Moved the last of my stuff out of my old house this morning. In total, my belongings fit into three conference bags (WWW2004, Multimedia 98 and Autonomous Agents 2001) and a black bin bag for my duvet.
Goodbye to the sink estate! Goodbye to being hassled by urchins, the smell of burning cars, unlit alleyways, petty vandalism, In-ger-land flags and the four forms of base elemental matter that I’ve had to negotiate daily for the last two years (namely dogshit, broken glass, fag ends and plastic bags).
Hello to Portswood! Hello to living within five minutes of two supermarkets, two bakeries, a butcher, an off-license, a post-office, a greengrocer and several takeaways! Hello to a house with broadband interweb, wired and wireless networking, a kitchen that you can swing a cat in, a whiteboard in the living room, and parking space outside!
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In other news, had my first driving lesson in twelve years last night. Yes, my name is Nick, I’m thirty-one and I can’t drive a car. I had lessons before I went to uni the first time around, and took (and failed) an indeterminate number of tests (either four or five – I honestly can’t remember exactly how many), the last of which was for undue hesitation.
Apart from the first five minutes being terrifying, the lesson went well. Happily drove around Southampton for an hour with only a couple of problems: stalled once in a traffic queue and missed gears a couple of times, which is acceptable considering I’ve never driven that car before. The driving instructor (who is younger than me) seemed to be pretty impressed, so this generally bodes well.
Beep beep’m beep beep yeah!