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.

• too tired to do anything, but wanted to update, since it’s been a week
• the downside of an upcoming long holiday is having a ridiculous amount of work to do before jetting off
• i have been working nonstop this week
• at work, before work, after work
• staying 1-2 hours late in the office daily
• and my room has fallen into disrepair as i ignore the cleaning and the massive pile of dirty dishes (and the light in my bathroom has just gone out)
• but this evening was nice – i was working late along with another colleague, who will be out of the office till next wednesday now, and so we won’t see each other again till i get back. and it is so easy to talk to colleagues when you are the only ones left behind, on a friday night, no less; we spent our last half hour or so there basically doing no work and having a good long chat about the internships we did to get where we are now, what we want to do in future, crazy ex-colleagues, sustainable farming, regional accents in sign language, and the stupidity of the Home Office (can you tell the conversation became increasingly random?). it was the longest i have ever talked to her, and it was lovely :)
• i SO need this weekend
• and i SO need the coming holiday

Ever had one of those unsettling, unfocussed days at work when you feel like you’ve been crazy busy, done loads of stuff, dealt with lots of things that people have thrown randomly at you out of the blue, and yet still be totally unable to actually say what you’ve done when you think about it? Even if you’ve stayed an hour late at the office?

Maybe it’s a Monday thing.

But it’s okay because tomorrow I am going to All’s Well that Ends Well which is my first play at the National Theatre, later this week I will go see 500 Days of Summer, on Saturday I am going back to Japanese class and then York ♥, and in December I am going to Lille!!! Yes I am three-exclamation-mark excited, brief as the trip is! Hurry up, Christmas! :D

Over the course of last week, because I have been so absolutely exhausted by a very, very manically busy workweek, I’ve been chucking everything I want to blog about in a draft post in point form. Now that I’m actually writing it up, I realise most of the points are totally unconnected (as they’ve accumulated over a week), so this will be somewhat piecemeal…

Anyway, so work. It was crazy this week (and looks like it will be crazy for the whole of October), as we have so many shows and big projects coming up that literally, every day, there is something urgently pressing to be done that I simply don’t have the time to start any earlier. And the thing about the nature of the work I do is that it is a long series of small tasks rather than one large, overarching project with an end in sight, so often it feels like a neverending slog. It is, however, truly gratifying when you find out that the season has kicked off with the first two shows being sellouts and everything above target so far – numbers like these make you feel that it is worth the hours spent cold-calling and researching.

Highlights of the past workweek were working from home on Tuesday morning – seriously, I was so productive without people distracting me or throwing new things at me to do, and I work so much better on my own laptop with music on (especially boppy 80s tunes) – and going to the Middlesex Uni Freshers’ Fayre on Friday, which was a massive blast from the past. I’d forgotten what freshers’ fairs are like, the teeming overspill of bright-eyed enthusiasm, exuberance, and sheer gung-ho fecklessness that are first-year uni students. It was a tremendously refreshing and gorgeously sunny day out of the office, and I found myself genuinely enjoying speaking to students, walking round the hall and chatting with staff at other stalls, getting caught up in conversation with a fellow Sydneysider about dust storms, having a journalism final-year tip me off on where one of our celebs gets his hair cut… I always think I detest networking, but when work mode kicks in, I actually do rather enjoy it.

Friday was also dinner at Gold Mine – roast duck! – with Wey Ren and his lovely family, and Saturday was brunch with Kevin, Shan and Evan at the Muffin Man in High Street Kensington, where we all had a good proper fry-up (scrambled eggs, sausage, freshly squeezed juice, tea/coffee, toast, jam/honey/marmalade, baked beans, bacon – heavenly!), a long, lingering chat as the morning stretched on lazily, a stroll down the shops which ended in a trip to Harrods, and then (naturally) Monmouth Coffee and amazing ice cream at Freggo which is my new favourite dessert joint in town!

Kevin pointed out, as we looked at Halloween pumpkin chocolate in Hotel Chocolat and remembered last year’s freak October snowfall, that it’d been a whole year already (or nearly). And so it’s been – with the new school year starting, people leaving, new people coming, another birthday and Christmas round the corner – the passage of time seems, suddenly, very real. There’s always this feeling at the end of summer, I think, the sense of a chapter closing, a golden russet brown once again creeping up round the leaves and the edges of the days. Exactly one year and a few days ago, I bound and handed in my Alice dissertation; on Friday, as I stood in the middle of Middlesex Uni’s Trent Park campus, I noticed the first tree covered with red leaves and it hit me again how time has flown.

I will be off to Sydney, Tasmania and Singapore at the end of November/early December and I am so so excited about that, but sudden-onset wanderlust and an acute restlessness from being stuck in the UK for over a year now has got me thinking about Christmas holidays already. The Christmas market at Lille and the promise of Mediterranean warmth in Nice are fighting it out at the moment for my attentions and tourist Euros… ah just get me out of here already, and bring on November!