Relocation
It finally happened. After a year-and-a-bit of living in London and commuting to work every day, I’m throwing in the towel and moving to Guildford.
When I first moved down from Edinburgh to start work at Lionhead, I decided to try a bit of an experiment by getting a room in the big, scary city. It meant my commute would be a bit extreme, but I thought I’d have a lot more fun living in London than in sleepy old Surrey.
To an extent I was right; I’ve had a fantastic time down here, particularly due to the live music scene. I’ve seen countless bands that I’d longed to see for years, but who would have never dreamed of venturing further north than Manchester. Sadly, all of the good times were slowly being smothered by the fact that I was (and - I guess - still am) kind of tired all the time. If I wanted to do anything on a weekday evening, I’d have to get the train straight from work into the centre of town, and then end the night early enough to get home for some token amount of sleep before going to work the next morning.
I gradually realised that I’d be having the exact same week-night experience if I lived in Guildford, and at weekends, well, the train into the city is pretty frequent and only takes 35 minutes, so it’s not like the place is out of reach.
That was the upside of London-living sort of negated, and the downsides were pretty hefty. Most days, the commute to work involved getting a lift with a couple of workmates, and on a good day that would take about an hour each way. On bad days, such as when it was raining, or just after school holidays (I’ll leave out my huge extended rant about the number of parents in London who drive their kids tiny, tiny distances to school. It seems like insanity to me,) it could take up to two hours in each direction. Getting up to four hours of my day back was an understandably huge motivating factor.
So after searching for a while, a couple of days ago I finally put a deposit down on a nice place handily located halfway between my office and the town centre, and in a week or two will be enjoying considerably more sleep every day.
Before all that enjoyment, of course, is the stress of moving. There’s the scary number of people and organisations I have to tell about the move, there’s mail forwarding to set up, there are utilities and services to be cancelled, there are vans to hire (and I’d ideally like to move on a Sunday, but no hire places are open on Sundays in this backwards country,) there’s excess stuff to sell or give to charity shops or to recycle (for instance, I’m still trying to find anywhere that will recycle plastic CD cases. Since I listen to all of my music as MP3s these days, I recently moved all of my CDs into small slipcases for ease of long-term storage, with the intention of recycling or giving away all of the jewel cases. This is proving harder than you might imagine, and I now have several hundred empty cases that I’m really not particularly keen on humphing down to Guildford with me.)
It feels a bit weird, since I’ll be moving from a cramped flat into a semi-detached house, with big rooms and a garden, but I’m still having trouble summoning the energy to actually get the whole process over with. It’ll all be worth it in the end, but I hatehatehate moving. I’m using every fibre of my being to try to will a teleportation device into existence. If anyone wants to send a pack of flying monkeys to move all of this junk for me, that would be just smashing, thanks.