Just when you thought it was safe...

Well,  having returned from Cambridgeshire,  having agreed that living in some parts of Ely would work and even having located some friends for the kids,  the peckerheads at Pfizer announce a buy out bid for AZ.  Awesome,  it will have upset quite a few applecarts I reckon.

So the hard deadline for a decision in June has gone out of the window and all bets are off.   Thanks for that.

Problem A: M.  Soriot  et al. have fattened AZ up to the point where it's a huge takeover target,  particularly for sharks like Pfizer who have 70bn. in the UK and need to spend it here to avoid a giant tax bill.   It's win win for them since AZ have almost no significant liabilities and heavily consolidated stock so only a few voting dominoes need to defect to make this happen.

Problem B:   I've been applying for jobs like crazy in Cambridge whereas now it looks like I might have to find funding to remain at Manchester in the next ten months or so which is a hell of a hill to climb.   I have some sketchy research ideas but these days you need to get preliminary data and the researcher with spare capacity to allow this is in no apparent rush to get started and my potential collaborator has gone missing.  The alternative is to go through redeployment again.  Big fun.

Option c involves an oven bag and a nitrogen cylinder,  and it's getting harder to keep THAT door closed.

Cambridge ... Back on again and right soon

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.

Moving to Cambridge - Part ... whatever I don't care it's finally broken me

I'm in data-analysis hell again today so I thought I'd give my carpal tunnel a rest and do some typing.  Any potential reader of this post might as well be as miserable as me...

Well..

AstraZeneca sure know how to keep us dangling.  STILL no confirmation either way about the move or any time-frame.  It's like they think I can just throw together a new life down south in a couple of days or something...

Consequently my depression and delusional episodes are going off the charts.  Hallucinations, suicidal ideation, self-harming, Valium abuse, all sorts of big fun stuff.  I've made a large seeping wound on my chest with a pumice stone and it really hurts, stupid.

Meanwhile the work on the house has stalled due to a bad patch of multiple flash-flooding towards the end of the recent hot weather, due to blocked street drains emptying into my house and soaking everything.

Ergo everything is still like a bomb-site and it's really breaking me in the head.  Plus I managed to rip my second good Fat-Face shirt in as many months thanks to having to struggle over the piles of crap and it's become completely obvious now that my marriage is a tissue-thin illusion.

I've got to go and see the Psych crisis team tonight after work to look at my meds and probably I'm going to have to endure yet more fruitless months of psychology referrals, because that's how modern Mental Health Services roll, it seems.  Damn you George Osbourne, you posh twat.

I just have to focus on keeping the hissing lit match of madness away from the flammable Draylon that is my job, to coin a bloody awful metaphor.  Watch this space.

In other news, just got back from a family "holiday" in Whitby.  I did enjoy lazing on the beach and fossil hunting with Joshua as usual, he may drive me nuts but he's a really good kid.  Previous to that we went to the cottage in Norfolk again (near Thorpe Abbots).  Not so good as the "wife" had asked her parents along AGAIN so I couldn't relax at all.  Plus I ended up going fishing, which I abhor, with Josh and my Father in Law.  It only served to reinforce my conviction that fishing is a hideously cruel blood-sport, so I'm afraid someone else will have to take him next time.  The WI-FI at the cottage was playing up so we all felt a bit amputated, especially since we really rely on BBC iPlayer these days to keep the kids from killing each other.  One cool thing was going to an aviation museum and seeing a real Gloster Javelin, arguably the very worst jet fighter Britain has ever built, a genuine pilot killer which was obsolete before it even left the ground. A full list of it's many flaws is given by the late, great, much-maligned test pilot Squadron Leader Bill Waterton GM AFC* (1916 – 2006)  is a major part of the excellent book "Empire of the Clouds" by James Hamilton-Patterson (ISBN: 0571247954), which I highly recommend to all those who wonder why we're having to buy in US F-35 fighters for our aircraft carriers and why the RAF flies planes which are 1/3 German.

We also saw a couple of Apache helicopters weaving through the trees one day which was a first for me.  It made me think of how I used to see planes all the time in Northampton, Tornados, F-111's, A-10's, F-15's the works, flying training sorties up the Nene Valley.  The agile grace of the A-10's particularly left an impression upon me, such a contrast with their plug-ugly looks and their mission profile as witnessed later .in Kuwait and Iraq.

This has been a post of two halves, for which I am sorry, but sometimes one just needs to vent.