After the rush of excitement at the beginning of the week, the pace of change in the building site has slowed. The carpets came up and the false dado came down, and well, they can only do that once, can't they?
I've been round every day. Yesterday, I arrived at lunch time - and I almost bumped in to someone leaving. The flat door was wide open, and there was only one person inside. He was sitting on the floor in his shorts, legs spread wide, painting the door frame. I said hello, but he just smiled at me.
I could have been anyone, I thought as I rummaged through the mail. I could have walked in off the street and decided to have a look in to this chrysaline flat. But, I thought, that would probably make me a bit mad.
I don't understand television any more.
I used to understand television, and this is how it worked. All three channels were beamed out of transmitters, in to space where they got caught in aerials. The signals then ran down the wire into the box, which got warmed up and then little pixies ran along 625 lines turning off and on the red, green and blue dots that you could see if you scrunched yourself up to the screen really really close.
Then they introduced new stuff like satellites and cables, so you didn't need to get television through your aerial as you could get it out of the ground, or out of space. That was fine too. You paid for television from the ground or space and you got to watch The Simpsons and endless US imports. I could get to grips with that.
And guess what, you could still connect up your old gremlin-run television to the aerial, and you could still get all three channels, and that was all good.
Then they got even more digital, sending more television programmes out through aerials, but these were squeezed up really really tightly, rolled up in a ball and kind of stuck together. You needed a special decoder to take these squeezed up programmes and translate them into real moving and talking pictures. That was okay, though. Generally, it worked pretty well, except when the signal is bad, when the picture jumps rather than getting snowy, and the sound crackles in a "hello I'm going to break your speakers" kind of way.
However, as I come close to buying a television which I will be watching through a wire connected to an aerial pulling programmes from a transmitter that's probably up a hill somewhere, I realise I have no idea what I am doing.
The television will have a digital tuner - which I can understand. It'll automatically unroll squeezed up programmes. Hurrah! That means I don't need an unsightly box (insert "unsightly box" gag here later). However, which unsightly box is it replacing? Freeview? Freesat? Top up TV?
And critically, do I really care as long as Mr Twinky can watch Saturday Kittens?
Three days ago, I got the keys to New Flat. Two days ago I gave them to a virtual stranger. Today I went back to New Flat for the first time.
When I left it, it was relatively tidy. When I got back, it was a building site. Carpets up, fake cornices removed, light fittings removed, wall sockets moved, a good chunk of painting done, fake dado removed and much, much more.
This bomb site work is, it must be said, good. It makes me more confident that we're doing the right thing in doing all this work on New Flat, and also that the team we're using are up to the task. There's always a degree of nervousness about letting someone in to do some work like this, and even more so when Mr Twinky can't be on site to supervise.
I think he'll be pleased.
I get the keys tomorrow - four sets.
The last ten weeks have been somewhat chaotic, really. Any attempts to impose order on the many, many lists of things to do have been somewhat futile - I've missed things left, right and centre and in many ways it is a miracle that it's all ended up going so relatively smoothly.
The next couple of weeks will be the real test - redecoration, buying and building furniture, accepting delivery of a huge number of boxes and generally moving in. There will be some days where military precision is needed, and on most days a good stiff drink both for myself and for Mr Twinky (without whom none of this would be possible, despite the fact that he is, of course, a cat). Hopefully there will be no more surprises, though.
The latest curve ball arrived today. Apparently a search against my name has come up with some issues. I don't know what sort of search, precisely, but it threw up problems; something to do with owning a pub in East Kilbride and owing money to the child support agency. As a result, at some point I have to prove that this isn't really me, and I obviously don't have any bits of paper to prove that it's not me.
I do, however, have a huge amount of paper. I don't think I've ever generated quite so much paper in such a short period of time. I will be sellotaping it all together on Saturday to make temporary curtains.
The strangest thing just happened.
I was sitting at my desk, and I suddenly remembered my French teacher.
Not my first French teacher, the woman who introduced me to notre notre nos, votre votre vos, leur leur leur. She was quizzed by some of the class about where she was from. No, she wasn't English, no she wasn't French, Belgian, Swiss, South African, Swedish, Vietnamese, Sontaran, Inuit or Lett. I remember the way she stressed both syllables after they gave up. Scott-ish.
For my last three years of learning French, though, I was taught by the head of the department - another Scot, and one who had - well let's just say a certain resemblance to De Gaulle. This led to a string of unsubtle jokes and gestures and the drawing of unflattering profiles on jotters. I'd completely forgotten about him - even when I was re-reading l'Etranger a few weeks ago, he didn't cross my mind. It's a fantastic book, by the way. But I digress.
As I sat here, remembering this chap, a man probably younger then than I am now, I raised my hand to my nose, and recreated a gesture I haven't made in over twenty years. It brought back the smells of school, the feel of the space at the end of the Modern Languages corridor, the voice of a long-forgotten friend saying the name of the teacher, the warmth of summer light through the wire-reinforced shatter-proof glass, reflected off the cold marble floors. So much memory triggered from one small thought, and suddenly I feel like I'm seventeen again.
I went to school two miles away from where I sit as I type this. I've travelled the world, lived and worked on other continents. I've got some great memories, but it's odd how some are more potent than others, especially the ones that you think you've forgotten.
