Well, after a winter of doubt and hope, AstraZeneca appear to have succeeded in financially incentivising my spouse into a pro-Cambridge position once again, and next week we're dragging the kids to Cambridgeshire to scout it out, particularly around Ely which seems on paper to be an OK location although it's just a small town with lots of tourists visiting the cathedral, lots of floodplain houses and absolutely nothing else for miles in any direction.
Having grown accustomed to having varying sizes of big town on my doorstep in addition to Marple (which Ely approximates) and pretty good public transport to those places, it's going to be a dull and isolated life and I've got a horrible feeling that we're going to be seeing WAY too much of my wife's workmates as they'll be the only people we know for a hundred miles.
Another down side is that rather than the regular trips to see her family that, while painful and awkward, last a few hours at worst, they'll be regularly descending on us for entire weekends instead. This is going to be one of the hardest things for me to accept, given the precipitate way we were forced to flee my Sister-in-Law's house when my son was a baby after being given temporary shelter there while some cowboy builders fucked up out house. We slightly outstayed our welcome and were forced to return to an unheated shell in the dead of winter with a 9-month old baby after an acrimonious incident.
Another downside is that Cambridgeshire is geographically closer to my Parents, although it probably takes about as long to get from Ely to there as the roads are unbelievably shit caravan and tractor-ridden country roads.
We're also investigating Royston, although the frankly staggering house prices in Ely will seem like small change if we have to buy something very small here. The only thing it has in its favour is that it is feasible to commute to and from London from here whereas Ely is much harder. I might need to be open to jobs in the capital in order to get a job at all. Travelling on the tube again...woohoo. I'd rather die. Seriously, smother me in my sleep.
Despite my brief interlude of peace when I started on Quetiapine tablets, my self harm is now getting worse again as this trip gets closer, and I'm getting more and more disconnected and suicidal again as I can't envision myself moving to this Godforsaken corner of nowhere. Apart from anything else I've just about bankrupted myself paying for dressings for the wounds, so maybe something more permanent is now called for. Like a spot of track-surfing.
I won't pretend I ever settled down in the North West and the job I'm in is boring me to death and stressing me out in equal measure because I just don't know what I'm doing. But at least I'm on a waiting list for therapy here, which I will have to go back to square one with in Cambs. We'll also be taking the kids away from their friends and their lives. My daughter is very happy at School and at her Dance School, with a large circle of friends. My son is just starting to break through to where he needs to be academically and also has a decent group of friends, some of whom aren't utter little pricks, and we centre our annual timetable around the local Cricket Club, where he goes to winter nets, spring training and summer games, plus we've Lancashire Cricket Club a short(ish) train and tram ride away and many summer tournaments which are glorious. It makes me choke down a lump in my throat when I think of the future he has here, a place that makes him happy, and that this move will steal from him.
I feel like we're betraying our kids and our principles because a certain AZ executive of Greek extraction doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and stop kissing board-of-directors arse. Yes AZ will theoretically be better placed for research interfacing with clinical collaborators at Addenbrookes but I used to work at Northwick Park for the MRC and I know exactly how much interfacing actually goes on: fuck all, it was a expensive failure that got moved to Hammersmith only to fail again. Plus they could have just relocated into Manchester and been right next to the Christie Hospital and the new CRUK National Cancer Research Centre for less money and without ruining the lives of the many thousands of people who are being swept along in this torrent of shit because their spouses work for the mighty Arse-traZeneca.
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