Wednesday in White City

So, it’s Wednesday morning, and once again I am in White City; the Beeb is a lovely place to work so far

The people are friendly; I’ve been incapable of remembering my cable to charge my iPhone, but a very friendly chap that sits behind me has been helping me out on that front – I must start remembering or I imagine his friendliness will run out. The whole place has a very campus feel about it – there are coffee shops and leafy outdoor spaces, even a small Tesco and three canteens (though I have only visited the largest of these).

The work is interesting too, and from this morning I actually have access to the codebase, properly, for the first time; I am looking forward to getting my teeth into the project. It’s great to be back in an environment where TDD / Unit Testing and other forms of process are intrinsic to the working of the team I am in – in fact the development policy across the whole organisation is now pretty much in the SCRUM way as far as I can tell, with SCRUM boards marking out a kind of curtain wall around the open-plan dev space.

There are even (apparently good) showers here, so my cycle-based odyssey that will begin in Sevenoaks and end in Chorley on Friday (with a couple of train journeys in there as well, I’m not that fit yet) will not lead to a sudden cessation in friendly relations with my colleagues.

Last night Lee-Anne and I had dinner with Chi and Mogs, in Spitalfields, and rather like my meeting Lee-Anne’s best friend on Sunday last, it all went rather well as far as I can tell. The conversation and cocktails flowed as we gloried in Canteen’s excellent Post-British Cuisine and two of my oldest friends got to know this fabulous woman who it is hard to believe has only really been in my life for just shy of eight weeks.

As intimated above, I am off to Chorley, to my childhood home, to spend the weekend with Mum and Dad and to assist in their ongoing campaign of emptying the house for sale by boxing up and sorting through my assorted posessions. It is the end of an era, and I’d be lying if I said that I was not at all saddened by the idea of our family giving up the home that I have known for 25 years, and that has played host to parties, anniversaries and more quotidien but no less important moments for not only the four of us, but also family and friends. Broughton House has long been a bustling place, filled with friends of mine and Ed’s, not to mention my parents’, and I will be personally sad to give up my perfectly laid out room, comprised of shelves ad precious little else, but all things must end; change is an inexorable force in life and one can only fight it for so long.

Anyway, enough musing on that – back to the accounts! (so to speak)…