London ice cracks on a seamless line...He's hanging on for dear life...So we hold each other tightly...And hold on for tomorrow...

Awright, geezahs?

I've moved into my new place and things are off to an awesome start. One of my new flatmates, Kerry, is on holidays in Oz for a few weeks so it's just me and Sarah for a while. I moved in on the Saturday and that night Sarah had a dinner party with a bunch of her mates to welcome me. And WHAT a dinner! For starters we had celeriac remoulade and parma ham on sourdough, followed by oven roasted duck legs on a bed of braised lentil and bacon with carrots, then flourless orange chocolate cake and a blue cheese board washed down with copious amounts of red wine. Oh my god! How sated was I? Bloody, is the answer to that question. I had the best night's sleep I've had in 7 months because there was no noise: no traffic, no drunks shouting, no teenagers fighting...brilliant! My room only comes with a bed so I've got to get some cheap furniture this weekend so out comes the magical Argos catalogue which weighs about a ton and contains every single product ever created in the history of human endeavour at low low prices. They don't even have a proper store, just a series of warehouses with a ticket machine out front and a dude who disappears for half an hour and gets your stuff. Picture the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark but with mountains of cheap crap instead of secret Nazi artifacts and you'll get the idea.

The East End is an interesting place. Got the whole jamais vue thing happening again as everything seems the same but is just slightly different. For instance, instead of the 47 bus heading north, I now get the 48 bus heading south. Instead of sitting next to a fat woman having phone sex with her boyfriend, I sat next to an angry teen fighting with his girlfriend and threating to "post up outside your school and stab you up, innit! Fuckin stab you up, tho! Fuksake." Ah, young love is so passionate...

The weather this weekend was positively fiendish. A severe icy wind blew in (they reckon up to 80mph) which just served to make the rain more stingy as it blew straight in your face. I managed to finally make it to the Natural History Museum to see the wildlife photographer of the year exhibition, which was really cool. Although I'm not sure what criteria the judges use in selecting a winner because in pretty much every case I thought the runner up was better. Maybe I'm just naturally contrary...or maybe not. They've got an awesome section on dinosaurs with massive skeletons of a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus setup all over the place but, being free, the place was swarming with families. Oh the stench! I'll have to go back at a time when they're not there, like just after the nuclear apocalypse.

Got a few work do's coming up. This week there's a big swanky conference dinner/drinkies thingy for my whole UK-based project team on Thursday, followed on Friday by a night of Lebowski-esque bowling at the All-Star Lanes. Then next week there's a team-building social gathering with my immediate project team and a public holiday on Friday and Monday, woot! The week after that there's an experienced hire gathering, so no doubt another night of too much wine and not enough canapes, surrounded by a fresh bunch of lost souls sniffing each others' bums and wondering what the hell they've gotten themselves into. Or maybe that's just me...

It's The Prodigal Child's birthday this week so everyone wish her a vicarious happy friggin' birthday for me. I'm super bummed that I can't make it over to be with her on the day. She's growing up so fast and it's times like these that I realise how much I'm missing out on by being over here. But what sort of deadbeat dad would I be if I was there for her whenever she needed me, huh? She'd grow up thinking she could rely on me and trust me and would never become the cynical self-reliant adult I always intended her to be. And we can't have that. Happy birthday, Chook! Daddy loves you...