So, I've moved out of Manor Park (or East Ham; people seemed to know about the latter as it's on the tube map, whereas the former's a mainline station) for the less dodgy Barnsbury (part of Islington, and between the Victoria and Piccadilly lines- a whole new world of London Underground to explore; yes, I've changed my preferences on the TFL travel alerts site to reflect the lines I use now).
(Parenthetically, London seems to have contracted a bit. I've changed from a zone 1-3 to 1-2 travelcard, and when I wanted to go down to a shop in Wimbledon last week, it turned out I'd need a zone extension, of all things. Somehow, this feels very odd indeed. Combined with the fact I took a rather gentle walk down to Covent Garden on Sunday, and I can feel the city shrinking. Odd.)
What's better? Well, there's the 'being shitloads closer to Central London' bit, and also closer to friends (so much so I worry a bit I might suffocate some friendships to death; ho hum); Islington is a much nicer area, as I said before (I can now go to pubs down the road). On the other hand, I'm now sharing; the people are nice, but three years of solo living mean I've accumulated a lot of stuff (mainly falling into the three categories media, Lego and computers) which is currently sitting in boxes. I need some sort of storage solution; I'm incredibly tempted by the Muji tube shelves, but maybe I should succumb to the lure of Ikea like everyone else. (Anyone used the Muji ones? Do they work OK?)
There was also the painful week or so when I was mulling whether or not to rearrange my room completely. Now I've done so, it seems a lot better than it did. Flatmates also mean we can share the cost of broadband, so once we hassle the right people, there should be ADSL and wireless goodness at the new place. Woohoo.
Oh, there were the two days of moving boxes in and out of vans, and the three days either side of assembling, dissassembling and fretting, and the worrying about deposits, but let's ignore them now, eh?