I’ve been out of touch with the wider world for some time now, but it’s not because I’m turning into some sort of recluse. Any thoughts I may have had of abandoning civilisation and living a life of contemplation up in the mountains were abandoned years ago, when I stopped reading all those silly Herman Hesse novels at university.

The blame for my infrequent communications lies with the local telecommunications company here in Ireland. After five weeks, they’re only just getting around to connecting the telephone in my new home. Fingers crossed, it should all be up and running next week, complete with the necessary high speed connection.

Let this be a lesson to anyone contemplating a move to the slower paced life of Ireland - six weeks for a telephone connection is not that unusual. Of course, as soon as the connection comes through, I’ll be ditching Eircom in favour of one of their many competitors - incompetence has a price guys!

Despite my sheltered life over the past month, work has continued on the next version of PageFour - details to follow.

This moving business is no fun. I remember the days when moving from place to place involved tossing a few unwashed pairs of socks into a backpack, putting my boots on, and walking out the door. When did it become an operation that required weeks of planning?

I’ve spent the past five days packing boxes, filling bags full of unwanted clothes and books for the local charity shop, cancelling direct debits, and arranging refunds for all sorts of utility bills - why the hell was I paying £45 a month for water anyway? I mean sure, I had a bath every day and washed the dishes, but I could have used goat’s milk for that sort of money. My address had to be changed in about fifteen different places, none of which accept UNKNOWN as a valid place of residence. Two of my bank accounts insist on a UK address, and everyone seems to get all offended at my inability to produce a postcode. Ireland’s a small country guys - get a clue.

I blame the computer programmers myself, living and working in their own little insular worlds, unaware of the Irish ability to work out where we are without the aid of six digit combinations of letters and numbers.

The clock’s ticking. Seven days remain and my city living comes to an end. I’d like to be able to say that I’m sad to go, that I’ll miss the crowds and the car fumes, but I’d be lying; truth is I can’t wait to board that plane.

This past week I’ve been making final use of the National Health Service that English people complain about so much - checking the blood pressure, sorting out that annoying little ear ache that keeps popping up, that sort of thing. Ireland hasn’t embraced the whole ‘that’s what your pay taxes for‘ thing when it comes to health care yet, so I thought I’d make sure to get my money’s worth before leaving.

The freezer is empty and the cupboards are almost bare. By the end of the week I’ll be living on pasta topped with instant cheese sauce, and maybe a touch of Cajun seasoning if I haven’t run out by then. The removal company are emptying the flat on Thursday, which leaves me with three days to kill before boarding the plane.

Sunday morning I’ll be tossing those few pairs of unwashed socks into my bag, putting my boots on, and walking out the door to the sounds of Van Morrison on the iPod. Now that brings back memories. It was always Van the Man singing ‘I got to go back…‘ in my ear as I sat on buses or trains in the past, leaving one godforsaken town behind and heading for another just like it.

Only this time, the words of the song actually fit.

I remember London in the good old days, back when I was eighteen years old and working for slave wages in the Royal Albert Hall. I was living in a grotty room in Wood Green and thought my pay check of £160 a week was the greatest thing ever. London was fresh and new, with its red buses and escalators that went on forever. It was a big adventure with an element of tradition thrown in - sixteen years ago it was almost unheard of for an Irishman not to emigrate. Who was I to fly in the face of tradition?

Over the years, I found myself returning to London again and again. I abandoned Trinity College Dublin in favour of University College London - please don’t ask why, as I’m a little embarrassed to say. I settled in West London as I trained to become a hot shot computer programmer, and returned again when my career took me from the Home Counties to the banks of the Thames.

And now I’m leaving.

I’ve grown tired of the busy streets and the constant rush, the anonymous flats with the next door neighbours I’ve never met, the four wheel drives that have never been off the tarmac, and the growing disparity between the happy families with two cars and a holiday home, and the passengers who ride the buses with me every morning on their way to low paying jobs in shops and factories.

There’s nothing to hold me here anymore, no reason to stay beyond fear of change. I’ve already kissed the day job and the career goodbye, what’s one more big change added to the list? I’m moving back to ye olde country, back to where it all began: the green fields and country lanes of Ireland.

My new business venture (may it be fruitful and full of success!) is about to kick off, and it makes little difference if I’m living in the cosmopolitan centre of the world, or a fallen down cottage in the middle of a field. Give me a broadband connection and I’m good to go.

It’s the right decision, and I can’t wait.

