house this evening, and perhaps starting to re-pack my things once again. How surreal, all this nomadding about. Hopefully this will be the last move for a long while.

You know, when you’ve been led to believe by your crazy flatmate since you moved in that you are the worst flatmate ever, it’s nice to view a house and be told by the guy there “it’s my home, so i’m pretty selective about who I live with, and right now, you’re top of my list. I hope the next place you see is absolutely horrible and that you hate it.”

I think I may have found my new house :) a lovely four-bedroom (though two are currently empty, so if I move in it’ll just be three people for a while), with garden, 20 minutes bus ride from work, 10 minutes walk to the tube. Most importantly, my prospective housemate/landlord was amazingly easy to get along with, extremely nice (he picked me up in his car from the tube station and drove me back!), has a “if you live here, this is your home, so you can do whatever you like within reason” policy, doesn’t mind washing up being left overnight and the occasional mess if you’re too knackered to clean up, and says I can use the oven as much as I like especially if I am going to supply a steady stream of baked goods!

Now you may think, as I did before I met Crazy Flatmate, that this is a totally “duh” sort of given in any shared living arrangement, but it was absolutely music to my ears to hear I would no longer be hassled about cleaning up, oven usage, having people over (not that I’ve had anyone over here, but I’m pretty certain Crazy Flatmate wouldn’t like me having the Japanese Class Eating Club over for movie marathons), and my whereabouts (Crazy Flatmate texts me to find out where I am if I’m not home at 7:30, and expects me to do the same for her, in case she has fallen into a ditch or something. I am not that accountable even to my parents).

After the whole Crazy Flatmate Experience, however, I am now a little bit paranoid and once-bitten-twice-shy about 1) living with the landlord and 2) judging people on their liveability-with on first impressions, since Crazy Flatmate seemed perfectly nice at first too. So I’m thinking I might swing by for a second viewing and longer chat as well as get to meet the other housemate, who was out when I visited. But there was something about this house that felt right; it had character, and rarely have I felt so at ease when meeting someone new on their turf.

(The place I saw after this one actually wasn’t horrible :P and I quite liked it too. It was, however, further away from work, and more expensive, so the choice isn’t too difficult for me.)

So this morning I was unceremoniously evicted via text with the brief accusation that I was disrespectful. I politely responded that I was fine with moving out but could she please elaborate on what she meant by disrespectful. I sent this text twice today and got no reply. I had to wait till I got home late tonight from a colleague’s engagement party to speak to her and find out what in the world she meant.

And lo and behold, what is she angry at me about? The fact that she didn’t receive a reply to a text she sent me last night, among other things. Hello, pot?

And! Just to make it all even more aggravating for me, I had sent her a reply. The situation last night was – it was lateish, and she texted me asking where I was and if I was ok, and I replied to let her know I was still at work and staying to watch a show. She then asked me what time the show was and if she could swing by. I replied to say it was starting now and apologies, but I’d let her know far in advance in future if I was going to see anything. This is the text she never received.

So I show it to her in my “Sent Items” folder, where you can see clear as day that I had sent it at 7:32pm last night. However! This is not good enough for the crazy flatmate. She laboriously checks to see if our phone times match (they don’t. I’m one minute slower. She’s like, “why is that so?” I am so flabbergasted by the stupidity of this query that I immediately say “why not?” a little snappily). She checks to see what time I sent the first reply. She reads the lost text again. She checks the message details and sent time again. I explain, repeatedly, that sometimes texts get lost in the network. It happens. I’ve sometimes not received texts from others, and others haven’t received texts from me. As she can see, however, I had indeed replied her last night. But no! The evidence on my phone is not to be trusted. She says she will contact 3 tomorrow morning to check that this text is, indeed, lost in the ether. If they say it is and verify that, yes, my number attempted to send her a text at 19:32 hours on 11 Feb, then I can stay, she says magnanimously.

At this point I am thinking she is actually certifiably insane, and even if she pays me to stay, I’m leaving. And then she has a hissyfit over the fact that the “I’ll be back late tonight” post-it note I left her this morning was 1) addressed “To Mona” instead of “Hi Mona” or “Dear Mona”, because on her whacked out planet, leaving notes with “To [recipient]” is rude, and 2) stuck on my door instead of hers (our rooms are next to each other and I was 100% sure she would see a note on my door so who cares where it was stuck?!). She also has a go at me about the fact that I went straight to my room and to bed last night without knocking on her door to say hi, since I knew she’d been worried about my whereabouts. I explain that I was zonked, and since she knew I’d been at a show, and I was under the impression she had received and not responded to my “the show is starting now!” text, that all was fine and dandy. I don’t think this was unreasonable of me AT ALL. Nevertheless, she is pissed off.

My colleague is convinced that she’s actually made up all the flatmates she’s lived harmoniously with before and they only exist in her head because no one could actually live harmoniously with someone like this. I am beginning to think she may have had a point there! Thank GOODNESS I have been evicted.

"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.

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.