Same old…

Just a quick one, if nothing else than just to keep up my minimum of a post a month!

Christmas has passed me by, but not before I was given a late Christmas present. Being able to watch Forest beat Derby 5-2. I haven’t seen a derby game in over ten years and this is the one I choose?! I’ve been relatively muted on the celebration front purely because I’m not overly confident of the return game at Pride Park next week. Form goes right out of the window in these games…

Due to Forest’s progress in the cup, I’ll be making the trip south to our next opponents – West Ham United. Never been to Upton Park, but with tickets only £15 (and coach travel about the same) – it’s an opportunity I can’t miss. The game is at the end of the month, coinciding with a busy few weeks. My birthday being the focal point obviously, but a few days previous to that, I’ll be helping my brother move house.

Iain lives in Wood Green currently, but due to Aleks and her job in Slough, they needed to move to West London. He’d been talking about Shepherds Bush, but a place in Ealing has become available. A quick look on google maps shows that it’s suburb-y (like Colindale), but a lot more leafy. Shops are not on the doorstep like Wood Green, but no matter – Ealing town centre is only about five minutes walk away.

I’ll have a closer inspection in a few weeks, where I’ll help him move/generally be nosey…

That Was the Week That Was

I’m now back home, after the Jersey trip and after a weekend down in London. It’s been a long week!

I enjoyed Jersey, it’s a lovely little island that feels like Devon & Cornwall mixed in with France – obviously helped by all the road signs being in french and all that – you feel like you’re still in the UK but at the same time it feels foreign. It’s quite odd. The weather out there was a mixed bag, but when the sun was out it was warm and pleasant, and that also coincided with me taking some of the better pictures. The beaches, villages etc. always look better when the sun is out.

The hotel was fine, everything you expect of a four star hotel, just a shame that the free hotel wifi didn’t reach my room! The hotel was also a ten minute walk toward the town centre, so I was certainly getting some exercise out there. I’d recommend Jersey to anyone who is thinking of going there, it’d make a brilliant holiday. I’ve took a ton of pictures, but seeing as they all need to be edited to get ‘em up to scratch, it could be some time before they appear on Flickr.

Of course, i was enjoying this break until I received a phone call on the Thursday. It was in reply to the interview I had the other week. I was unsuccessful. After the past week of my family and sister being overly positive about my chances of getting the job, it turns out that “We just don’t have the vacancies at the moment”. Now, the fact that they said that other than the typical “You just weren’t good enough” left me wondering if there was more to it, and a phone call from my sister Megan (who works there, of course!) led me to think that I would have got the job if the law of sod hadn’t come into play…

Basically, an employee who fancied returning to work after a FIVE YEAR career break, chose the same week that I had my interview to tell the company of her intentions to return, so they were duty bound to offer her the old job back, thus taking out one of the five vacancies they had going. Conversations with my sister since all this and I’ve learnt that had she not decided to return to work, I’d have got the job. It also transpires that I passed the skills test and the actual interview, which they score, but seeing as I had the lowest pass score out of all the applicants, I was the one who had to miss out when it came to deciding who got the four remaining vacancies. To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. If I’d been just no good for the job, then fair enough, but I was so CLOSE to getting a new job, only for things to go against me when it really matters.

However, when you ‘pass’ the interview but don’t get a job, they keep you on a reserve list for six months. That means if any vacancy – similar to the job i applied for – arises between now and January, I will be offered the position. That’s even without an interview. My sister remains confident that a new vacancy will open up in the coming months, but I’m not so optimistic. When you’re that close to getting a new job it all goes tits up, it does make you err on the side of pessimism. It also means that I go back to work this week with the prospect of NOT handing in my notice today, forced to carry on working at Royal Mail for the foreseeable. Great.

So, that didn’t help me enjoy the last few days of the Jersey break, but not to worry – London was next. Iain and Aleks are going to Bulgaria soon so it was a chance to see them before they jet off in a week or two. I love London, don’t care what anyone else thinks, i love that city.

We looked more closely around where he lives, Wood Green, before going into Central London for some food. We ended up on Tottenham Court Road and I saw for the first time all of the electrical shops that it is famed for. When the time comes for my new DSLR (and the time is close!) I’ll be certain to take a trip down there. So many places to shop!

We ate at this restaurant near to the British Museum. It was a Turkish place called Tas. A chain of restaurants all around London, this was some excellent food. By far and away the brst Turkish food I have tasted. Couple that with excellent service, it’s somewhere that I’ll be telling people to go if ever they are in that part of the city. Brilliant stuff!

Yesterday, we found ourselves in Tottenham. This place is a treasure trove of European supermarkets. They have all sorts of odd foreign chocolate bars, varieties of cheese, meat and crazy flavoured fizzy drinks (SuperMalt anyone?). I could also see White Hart Lane from where we were, even though Spurs were the other side of London yesterday.

So, a long week which was enjoyable on the whole, except for the crushing disappointment of Thursday!

Midsummer Mundanities

Today, June 21st, is the longest day of the year. I always thinks this comes far too early – before we get chance to enjoy the summer, the nights start slowly getting darker again!

Today is also about one month before I fly away on holiday. It’s a well earned break, I must say. In the past month at work things have changed, duties are different, meaning I no longer have the cushy safe job with my mates and instead have a mind-numbingly boring job. Ho hum. That’s also not to mention the fact that my hours on Saturday have changed. I’m not a fan of working on Saturdays anyway, I finished at six but it’d kinda ruin the day, but now my hours have been shifted from 2-6 to 3-7. Perfect.

I’m all for looking for new work, but the severe lack of any decent jobs (the Nottingham Evening Post doesn’t even have a proper jobs paper anymore!) has led me to look at some sort of training in something else. I think I’ve approached the point of sink or swim. I’m 26, I’ve been at Royal Mail for three years and if i do nothing now, i’ll be there in three years time. Problem is, i’m not entirely sure what I want to do, and what I’d be good at. Certainly needs a few days off work (like a holiday!) to think long and hard about it.

I’ve been to London a good few times recently. Until the other day, my brother Iain and his fiancee Aleks lived in a ‘leafy’ north London suburb called Colindale. I say leafy, but a short walk down Edgware Road is enough to convince you other wise. They moved across the north of the capital last Tuesday, to a much larger and more interesting place called Wood Green – or more precisely Turnpike Lane – which involved me and my dad helping them both in about three car journeys to and fro.

Wood Green is automatically nicer, seeing as the high street is literally minutes away, there is a Wetherspoons serving non-London priced beer and they have the Turnpike Lane tube stop down the end of their road. Shame that they aren’t staying there longer (short term let) as i’d like to get to know the area better, plus it’s a few miles north of Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium – which I’d like to go gawp at.

Elsewhere, the new iPhone and the iPhone update were released the other day. The change between my iPhone 3G and the new 3GS is minimal, certainly not enough to go out and buy it. Besides, the recently released 3.0 jailbreak has seen to it that a lot of new features brought in on the 3GS can be got on my phone.