london - innit?
When I first got back to London, I stayed with Pete and Vicki in Bermondsey while getting back on my feet. Getting back on feet took quite a while - ten weeks in fact! Largely due to the fact that I was struck down by bronchitis, pleuresy and pneumonia when I got back, so didn't feel like working much, or flat hunting. Vicki and Pete were very patient though, and on June 5th, I packed my bags and moved into the place that Pete and I had found.
Pete and I spent two weekends looking at places in Docklands for a nice apartment; we had a few criteria that were imperative - he wanted broadband, I wanted a dishwasher. When we got to our penultimate viewing, we stopped. There was no way we could find anything better, so we took it :)
Pete and I were happily esconced on the twelfth floor of our Docklands tower near Crossharbour for two and a bit years before I left again. From our lofty vantage, we were overlooking pretty much everything on the Isle of Dogs and beyond, a stone's throw from Matt up the road, and not a million miles from Warren & Tash either.
For a while I was contracting at Oyster (nothing to do with the Tube cards) as a Senior Interface Developer before joining Victoria Real in September 2004. They're owned by Endemol UK (whence came Big Brother, Ready Steady Cook, Changing Rooms, etc.). Following the launch of the Teachers' TV site, I went on holiday to Sydney again (and again in 2006), and carried on contracting, most recently for the BBC.
It's funny. From the ashes of what was an amazing year in Australia, I put together a pretty amazing life in London. Our flat in Docklands was the place I've most felt like home, and Pete was the best flatmate I've ever had! I always had returning to Australia at the top of my mind (or nestling somewhere thereabouts), so I made a big effort to make the most of being in London and Europe and do lots of touristy things, and I certainly enjoyed living there much more than I had before I left. You can read my week by week activities in my Blimey, my London journals. Leaving was much harder in 2006, and the goodbyes were more final (maybe goodbyes just get more difficult as you get older?). But it was stiff upper lip all the way back to Sydney.