Week in review

I believe it has been said that when something bad happens to you, you should count your blessings...
#1. I was dressed at the time.

I've locked myself out of a number of things before. (I've locked myself in one or two as well, from which enthusiastic friends and I learned that the person holding the keys should never be the one to climb into the car boot. But that's another story.) Usually I lock myself out of houses, and as a student seemed to manage to do this particularly during study weeks prior to exams, for some reason. I even locked us out of someone else's house a couple of months ago, though with my cybertool managed to break back in, literally in seconds, before the first mobile phone call for help had even been completed. But Monday took the cake. (Possibly the saveloy, actually, as it was Australia Day after all...) Mid-morning I slipped out to our rental car we'd had for the weekend to check the mileage. But it was cold, and of course I wouldn't want to let the heat out of the house. So it was that I returned to the front door to discover I had closed it behind me, and the only key I had was the one for the rental car. I also had no money, though I did have my rental car agreement as a rudimentary form of ID.

Rather than go through the painful details, let us simply close this sorry story by noting two points of information:
a) Both Bronwyn and our housemate Nick work within six to eight miles of our house, and I had a car with fuel.
b) I didn't get back in to the house for three and a half hours. (But at least I was dressed at the time.)

I should point out that even though it was Australia Day and there are a lot of Australians living in Wimbledon, it wasn't a bank holiday on Monday. I'd randomly taken the day as annual some time ago, just to catch up on life, and had high hopes of achieving many things. Needless to say, few of them ended up occurring. Instead, when I got back into the house I ditched all my plans in favour of re-arranging our room. In a fit of inspiration I perceived a change to the furniture in our room that might give us a bit more space. Turns out that wardrobe wasn't built-in after all. As you can see from this mid-process photo, the hallway can get a bit messy when you move everything out onto the floor. By the end of the day it was all back in though, the room was thoroughly spring-cleaned, and we did indeed have more space. It's taking a bit of getting used to, and I don't think we're fully sure about the new arrangement yet. We'll see.

Last night we had a work do to farewell my colleague Claire, who is taking six months off to travel round South America. Now antipodeans will often come here to the UK to earn money in order to fund further travel. However, when people from the UK go overseas my observation is they tend to just travel. After all, why work overseas to save money when you can earn the world's strongest currency at home? Claire's departure is just part of the high turnover in the teams here in London. At one of my workplaces, I will be the longest serving staff member in the team in a month or so, when a couple of my colleagues who are leaving finally depart. Even worse, by June every one of the current team members bar myself will have either rotated to their next position or have left. Dynamic, but unstable.

A review of the week would not be complete without mentioning both snow and politics. It was exciting to have it snow here on Wednesday. It started late afternoon and was an inch on the ground as I walked home from work that night. Cooler temperatures throughout this week have meant that the snow stayed all through Thursday and even today there was still a fair bit of snow on the ground. Temperatures now are beginning to rise however...

Things also seem to be thawing for Tony Blair's government. He won a critical vote on tertiary education funding reform, albeit by only 5 votes despite a 161 seat majority in the house. The Hutton Inquiry report was also published this week which completely exonerated the government of wrongdoing and pointed the finger squarely at the BBC in the events surrounding the death of weapons expert Dr David Kelly last year. In fact, while the temperatures are predicted to rise a little round here generally, the heat has really been on the BBC with two top heads already having rolled. I plan to keep listening regardless.