Yorkshire bound

Finally, finally, Dave has found the secret skeleton key that allows people into the impenetrable fortress that is senior management in local government. The excruciatingly gruelling recruitment processes he has been through over the past year is something that only he can write about. Suffice to say, what can you do when time and time again you’ve been told that you gave the best interview on the day, did the best verbal and numerical reasoning tests and gave the best presentation, but still haven’t got the job because another candidate already did the same job for a different council?

He has been appointed as Performance and Outcomes Manager for North Yorkshire County Council, based in Northallerton, which means that we are going to move to York, the city where I did my undergraduate degree, and which has a giant soft spot in my heart. A strange step back in time to cake in Café Concerto, matinees at City Screen, snoozing in the Museum Gardens by the river, ale and folk music at the Maltings and dodgy ska bands at Fibbers.

Soon, we shall no longer be CrouchEnders. Soon, we shall be able to live in a three-bedroom house with a garden and two kittens of our own, rather than a one-bedroom flat looking out at Fluffy the cat playing in the park. Our flat, incidentally, has just been valued at 310,000 pounds, which means that it would be completely beyond our budget to buy now and that the London property market has finally gone completely insane. But to our advantage at last.

I am desperate to leave London, but sad to leave London. By the time we move, I will have lived here for eight years, first in Clapham, then Tooting, then Earlsfield, before marrying Dave and settling in Crouch End. I love Crouch End. If we could have afforded a house here and had the lifestyle that we were continuously reminded we could not afford, I might have stayed forever. I get a kick out of being bohemian, of anonymously rubbing shoulders with celebrities, of Indian tapas, bento boxes, Lupa pizzas and badly named Thai restaurants, of simply enjoying that indescribable London buzz whilst feeling you're in a green and leafy village. But I also need to have a garden I can grow vegetables in, to have enough space to have the piano that has sat idle in Bishop’s Stortford for over 15 years, to have the option to have pets and children and a guest bedroom. I need to not go on the Tube on a sweltering summer’s day. I can’t procrastinate my life any longer. I have to give it a go.