look back on the year in which I had three employers, two homes and only one flight.

Of course, this time last year was already this year. I spent Christmas and New Year in Hong Kong and was on a plane back to the UK while people here were still looking forward to the party that people there (including me) had already had.

I was met at the airport by the man from Voyager Executive Cars, a company I can wholeheartedly recommend should you find yourself at a London airport at six-thirty in the morning on New Year’s Day. At least, I can recommend them if you are there and would rather be at home; they wouldn’t be much use to you if you were there to catch a flight, though they might have been useful had you previously been at home wanting to get there. On second thoughts I should probably only recommend them if you know in advance that you’re going to find yourself in either situation, as a prior booking is essential.

Luckily for me I had booked so I was met on time as previously discussed. As I relaxed in my Executive Car, the driver asked me what I had planned for the year. The first order of business, I informed him, was to resign from job at CacheLogic. My position there had become basically untenable and I had an offer from Siemens. Truth be told I would have turned it down had CacheLogic come up with a counter offer. They didn’t. Two days later I would hand in my notice and start the month-long wait to see whether I had made the right decision.

I had.

I hadn’t.

Maybe both.

Leaving was the right thing to do. I was soon to find out that going to Siemens was the wrong thing to do. It was too far away; travelling there was unbearable; it nearly bankrupted me to live in Cambridge, where I still rented a flat, and spend weekdays in Maidenhead. I couldn’t even motivate myself to resolve the latter problem since Maidenhead is a depressing place whereas I like Cambridge and I wasn’t massively happy about the job.

After a couple of interviews that went nowhere, a steady decline in my bank balance and the news that the landlord wanted to take possession of the property, I was at rock bottom.

Then salvation.

I got a call from an agency asking if I would be interested in a contract at CSR in Cambridge. Would I ever! I interviewed with them and things went quiet for a few weeks. I thought they weren’t interested. Then on April 27th, ironically after I’d had a face-to-face meeting with my line manager and explained that I wasn’t happy with things, the offer came in. Thus it was that I went back to see the boss, apologised for the sudden news which was as much a surprise to me as it must have been to him, and announced I was off to new(er) pastures.

Even after only four months had already been enough packed into the year as one could reasonably expect to see so I’ll keep the rest brief. Indeed it’s a fairly simple story from there on in. I started the contract, had it renewed a few times and am still there. Rebecca finally moved over from Hong Kong permanently and is still here. I moved into a new flat in Cambridge and am still there. In fact the only thing that isn’t still there – the only downside – is the Curry House. I’ll miss that place.

And so in finest tradition I submit to you, the reader, that I’m not slow at getting things done but … it has taken me several years to get a blog online.

It hasn’t been for lack of material. There have been several occasions when a web journal of my experiences would have been tremendously appropriate.

• In 1997 I went off to study in France. I had all manner of crazy adventures and came back speaking fluent French, passable Spanish and having completely forgotten what I was supposed to be studying.
• In 1999 I (somehow) graduated and went off into the Big Wide World of professional work.
• In 2000 I went off to live in Hong Kong. Hong Kong! If that doesn’t warrant a diary, what does? In fairness I did fire off a few emails to friends for the first couple of weeks but that died down when the wildly new and different way of life began to warp into a humdrum and familiar one. I tend to be pretty good at adapting to stuff; what’s so interesting about eating raccoon that it needs to be posted up for my friends to read about? Eventually I justified my lack of memoirs by observing (probably correctly) that no one would believe them.
• In 2003 I went to live in Seoul. Well Seoul is no Hong Kong and it certainly isn’t the Tokyo it thinks it is.
• In 2004 I played my first MMORPG: Star Wars Galaxies. There’s plenty of material out there to demonstrate how ripe that subject is for blogging.
• In 2005 my old buddy David Dumenil said I should have a blog. And he was right. I told him I was too lazy.

So what is so special about 2006? The sad answer to that question is that I was trawling Google for some Mac stuff when I came across a site done in WordPress and I thought the stylesheet looked pretty cool.

And so with the sands of time swirling around and above the interesting events of the last decade, I start my journal now … with a nice stylesheet.

Don’t be surprised if the timestamp between this post and the next is several years.