I am taking a breather from opening boxes. Since we moved into our new house in Harrow I have opened and emptied well over 40 and there are still about 10 to go.
Remarkably we are running out of spaces to put the stuff we brought with us, even though the new place is officially bigger by at least 50%. I did not realise the old flat had a touch of the Tardis about it.
It has been a remarkable year. The first target for me was to buy a house with a garden. This should have happened in August but it went pear-shaped when my then buyer failed to get a mortgage. In the end we put in bids on 3 houses in the same area of Harrow, paid for 3 surveys, and ended up with the house with the biggest garden. Not that I am a gardener, although I have a romantic vision of myself growing things, which may be harder to achieve in reality.
The second inter-related target was to move my working space into the new house, so I can work from home again after an interlude of 3 years. This was achieved last Monday and I am properly settled into my new den surrounded by familiar posters and pictures.
I have joined the local municipal pool and had one or two conversations with fellow swimmers in the men's locker room. We have made friends with our new neighbours and have exchanged Christmas cards, so we have been making our first tentative steps to make roots in a new community.
In an earlier post I challenged myself, and my friends, to stop me becoming "content" with my life. I am still very wary that the suburban values that could be entrenched in the fabric of my semi detached house might still lull me into a smug attitude borne of a settled home. So I am deliberately thinking about creating some new targets for next year.
We have some more works to do to the house next summer, and plans for a European trip by train to the south of France and into Spain. But a new personal challenge? Will learning the basics of gardening be enough?
I have switched my Liberal Democrat membership to the Harrow party, and learned at a recent festive gathering of fellow Liberals, that the constituency I am now living in has no parliamentary candidate in place yet for the May General Election. There may be other seats nearby in a similar position. Could I be tempted? My last General Election campaigns were in 1979 and 1987. Being a serious candidate involves a lot of hard work, but being a candidate in a non-target seat could be just a bit of fun, especially in the head-to-head public debates.
The only thing I miss about not being a councillor now is the occasional rant in the Council Chamber, and so being free to challenge the worst excesses of both Tory and Labour opponents in a General Election debate would be really rather enjoyable.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Isn't this just a flight of fancy? Surely I should be reviving the long stated ambition to write the novel? The rough plot has been in my head for over 20 years. Isn't it about time I started those first drafts? After all, tapping on a keyboard in my new office is a lot easier than pounding the streets, especially with my arthritic knees...
No need to make a decision yet. Let the festive season take its usual course. There will be targets for 2015 for sure, but we will decide when the calendar changes.
Happy new year, and watch this space...
