Settling in

So! Finally, I'm staying put in England for a while. I have to, I have a job and I start tomorrow! I had the interview this morning, it was my first and I got the job, it was that easy. So those of you Aussies dilly dallying over whether to take the kangaroo route, come on over! Getting a good job here is like fishing in a barrel.

my new bike at home in its shed

It will be interesting to see how the cost of living pans out... I asked for what seemed pretty much the middle of the range salary over here for media/PR jobs, and got it (damn I should have asked for more!). It's more than what I was earning in Australia , but everything seems to be three times more expensive anyway so we'll see how I go.

Ian and I's little flat is coming along nicely and I have a cheerful red bicycle with a basket, as you do in Cambridge. There's so many stupid things you have to buy when decking out a house that are awfully hard to handle when you don't have a car, like ironing boards and shelving. We got a big lot of stuff delivered but Ian decided we could get an ironing board cheaper elsewhere, and is now planning to somehow strap it to his back and cycle home with it (if he does I'll try and get a photo of Ironboard Man).

The place we got is university owned and furnished... but that's just the basics. And they're certainly not the basics we would have chosen (we have to use mattress protectors! Eeeew!), so now we have to work around these things. It is probably a lot cheaper in the long run though, being furnished, and made it a lot easier when Ian moved in. In fact I suppose that if it weren't furnished we would have just gone and bought the crappiest cheapest possible items anyway, as we've done with the extra basics like phone and shelves, so in fact I shouldn't be complaining after all.