It seems extraordinary that over four months after Dave was offered his new job for North Yorkshire County Council, I find myself still in Crouch End writing this. Such is the process of buying and selling property in the UK. We may or may not be edging closer to exchanging contracts but until there are signatures on dotted lines anything could still happen. So for now we live in York in the week and return to being CrouchEnders at weekends.
Monday to Friday (or Monday to Thursday in my case), we are residing in a horrible staff flat on the University of York. Its main advantage is its cost, being very cheap, something which is hugely necessary given we're paying our London mortgage as well at the moment. For our money, we have a lakeside view, three pet spiders (called Goose, Duck and Coot in honour of the local waterfowl), furnishings and fittings that haven't changed since 1963 and our own fridge, which freezes everything we put into it instantly. We sleep on an inflatable double mattress as the flat only has a single bed. My main problem was the layers of kitchen grease and thick black dust coating everything inside when we moved in. University housekeeping is clearly not what it once was. Humans are ever adaptable creatures and so I've got used to it now, but coming back to our flat in Crouch End and our gloriously comfortable
Warren Evans bed always feels so luxurious. At least the food on campus these days is quite decent - in fact it's better than a lot of restaurants we've been to in York. (The chef is allegedly award-winning, though this of course could just mean he's been given an ASBO.) And it’s cheap (about £3 for a dish) so we aren't worrying about catering for ourselves with the somewhat ropey scummy student kitchen facilities on offer.
I am no longer a subtitler. There, I said it. My official title is now Lab Manager for the Infant and Toddler Language Studies Research Team in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. The vacancy came up with spot-on timing and I was thrilled to be offered the job. Being a distinguished alumnus with useful contacts probably helped. We have an ESRC grant to study the “dynamic interactions” between perception and production in infant language acquisition. 60 babies will be studied between the ages of 9 and 16 months over the period between now and the end of January 2009. They will be filmed in the home and come into the lab to undergo speech perception experiments (conducted by me). So far so good – it’s very stimulating for me to have a focus in my life again after years of meandering along with freelance work. It’s even better to have a guaranteed monthly income and paid annual leave and a generous final salary pension scheme, having had to wait up to four months for subtitling companies to pay my invoices in recent times. I suspect my job description will end up including mopping up baby sick and trying to pacify 10 month olds who quite reasonably don’t want to be shoved into a dark, bank-vault-like soundproof booth to have lights and noises flashed at them. But I have the impression already that I’m going to love every minute of it.
My old department seems pleased to have me back, though I feel like I’ve time-travelled, seeing all my lecturers suddenly having aged ten years all at once. Linguistics is now based in Vanbrugh College in newly refurbished but unbelievably hot offices. We used to have our own building, which is now on the verge of demolition...once they've removed all the asbestos. It’s very disconcerting watching men in radiation suits wandering around somewhere we happily sat in every day for three years as students. They're building a new humanities research centre in its place, with a budget of 11 million pounds. My old phonetics professor showed me the plans and it should be fantastic, even though 11 million doesn't get them as much of a building as they wanted so they've had to scrub some of the more romantic sides of it, like a roof garden. The infant language studies team will move into there once it's finished, but of course my particular project will be over by then so I may never get to see it.
Dave's happy with his new job too, though he's entering a new department which is still being set up and restructured so not everything is in place that he needs. It's all serious management stuff though - meetings and jollies and delegation. The journeys to and from Northallerton haven't been too bad but will improve once he can walk to the station. York has new purple buses that look like trams - they're rather fine. Obviously my commute is very easy – it takes me two minutes to walk round the university lake to work. Lots of ducks, geese and bunnies to entertain us, and giant carp in the lake.
I do feel very old suddenly though - it's ten years this week since I graduated from York, and seeing this year's ceremonies made me very nostalgic. (Sad too, remembering being there with Mum and how proud she was of me... It would have been her 61st birthday tomorrow.) (And how strange to think Dave and I didn’t even know each other then, though our third wedding anniversary this September also marks the tenth anniversary of our meeting, beside Grey’s Monument in Newcastle-upon-Tyne). This year for graduation in York they installed a chocolate fountain on campus - none of that in my day, so plenty of reason to make the most of it now.
Recent events make it appropriate to tie up my CrouchEnding blog for good here as so many things I have written about have suddenly become relevant again. England is now
smoke-free, which makes all of the real ale on tap in York pubs taste even better. Mark Morris was back at the Barbican with his simply divine
Mozart Dances. London once again came under terrorist
attack.
Breast cancer patients are still not being diagnosed in time in the UK.
I will blog again, but in a different guise. If we ever actually get to move house, that is.
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