Author: Rob

There. I’ve said it. Four days I’ve had a sore throat now, and I haven’t enjoyed one moment of it. When I was little I’d get to stay at home, wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa watching terrible daytime TV. No matter how crap the TV was or how ill I was, I would secretly revel in the fact that I was at home, seeing life that would normally go by while I was stuck in a class room.

Then at around six pm my mother would come home from the various jobs she seemed to have when I was little, always with a bottle of Lucosade or Fergusade (?) for me. That was the hallmark of being ill for me. Well, it was the hallmark of having my mother convinced anyway – I noticed she wouldn’t turn up with any if she had any doubt about the reality of my illness. If I was lucky and ill enough, she’d present me with one of the orange bottles that went sticky the second you removed the cap. You didn’t even have to pour any before your hand would be glued to the bottle and the see through orange wrapper that surrounded the bottles in those days.

I haven’t had any Lucosade or similar in ages – maybe that’s why it’s taken longer to shake off this sore throat/cough combination that looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Or maybe it’s not the lack of the sickly fizzy potion. Maybe it’s because I went to work instead of staying at home on the sofa wrapped in a blanket watching terrible daytime TV?

If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I didn’t have the best sickie record in my first 20 years on the planet. If I had so much as a runny nose I would turn it into full scale black death with some clever acting that would have made Ferris Beuller doff his cap. Now I seem to be a different animal – I’ll usually keep working in the hope that it goes away without too much worry, thinking that if I ignore it it might just go away.

Anyway – I’m trying my best to do just that, by surfing the good web developers pages and converting this site to XHTML. Hopefully the distractions will work – I never have liked lemsip and having had a grand total of four in two days I’ve realised I’m never likely to endorse it either. Yeauch!

You know that they never made a Carry on Moving, right? Well I have an entire script based on the events of the last week. The moving firm chosen to transport our furniture the four hour (for a removal van) drive from London to Liverpool took six days to do it. They couldn’t even narrow it down to an exact day, no matter how many times they were called.

Add to this the fact that when they turned up they had made the most unexplainable pooch screw going, in forgetting the matress for our bed. This will be here on Saturday, we are promised. By that time it will have taken the matress nine days to take a four hour trip. The mind boggles.

Fortunately, everything else is going rather well – Wipeout Fusion launched in Europe this week and it’s been quite an exciting time at work. The best bit was the fact that I got a limited edition copy of the game, which is nice! Sadly I’ve been playing a pre-release version in the office, so I’ve completed quite a bit of it already. I’ll have to unpack over the weekend instead of playing it from the comfort of my new home, too. The best things come to those who wait… if the advertising is to be believed.

As Fridays go, this one started off great – we got a free preview screening of Monsters Inc. this morning and it’s a really great movie. Pixar just seem to get better and better – try and catch it if you can.

Well, it’s done and dusted – the London chapter is finally over. Today the removal van collected all of the stuff from the flat down there and should deliver it up here in Liverpool within the next few days. Hopefully.

It feels a bit weird that after two years down in the big smoke, I actually left in kind of a hurry. I’d got round to feeling that London was home, however temporarily – it just turned out that it was more temporary than I expected.

It’s like a few years ago when I good friend announced he was off to the ‘States for a while and we were all meant to go to the pub the night before he left. I think I turned up late for whatever reason and only got to see him for a short while. It wasn’t until a week or two later when I thought to myself that I hadn’t said goodbye properly. It brought back all the times we’d gone out or played footie in the park and I missed that more than I thought I would. It feels a bit like that with London.

Coincidentally the same friend is one of those I’m leaving behind in London – along with my cousin and a few other folk who I’ve come to play footie with in Hyde Park. And, to be honest, I was quite fond of the flat in South Ealing, too – all of the friends mentioned above were in close proximity and the surrounding area was quite nice compared to the other places I’d stayed in London. Heck, even walking through the cemetry didn’t seem so bad after I’d done it for a month or so. And the Corriander Leaf – man, that was a good Indian restraunt!

Ah well, onwards and upwards I suppose – I’ll be up for another night out in Liverpool later this evening. My cousin is on the train up here now, along with my girlfriend, so at least I’ll have some semblance of continuity in my life for the first time in weeks. By the end of next week I’ll have the furniture where it should be and most of the stuff unpacked… should be settled in by the end of the month.

In no time at all I’ll be ready to do it all again when our time is up in this flat.