I started this blog out of curiosity but with no clear purpose in mind. I have hardly ever posted to it. But now it has a purpose, to document what might just be the darkest hours of my life.
AstraZeneca (those motherfuckers) announced that they're relocating their Alderley Edge R&D operation to Cambridgeshire in 2015, and the BEST CASE is that we'll have to uproot and trek down to East Anglia.
The enormity of this has finally hit me when I was forced to consider how many things, large and small, will have to be sorted out to allow this to happen. I finally sat down and thought about the minutiae that add up to a life and how every single tiny piece has to be uprooted and moved, I finally started to realise what will be lost in the process.
Top of the list, I have to find a job down there. I'm 47 years old and not exactly transferable. Sure I know a bit of Python and Java and I'm working on my Perl but I seriously doubt Sanger or EBI would be interested. I couldn't even get into Cambridge Uni as a student, when I would have been paying them to be there, so getting a job there is frankly unlikely. My wife has suggested commuting to Manchester and living here in the week, returning to Cambridge at weekends, but I honestly can't see that working, not least financially. Maybe if I could've stayed in London rather than moving to the North West and built my career there instead of in this provincial little hole I'd be in a better place about this. That milk's spilt though, no point crying over it.
We will also have to tear the kids away from the schools, friends, clubs etc. It's going to be heartbreaking.
We've become deeply embedded where we live, we have friends, hobbies, sports and other activities set up for the kids. We own a house, have favourite places, our kids took their first steps here and said their first words. I've never loved where we live but I guess I'd always assumed that we'd be here to see them take their first steps into the wider world, first loves, first triumphs, first failures. That future has now ceased to exist and I think I might be mourning it.
Now our home is just a house again and it's all down to some corporate bastard's bottom line. It's hard to get up in the morning because what's the point of going to work when I know I'll never finish what I've started in my job?
I feel robbed, sad, lost, scared. I feel like I'm suffocating.
I feel like checking out.
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