Plenty has transpired during this little hiatus, which was caused mostly by the discontinuation of my free ethernet connection at home. There was the summer solstice on the 21st, celebrated with a picnic next to an open-air performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Victoria park; not an ideal setting for a hay fever sufferer. There was a bit of Saturday night juice drinking at the Adventure Café with Elfie, in Bath for the weekend. There was more pollen-inhaling masochism with a Scrabble® game in the park with Roni and Fab. Then, there was the Move.

The Move deserves its own paragraph. It started on Friday. Packing away the patina of items I use daily was not particularly challenging. However, once that top layer was peeled off, like dried blood covering a wound, excessive tons of forgotten stuff (some dating back eight years) started oozing out of the walls. This flood overwhelmed all attempts at categorisation. For two days my room was littered with miscellaneous unsorted items. The breakthrough categorisation system finally produced three piles, labelled Keep, Throw, and Maybe. The psychological anguish caused by the implementation of the system resulted in the merging and subsequent disposal of the latter two piles.

The Move, now in its second paragraph, is ongoing. The members of Keep (mountains thereof) are now at my illustrious new address, a block of flats reopened, as the sign over the lift announces, by no one lesser than the 6th marquess of Bath. My things are in boxes (new members of the Throw category) taking up half the living room, waiting to be joined by Fab’s stuff and some new furniture.

I still need to get ADSL sorted, buy a bed, and let certain parties know my new address. Meanwhile, next weekend I will be joining the housewarming party for Russ and Elfie’s new flat in London and writing a few thousand words for my thesis.