I have two hours worth of train trip to get through, so I figured why not take a few minutes to do some reflecting, but where to start?

My new flat is gradually looking how I want it to. As I am not allowed to put anything on the walls (and I mean anything) I’ve had to resort to free standing shelving and putting my posters (of which I have many) into storage. Other than that, it’s looking quite nice. I’ve spent a fortune at IKEA over the last few weeks but I figure it’s going to happen eventually when I buy my own place so I may as well make a start now… and that’s the excuse I’m sticking to. As with any new place, I’m reluctant to leave things switched on as I don’t know how steep my electricity bill is going to be. As such, I’m going round turning things off rather than leaving the evil little red light of power consumption shining away at me. To my amusement, I’ve discovered that my sister who has also just moved into her own place has started doing the same thing.

Living on your own is a mixed blessing. You get the tranquility of watching and listening to what you want without competing for volume (thankfully the floors and walls seem to shield out nearly all noise from other flats). You get to pile junk on the floor without feeling guilty that you’re obstructing someone else’s way (though I could list one or two people who weren’t bothered by that even in shared housing). What I like best is that when I do go around switching things off, I don’t have anyone to whinge that I’ve done it and go around turning things back on again and if I leave something on then I have nobody to blame for the bill but myself. Unfortunately, this sometimes doesn’t outweigh the feeling late at night when when I could do with someone to chat to, or how I occasionally miss the amusement of listening to my (frankly quite tone deaf) housemate singing the same line from a song repeatedly. Having recently spent an afternoon in bed with a chest infection that left me feeling drained and sore, it reminded me of the days sharing a place when they would kindly offer to cook or fetch things (and I offered the same - though in my case cooking usually involved offering a bowl of soup). It’s at those times that I truly feel alone, and chatting online just isn’t the same.

On the plus side, several of my friends live fairly close to me so I can see them regularly (although the tires of work have meant that we have not met up recently), and it’s always great to see them again. I’m grateful that a fair number of my friends are still in the area and that we are still keeping in touch. As inevitable as moving on is, some of those friendships I would not like to have broken by such a trivial fact as distance.

Which brings me around to work. Well, not so much work but the things its existence do to the way you perceive time. As a student, I had a fairly set timetable with half of the year as holiday time… sorry, study breaks. Now I am bound to a set number of days leave a year with the need to arrange my days well in advance so that we can always guarantee enough staff available at work. It certainly shifts the way you plan things into a much longer scale of events. As an example, I planned to visit my family this weekend only to discover that several of them ave gone away (and I have no doubt that they are currently getting very, very wet) and I will probably not be able to come back for several weeks. I now finding myself planning days off in December, asking my family what their plans are a month in advance and thinking about things I would need to have done before I could disappear for a few days. I’m now a firm believer that graduates should be given a pack with these things pointed out in advance.

And onto the job itself. If you had told me ten years ago that this is what I would be doing, I would have laughed at you. The goals were always so clear - get a degree, train to become a teacher, get qualified in it, teach. It sounded so straightforward. However, over the last few years two thoughts have derailed that dream. The first is how disheartened teachers seem to be these days with teaching - too much paperwork and too much “teaching to pass instead of teaching to inspire”. The second was a general desire to just get out of education and do something different. As a result, the job I got couldn’t have come at a better time - I had just finished exams and was looking around at the type of job that was going for someone with qualifications like what I has got and afraid that I would get a job that would get me stuck behind a job 9-5 doing some form of monotony after another (the initial reason I was against solely doing Computing in the first place). Instead, I have a job that is varied in content, ranging from support to programming to networking and working with people just as eager to teach me as I am to learn it… even if I may not grasp it straight away. Sure, there are occasional things that are run-of-the-mill, but show me a job that doesn’t have those! Most importantly, any job where you get to work with people who enjoy banter and the occasional verbal joust is well worth any repetition. They even seem able to tolerate the fact that I very rarely shut up. I wonder if therapy bills are being docked from my wages? More importantly, I even felt close to a couple of them that I was able to tell them why it’s a bad thing when I do go quiet and some of the reasons I am as I am… other than being completely bonkers, I mean.