So here’s the thing. You work for The Company for a few years, doing whatever it is they hired you to do. It’s a job and it pays the rent - in some cases it pays a very large rent and even buys you a nice car and a great big plasma screen TV. But it’s just a job and you tell yourself ‘When I grow up I’m going to be an astronaut,‘ never realising you’re already grown up and if you were going to be an astronaut you’d be one by now. So it turns out your life is the one you’re living, not the one you dreamed about living - that this is it, and tomorrow is really today.

That’s the key you see: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TOMORROW.

There’s nothing morbid about this sort of thinking, but where does it leave us? Watching Dead Poet’s Society and channeling Robin Williams as he urges his perfectly Dawson like charges to ‘Seize the day‘?

For many of us, the day job comes closer than anything to defining who we are. When we meet a stranger at a party or in a bar, the first question we ask will invariably be ‘What do you do?‘ as if their means of paying the rent or mortgage is the single most important thing about them. We ask this question because we think it means something; we think it’s important; and we think it’s important because despite everything many of us pretend to believe, despite all the times we’ve listened to Robin Williams and Janis Joplin, we really believe that the amount of money someone makes tells us a lot about them.

And it does. If someone works 14 hours a day and never sees their kids awake for 5 days in succession, it does tell us a lot about them. If children spend more time with a nanny or an au pair than they do with their parents, it tells us a HELL OF A LOT about those parents. They have ‘important‘ jobs, earn lots of money, drive a nice car, and have an expensively decorated home they never see. The day job is clearly the most important part of some people’s lives.

But was it always? Didn’t they ever dream of being an astronaut? Or study Law for years with the intention of changing the world from within, only to end up a highly paid corporate lawyer working their asses off to maintain the status quo and safeguard the new Lexus.

Some would say it’s called growing up; but it’s not - it’s called giving up. Expensive toys will not make your kids happier, just like grown up toys don’t make us any happier.

I have fond thoughts of my first car - the one I paid £175 for. I used to carry a great big bottle of water everywhere I went in case it overheated, and I learned how to change a radiator before I could even drive properly. I drove my last car for five years and it never broke down once, but it’s the rust bucket that brings back memories.

Today is my last day at The Company. I’ve tossed in the day job and pretty much dumped the career. My next car will probably break down a lot - and I can’t wait. And if I meet you at a party, or in a bar some day, I won’t be asking you ‘What do you do?‘ I’ll be asking you ‘What do you love doing?‘

If the two answers are the same, congratulations.

The Other Blog is going well. This is my anonymous contribution to the 46.1 million offerings currently listed on Technorati, and contains all the slightly suspect content I’m too scared to post here under my own name. It’s a whole lot of fun - not giving a damn and never having to look over your shoulder.

My experiences out there in Anonymousville have had me thinking about ideas for unusual blogs. A few weeks back I stumbled across Captain Picard’s Journal, a fictional offering set in the Star Trek universe and written as a series of journal entries from the POV of various Star Trek characters. It’s an interesting idea, and with a Technorati rank of 5579, quite a successful one, though I have to say that the quality of the writing is a little on the weak side. Editing guys! Please!

But it got me thinking. Fictitious blogs make for an interesting writing exercise, and the scope is unlimited. How about a seemingly normal, everyday blog, but set ten or twenty years in the future? You could introduce one major event which changed the world - say a hard core terrorist cell of Scientologists set off a nuclear bomb in Manchester in 2010, and take it from there.

Or a contemporary blog written from the POV of a young student, set over the course of a year, but getting stranger and stranger as the weeks go by. A mystery with religious or cultish overtones perhaps - I might even find a use for those three years at university studying mediaeval history. Now that would be a first.

Books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Adrian Mole would have made great blogs. But would anyone have known they were fiction?

The possibilities…

I admit it - I’m an Anita Blake junkie. Laurell Hamilton may have turned her pint sized, penguin loving, zombie raising action heroine into a soft core porn star about three books ago, but I can’t help myself. I’m like a kid in desperate need of a Harry Potter fix, and even Hamilton’s conversion of her lead character from a nun to a reluctant nymphomaniac almost overnight has failed to quench the flames. I’ll take what I can get.

Danse Macabre is out in about ten days. That’s 496 pages, which translates to about 200 pages when the sex scenes are filtered out - but it’s better than nothing.

How sad am I?

I’m a Newsgator convert.

There was a time when I thought Bloglines ruled in the battle of the RSS readers, but that day has passed. Ever since they introduced a bug when running in Firefox about four months ago, and NEVER fixed it despite my many annoying emails, I’ve been feeling less than pleased. So a week ago I crossed the great divide, and abandoned Bloglines in favour of the competition.

For anyone still clicking on those bookmarked links every day, or trawling up and down their blogroll in search of updates - what’s keeping you? The Newsgator interface is first rate - plenty of white space and the annoying adverts are almost unnoticeable. They seem to have gotten everything just right - the quiet, calm colours, the perfect fonts…

I’ve even tried out the desktop choices such as FeedDemon, which has such great reviews on www.download.com, but why pay when the FREE alternative is so much better.

