things are starting to fall apart...

London has this habit of sneaking up on you - sitting on the train you pass through village after village divided by miles of fields and pasture until the villages start to roll one into the next and you look over your shoulder to realise that that there'll be no more fields and there's London staring back at you with a guilty grin while it tries to pretend it wasn't about to shiv you with the sharpened pool cue it's doing a poor job of hiding behind its back. i've heard tell of people who commute into London from villages in the surrounds (even met a couple) but i'd never believed it was that popular until i rode the train back from Harwich first thing in the morning. by the time we're half-way there the train's crowded. half an hour out and it's packed. these people must spend almost as much time commuting as they do working (more so knowing some of the office-workers i've met over the years), but they don't seem to care... or at least, are resigned to it out the quietly desperate way of the English that Pink Floyd referred to years before i was born.

Louise and i parted company at Liverpool St Station - me taking the bags back to base-camp and her off to work. i walked into the cool quiet of our room. she walked face-first into a Don't Come Monday. the company she's been working for since December runs in cycles of workload and she'd already dodged two staffing cuts. this one got her. on the plus side, she gets to work out the week which means a bit of extra cash for her. on the minus, this leaves her at a massive loose-end, and no idea where her next paycheck's coming from.

my job search has showed little more than previous weeks and i'm not in the mood - going through the motions if for no other reason than that i have fuck-all better to do. i've had an increasingly sinking suspicion since Tuesday that this might be the beginning of the end and my mind's already started to build contingency plans and pondering dates of return to the a sunburned country. i don't know. i really don't. there are too many different factors pulling in different directions. what i'm hearing from the homeland hasn't been positive as far as the job opportunities are concerned, but at least i have infrastructure there - a strong professional reputation, pimps who take my calls, couches to crash on and the dole i can apply for... but i have this sinking feeling that if i wound up back in Canberra in a month or so i'd wind up sitting there staring out across Lake Burley-Griffin thinking WTF? my current temptation is to give it another few weeks or a month, pack it in and go travel the continent. Louise has been talking about doing a 3-week tour through Egypt, which sounds like a great way to get it started. St Patrick's Day is around the corner, as is Ireland, and that seems like the sort of thing that just has to be done, so i could probably fit that in before Egypt... then instead of coming back to London i could head on elsewhere... Greece is just across the Mediterranean. so's Italy, and from either or the rest of Europe's laid out in a patchwork of irregular borders and train lines, begging to be traversed. i could easily lose 2 or 3 months in that and get back into Aus at around Tax Time when budgets are full and the departments are casting around to fill in their FTE. or i could keep hanging around London...

i need to sit down with Louise and see what she has to say, and what her plans are. i don't think she's done yet, but it's a conversation we have to have. not sure whether, or how, it'll change my plans just yet, but if i can remove that variable then at least i can start thinking about how i want to attack things. there's also the small matter of a pretty little brunette who i've not spoken to enough since i left... knowing her mind will certainly help push me in one direction or another.

i hate to think about slinking home with my tail between my legs, but i know in my mind that i've made the best go of it that i could under the circumstances, and backpacking Europe would make a fantastic way to end it... or at least make the return smell less of failure and more of the grand adventure i'd envisioned a year ago when i was first putting my plans together. conversations i have in the coming days will tell me a great deal. i just hope that they provide me with some clarity on which way to jump. at very least i expect that they'll remove any excuse i might have to not make the decision i don't want to have to make myself.