And so the change continues
So I lied. I haven’t been updating this like I said I would and I need to redress that. So Bernice and I moved without major incident, settled in. We’ve been here 4 weeks now. Time enough to get over the initial excitement, time enough to begin to truly evaluate whether we’ve made the right move or not. Time enough to see whether we’ve been a bit silly (for those not up to date, we’ve just left a 3 bedroom house we were renting in London, sold all of our stuff, moved into a single room in a shared house in Manchester and are both doing a part-time TEFL course). So, what do we think? So far things are going great. I haven’t felt this at peace for a long time. One of the most liberating things is not wanting to buy anything. We must have sold/given away/given to charity shop about 25-30 boxes of stuff just in the week before we left the house and there’s still a bit more there to move! It was so difficult selling all our furniture and bits that you simply do not want to buy anything more. It really helps you to see the real value of these things. They are worthless. No-one will pay you anything for them. So much money and time wasted.It also helps of course that Bernice and I are now only living in one room – which we fit into very comfortably actually. I really thought we might be crowded in there, but we’re not. Plus, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re leaving in the house when we leave anyway, so we’ll have even less stuff! It’s very freeing walking around Manchester City Centre, seeing all these people shopping – especially for clothes (every 2nd person seems to have a Primark bag…) and not wanting any of it. It’s a real liberation from the oppressive consumer culture that we live in. It’s not that we were very materialistic anyway, but you can’t help but absorb some of that “must have that thing” kind of mentality.The only thing I want now is a decent MP3 player like the new IPod Nano.Anyway, in addition to that I’ve started working in a bar just at the weekends and I’m really enjoying that. Although that gives my life a very different rhythm now – I’m busy every night apart from Sundays. Monday – work, Tuesday to Thursday – course, Friday and Saturday – work. Sunday – recover. So now I’ve become a proper little night owl.Bernice is working 5 mornings a week but we still see much more of each other than we ever did in London doing full-time jobs. That’s enough for now. Stay posted and I’ll try to keep this updated more.
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