New Abode on the horizon - will I finally escape student living?

After three years of house sharing while at university, one might assume that when you collect your degree you leave those days behind you. I assumed this to be the case. How wrong I was.... In the three years since I left uni, I lived a more grown up life of cohabiting with a boyfriend, and even living and working abroad for a year. But necessity spoke and in moving to London, or "emigrating" here as my Grandma described it, I took the easy option of moving in with my student brother and some of his friends.


To be fair we aren't exactly roughing it. This isn't quite the hell hole halls I experienced first time around. My parents took advantage of fallen house prices and bought to rent when my brother knew he would be coming to London for uni.

It is a nice house, I can't complain, but I still do. For I didn't think I would be mixing with quite so many 18 year olds when I was 23. I don't care to know about the student union nights and which societies at Freshers week were giving out the best goodies.

I am past the stage of teaching fellow housemates how to use a washing machine and cook, and waking to find strangers in the house the next morning, not knowing whether the sofa or a housemates bed has been their place of rest.

I am fast tiring of the mother figure role I seem to have found myself in. (Mother figure is how I describe it they call it something all together less flattering.)

It would be nice to get back to some privacy and independence from the mayhem. It would be nice to be able to invite my boss around when we have changes to make to documents. Instead of which we can currently be found huddled in a crowded Starbucks hoping for Internet signal and knocking coffee over the laptop.

A lifeline appeared this week when an old friend of mine from University noticed my facebook status and got in touch saying she was looking for a flatmate to find somewhere in Camden from late Jan.

When I say old friend, we actually lived together for two years of uni along with 6 other girls. Of all of them I got on with Bex the best. She has a healthy appetite for shopping and fun like myself, and if we could indulge these hobbies in Bournemouth just think what we could do together in central London.

Here comes the tricky bit.... Bex and I stopped talking right at the end of uni. She began seeing someone from our course who I had had brief thing with that year. This is before I met G and before Bex was ever interested in this guy. Neither Bex or I had done anything wrong to one another it was just one of those uncomfortable situations. Suddenly our course mate who I had history with was around our house all the time and everyone found the situation weird. Luckily it was only about 3 months until we handed in our dissertations and packed up our lives in Bournemouth for good. But the result of these events meant Bex and the male trouble maker dated for the next three years and she always found it too weird to continue her friendship with me.


I didn't feel any great loss from the situation, I moved to Thailand for a year with G and am embarrassed to admit a lot of my friendships back in the UK took a back seat to my new life there. Once back in England, I heard through the grapevine Bex was working and living in London. About 6 months ago she added me as a friend on facebook. Then 6 weeks ago I noticed she and our mutual male had split up and she was listed as single and looking for fun.

I don't know what happened to break them up it would be inappropriate to ask but I did wonder if it would mean she got back in touch with me. Then all of a sudden yesterday, a voice from the past enquired whether I would like to search for somewhere to live together in Camden.

I am excited on a number of levels - firstly I may actually leave behind student life once and for all. Secondly, it seems as though this is an olive branch offering and Bex and I could still have a friendship despite a three year absence from each others lives. I don't know many people in London and Bex was like a sister until a man came between us.

Funny isn't it, how you come back around to the important friendships in your life, but almost all love relationships have an expiry date.

Absence makes the heart...go shopping to fill the void!

A strange mix of emotions this weekend as my boyfriend, who I left behind in Birmingham, came down for the weekend to visit.

It feels comforting being with him, like coming home. It has been a long three weeks and many phone calls and texts since we last saw each other and I was thrilled when he turned up after work on Friday night.

My boyfriend, let's call him G, is an engineer back in Birmingham. He doesn't have much interest in moving to London. He is happy in the small town we both come from, Walsall in the West Midlands.

Still living on the road where we both grew up, and going to the same pubs every weekend with the same friends, he is content to be doing what he has been doing for the last 15 years.

I got bored and moved away, but my heart didn't move away from G, and now I hope his follows me to London.

We met during my final year of university - when I lived in Bournemouth, so we know what it is to commute for our relationship. But it was different when I was at uni living with housemates and wanting to go out every night with them. It was different when we were in the early stages of the relationship and happy to take things slowly.

Now, we are three years down the line and have lived together for two and a half of those, including a year in Thailand. It feels weird to be apart, still strange for him not to be the first person I see when I wake and the last when I fall asleep.

So this weekend I tried to show him the best of life in London in a none too subtle attempt to get him to reconsider a move. We did a spot of Christmas shopping on Oxford street where the Christmas market was in full flow. There was a carnival type atmosphere and as it grew dark around 4 o clock and the Christmas lights began to light up the street, it was the first time I have felt the festive spirit this year.

After a successful shopping trip (successful in so far as he bought me some good prezzies) we walked towards Trafalgar Square and stopped off at Planet Hollywood for dinner. Two hours, some food and a fair few cocktails later we dropped our shopping back at mine and were ready for a club, so we got the tube to Pasha in Victoria - never an easy feat in heels and feeling a little tipsy.

Pasha was a hit with G, exactly his kind of dance music, and the famous DJ re mixers Freemasons were there making a guest appearance. Personally, I could have done with a little more cheesy music and perhaps fewer queues at the bar. But then again this weekend was aimed at making G reconsider London as a possible home, and dancing the night away to the 60's Motown hits I love would certainly not have done the trick! Although not my first choice of music (or in fact many girls' - it seemed 80% men in there on Saturday?!) we stayed until they closed at 5am - and then considered visiting nightclub Ghost - which had been recommended by a man dancing wildly next to us at the bar. It apparently opens at 5am and stays open until midday Sunday.

We decided however that this was a little over ambitious for our drinking and exhaustion capabilities so we headed home to collapse into a deep sleep and relaxing hungover Sunday.

Saying goodbye to G on Sunday night was hard but I am keeping my fingers crossed that he comes back down this weekend. Well to be honest I'm keeping my fingers crossed he comes down to stay eventually but we won't push him on that subject too much just yet... a woman knows how to time these things for the maximum chance of success :-)

Wish me luck people! x x