Something reminded me that I started this blog little over a year ago, and it got me thinking about how much can be achieved in such a short space of time.
As I've blogged countless times, journalism is a tricky one; it's a sloppy slope, but as well as a slope it's also a ladder with rungs, and there's also loads of marbles. And you sit at the bottom of the hill, downtrodden, thinking "Maybe I do want to be an Estate Agent," and you rack your brains for funny/sexy/aspirational estate agents, before realising they're all dead inside.
So you do the only thing you know - you try, and you try, and you know that it'll pay off, eventually. Also, if I'm going to take my work home with me, I'd rather find depth in the state of the media then tell my friends that their house will never sell if it's next to an abattoir.
I moved down to London with nothing but a suitcase and a very skewed idea of how the tube worked. I found a place to live, eventually, and trained as a journalist with the News Associates in Wimbledon. Then I wound up at FHM.
But there's been a bit of a problem. My landlord, Ki-Man Chu, texted me to tell me he was not going to be renting our place anymore, and we had to get out 'Very quickly, or September 27th?'
Okay, so keep this to yourself, but we had a bit of a weird set up. No contract, but we could leave whenever we liked - two weeks notice maximum. I always assumed that my landlord rented off someone else, and sub-letted (which is Quite Illegal) but he paid all our bills, internet, council tax, and was quite easy to convince that we were always right and needed to be kept happy or we'd tell on him.
That didn't mean he was easy. When our washing machine broke, his first response was that clothes lasted longer if you washed them by hand anyway, and we should just stop using the washer. When we insisted that we needed a new machine, he turned up at 11:45pm with three models in the back of a van. In our slippers, we wandered outside and picked one, before he sped off, assuring us we'd get it soon.
My housemates seemed nonplussed; they'd been here around three years. Two have conflicting types of OCD; while one likes things to be spotlessly scoured, thinking an area only clean when you can see the fumes from cleaning products curling into the atmosphere, the other has a compulsion for things to be at very specific angles.
Unfortunately we don't know what angles are good, bad or ugly. I will, however, be severely reprimanded if things are wrong. Or Wong, as she says.
Naturally these two conflict; while Housemate #2 isn't clean, she's tidy, and things are very neat and stacked and organised. Housemate #1 meanwhile, loves things to be shimmering with chemically-induced cleanliness, but isn't bothered about how it looks.
This means that, during the last year, there have been a lot of discussions about what is right and what is wong. That's now coming to an end, but instead of something leisurely and planned, flat-hunting is what it was last September - scattered, frantic, mental.
It's actually quite a fitting way to end the year - one last thing to be completely clueless about, running around in the rain from Estate Agents to Estate Agents. Still, it could be worse.
I could work as an Estate Agent.
