Location location location

Him Indoors and I had the pleasure of visiting two of our chums who live in Buckinghamshire last night for some rather lovely nosh and entertaining conversation. Wine flowed, I talked shite (the two tend to come hand in hand) and we all ended the evening chilling in front of a movie (which I admit I fell asleep in front of – what can I say, my chair was very comfortable).
On the train home this morning, conversation turned to us moving out of London. This conversation usually makes me anxious, partly because I know compromising on where we end up living is not going to be easy, and partly because it seems like a mammoth task to find somewhere to live that ticks all the right boxes.
Firstly, we have decided that we ideally want to be able to commute into Kings Cross or St Pancras, but are willing to look at other stations too if the pros outweigh the inconvenience of having to travel across London. Secondly, we don’t want our door to door journey to last longer than an hour. So what we have decided to do is print off a map of London train connections and draw a loop around the stations that are within 40 minutes of Kings Cross, or half an hour of other stations south, east and west. We then need to investigate the cost of commuting and the earliest and latest trains into and out of London to accommodate his career and my social life. Then of course it needs to be affordable. And somewhere we both want to live.
There are other things we need to factor in as well. Would we need to buy a car to get to the station in the mornings? What are the local amenities like? Are there any decent pubs, and, dare I say it, clubs? So much to consider, so little time. Not that we are planning to move before the end of this year, but still, that is a lot of research to carry out.
I have made an executive decision on this one. I am letting Him Indoors take the lead on our investigations. Why? Because, due to his awkward working hours, he is the one who needs the most boxes ticking. And he is the one who wants to move out of London. The sad mathematician in me is looking forward to drawing up a comparative spreadsheet of different locations to ease the process. In fact, if it works well enough, you might see me on Dragon’s Den plugging it as an internet business. But other than that, it’s in his hands. Am I deliberately trying to slow down the process? Not at all. But if he fails to get his act together and get the ball rolling, I will leave him to it and make the most of a few extra months in the capital, guilt free.
Having said that, the current political climate might scupper our plans. Cuts to public services could well see me without a job, and, with an employment history that does not really venture out of support work, I may well be pretty unemployable. So, the money I have saved up for a deposit may well and up substituting my income whilst I find a new niche in the employment market. Strangely enough, when I pointed this out to Him Indoors, I did have to admit that although redundancy is a scary prospect, it appealed in some perverse way. Redundancy could be my way out of a job that I don’t really get any satisfaction from and force me to do something different, even re-train. Yes, financially it will be tight, but with a few agency shifts and a little job pulling pints I reckon I could get by. I might even have time to really go for this writing malarkey and become self sufficient with home grown vegetables and handmade clothes.
Who knows what the future will bring, and where it will deliver me. Whatever happens though, and wherever it happens, I think I can live with it.