My life is ruled by lists.
I've got lists of work, lists of stuff to sort out with banks, lists of stuff to sort out about buying the flat, about redecorating, and about moving in to it. Mr Twinky has the same - we swap lists sometimes, just for the amusement of it all.
I now just want it all to be over - not because I am hating it, far from it. Because I can visualise what the end result is, and from here it looks very enticing.
I can't wait to start ticking off some final items. Yes, the flat is decorated and everyone is paid. Yes, we have sofas and curtains and knives and plates. Yes, I have my computer back, my study set out, my telephone connected.
I know there will always be plans for what to do next, but at this stage, I'm starting to think that maybe, by August, things will have settled down and started being the way I thought they would be when I started all of this madness.
Of course, the chap who is sorting out my mortgage thinks I'm mad. Brave and crazy, but mad. The chap I met at lunch time today thinks I am setting myself up for a lifetime of pain. I think of it as keeping busy.
Plan A was, of course, to write about it as I was doing it. I was going to turn this site in to a useful guide to how to move from Foreign to Here, with a useful list of tips and contact numbers. Plan A was, of course, nonsense.
Of course.
Let's just say that things are moving along nicely, and I am managing to stay one step ahead of disaster.
My ever-increasing number of to-do-lists fall nicely in to a number of categories.
There's the stuff to do with money, which is my current worry. Not the costs involved, but the fun business of moving it from one account to another, and making sure that nobody thinks that I am an international money launderer.
There's the legal stuff, which is happily burbling along and under control.
As is the insurance stuff.
Then there's the tax stuff - trying to sort out my taxes Here and in Foreign, where both tax authorities owe me money, money which I intend to blow on sweeties.
Once we get the keys to the flat, we'll be getting it redecorated. This is Mr Twinky's main area of expertise, and he's organising it remotely with minimal chunks of help as required from his army of foot soldiers on the ground. By which I mean my long-suffering parents, who are both being fantastic although they probably don't think they're doing much apart from keeping me sane and keeping me company.
I'm whiling away my idle hours by planning what electronic gizmos I am going to buy, and working out the order of various calls that I have to make two weeks from now (in order - electric, gas, phone and broadband, ordering electronics, getting a television licence, getting satellite television).
And only after that do I think about getting a regular vegetable box delivered, or those lessons I've been talking about for years, or sorting out my National Insurance.
Through a combination of luck and more luck, I've not managed to screw anything up yet, but I know I'm just keeping one step ahead of disaster and I couldn't do it any other way.
Interestingly, it appears that web pixies have abducted my layout. This is called 'an upgrade'.
It's all my own fault, really. I should have thought about what I was doing as I gleefully clicked that yes, over-writing all these files was fine and no, I didn't want to back up.
And so it's gone, as though to outer space. Hours of hard HTML, hand-coded by a fumblefingered amateur, and replaced with uniform grey, bland and uniform, simple, clean, functional.
There is a lesson here for us all, I think. As we travel through life there will be times when we do stupid, illogical things. These may be small things like overwriting files or big things like rigging national elections. We won't always step back and think through the consequences fully and these may be minor, like the layout of a website changing, or major like setting the progress of a country back a century.
The test of personal character and integrity is how you behave after these mistakes. I like to accept that I screwed up, and hopefully learn and become stronger.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some elections to rig
We got back from France late on Saturday. It had been quite a trip - eighteen hours door to door, taking in four demonstrations, two trains, a ranting taxi driver and every French football fan on the planet ("this is like Beirut" said Mr Twinky) squeezed into an eight foot square area, and a departure lounge with eighteen children under ten playing hide and seek.
So we were tired.
It had been a good holiday. We had eaten well, we'd seen some art, been rained on and hailed at, we'd driven around a couple of industrial estates, and we'd stayed in an ice-box up a dark muddy lane near the water treatment plant fifteen minutes walk from the only village in Brittany that has absolutely no charm. We'd had one day where the absolute highlight was driving through a puddle. Quite fast.
So it was only natural that within an hour of getting home one of our radiators exploded a bit, leading us to spend half the night with sandbags and saucepans building dikes and dams to stop the flow of special radiator water, to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality, and to soak up anything that escaped.
The flat's quite cold now.
Once upon a time, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there was a simple story of a boy, a girl, some swords, some explicit passages and a bit with a dog.
I had lunch today with an old friend. I can't help thinking of Jane Horrocks as I write that. An old friend, implying that it's the friend that's old rather than the friendship. The friendship is over twenty years old. We had an hour together, and we chatted away as though no time had passed since our last meeting. We parted committed to seeing each other again soon - and regularly if I have my way.
We talked mainly - as we always have done - about swords and stories. This was, naturally, interspersed with catching up with news about each others families and so on, but mainly it was swords and stories. He's got a wonderfully infectious way about him - his enthusiasm for writing is as great as it was when we were in our teens, but he's got the advantage of having written two novels, and had one of them published. We talked about my last semi-aborted effort, and thrashed out some of my issues about how to take the plot forward. He's bursting with ideas, and frankly I think that's great.
I talked about my plans - my great scheme for writing more, the scheme that part of me doesn't see happening. I came away filled with thoughts and directions to go in, and I guess that's what I need sometimes. I need to be prodded with swords and stories.
