New job

The husband has found a great job.  I'm very proud of him as it's no mean feat at the moment.  The only snag is the job's in London which is 250 miles away from where we are living.  He is staying in the big smoke during the week then coming home for weekends.  Apart from the obvious downside of us not seeing each other or him not seeing the children, I can see a number of upsides.

The pay is way better then he'd get up here and there is masses of work.

One of the main reasons to be here is to see my parents.  I can see ma and pa constantly.

I can spend every evening on skype chatting to my mates in New Zealand without my husband raising his eyebrows in irritation at the content of our conversations.

The sky plus recorder is now rammed with series links of Made in Chelsea, The Only Way Is Essex, Peter Andre: My Life.

I can eat tinned spaghetti on toast with the children at 5pm and not cook dinner.

When the twins wake up in the night and want to sleep in our bed, there's plenty of room for them.

Every cloud and all that.

Tonight I'm off to stay at a friend's house for a sleepover with the children so we can focus properly on drinking wine and talking shit until late.

Voyeurism

Travelling by train is quite voyeuristic and reveals much of the character of a country.  Patches of verdant allotments surprise at the end of trails of red bricked terrace houses.  Football grounds, storage warehouses, pubs, quarries.  Secret windy roads weave a tunnel through arcs of greenly dark leaves towards crumbled and tilted cottages.  Sudden urban sprawls are studded with church spires, complicated roundabouts spew ribbons of red tail lights onto growling motorways.  Gently bulging hillsides are sprinkled with cows and sheep.  And the trees: God knows how long they’ve been there but they look like the stitches holding together the seams of my beloved, beloved England.