Eight years.  That’s how long I’ve been living in the wrong end of England.  I say “wrong”, but perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration.  I came here to study for a degree, and when it was over I just never got round to leaving and going somewhere nicer.  I’ve never been much of a city boy, and before any of you starts yelling about Colchester not being a city, it’s all comparative – when you’ve come from the countryside, a dual-carriageway is a big scary road, and if you can’t get from one end of the town to the other in ten minutes then something is very wrong.

So it comes as an enormous sigh of relief that Ellie and I have found a lovely new house to move into in a few weeks time!  This week we travelled down to Bristol to stay with my grandparents for a couple of days while we scoured the locality for potential places to set up residence.  We’d spent a fair amount of time reading through the results on RightMove.co.uk, and found a few we thought looked promising, and when we arrived in Bristol on Tuesday evening we had three houses we particularly wanted to look at: one in Peasedown St John, one in Evercrecch, and one in Bedminster.  Grandma quickly told us that Bedminster wasn’t a great area, so we weren’t too disappointed when the estate agents never got back to us about getting us a viewing.

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I know it’s Easter Sunday, and I really am excited and thrilled to know that Jesus rose from the dead, but there’s more – Neddy lives too!  It’s clearly the day for resurrections.  After several months of being garaged, my lovely Mini is now back on the road, healthy and alive and really loving it!

I was actually hoping to sell Neddy way back in November, when we bought our Ford Escort Ghia X, which was intended to replace our little Mini.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find a buyer at the time, what with the credit crunch driving car prices down, so Neddy sat almost completely forgotten in the garage, not seeing the light of day or feeling the tarmac under his tyres.  I did make sure the car was MOTed before Christmas, but due to lack of buyers I opted to SORN the car rather than renewing the tax disc, with the intention of getting the ball rolling again in the spring, by which time hopefully the car market would have improved.

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