So my recommendation for watching all those blogs and eBay auctions is Newsgator - hands down.

One of the things I love about living alone is that I never have to explain myself. Why has a particular book caught my attention? Isn’t it a little on the childish / trashy / (insert your own adjective) side? Why am I listening to that music when it’s so clearly gay / tacky / not in vogue at the moment?

My younger sister is very much aware of contemporary fashions. Apologies for outing you on a public forum Susan. Her fake Louis Vuitton hand bag failed to grow on her until she discovered what it was, saying at first that she couldn’t possibly hit the streets of downtown Queensland with such a tacky and colourful item swinging by her side.

I gave up liking what other people liked somewhere in my early twenties. I’m embarrassed to admit that there was once a time when I saw the Booker shortlist as somehow important, but am pleased to say I’ve grown out of such childish views. I’ll now proudly admit to never having read The Da Vinci Code, failing to demonstrate even a vague interest in all the hype, and when the ‘critics‘ on Newsnight Review sing the praises of a particular piece of popular culture I avoid it as if it were a new Richard Gere film.

Playing on the stereo at the moment is a collection of British songs sung by Kathleen Ferrier.

Not exactly Top of the Pops material, but I’ve no doubt Kathleen was a belter in her day, her vinyl contributions pouring off the shelves like hot potatoes back in the forties. Recent purchases include three CDs from The Blind Boys of Alabama - discovered thanks to a mention on a blog I have a lot of time for - and Hilary Mantel’s autobiography Giving up the Ghost. I hear it was big a few years back.

I’m ever thankful for the day I dumped ‘expert‘ opinion as a factor in my purchasing decisions, and for living alone and never having to explain the reasons for my quirky and often spontaneous acquisitions - even the ones tucked away out of sight in case anyone happens by.

I never resigned from my last job. After a couple of years, me and the boss sort of came to an agreement that I’d be leaving a few months later when the work was completed. It was a micro-sized software company operating out of one room, and once the product was finished and out the door, my job was done. It was harmless and very civilized, and the parts I’m not telling you about probably broke all sorts of employment laws.

Without asking, I knew the current day job would require a little more formality, so Sunday evening I typed up the appropriate letter to satisfy the bureaucratic machine. Resignation letters are not something I’ve had much experience with, as most of my departures have been along the lines of: “Hey, guy with the hard hat! Tomorrow’s my last day,” or “Dave, I’m out of here. Where’s my money?” I signed my security away with a dash of red ink - not exactly revolutionary, but every little difference helps.

So yes, I have resigned - finally.

After three years and eight months working for The Man (and his brother, and his sister, and her husband too - though that’s a recent thing), I will shortly be a free agent. I have no pension fund, no mortgage, no kids, and no reason to fear the lack of a steady income over the months ahead. All I have are a whole heap of crazy ideas and a passion to do my own thing in my own strange (and possibly weird) way.

Smarter people than me have done less dumb things than this and lived to regret it, so there is a chance that it will all blow up in my face six months from now, and I’ll be unemployed, broke, and singing for my supper on a street corner in central London. I can’t sing for shit - even at eleven years old they wouldn’t let me sing at my own Confirmation, so I could be destined for a life of penury and starvation on the streets.

But at least I’ll have tried.

Even knowing all the things that could go wrong, it was the right decision. It’s all too easy to take the cosy route and stay where you are, sitting comfortably on a career path you may not even want out of fear of change and worries over paying next months rent or mortgage. The time for second guessing is over - I’ve tried the day job thing and decided it’s just not for me.

My final day as a productive drone oiling the big machine will be the fourth of July. A perfect day, and then it’s sink or swim.

The mission was simple and straight forward. Visit Tate Britain. Find the only Rossetti that has ever blown my mind. Be suitably impressed. Nothing could go wrong.

Here’s a tip: Wall space is limited. NOT EVERY PAINTING IS ON DISPLAY.

To backtrack a few hours. I was determined to do something interesting with my Saturday, so decided to mix it up with the tourists and the Moms, Dads and little Juniors, and pay a visit to Tate Britain to track down Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix. I even had company for the afternoon, but let’s not go there as you know how people like to talk. The tube was crowded. It was standing room only.

There was a prime people watching moment when an old man with grey hair and wrinkles boarded the train at Fulham Broadway. No one stood up to offer him a seat and the poor guy was left standing all the way to Victoria. It’s the power of crowds - everyone waits for someone else to do something, and if no one acts then inaction seems like the right thing to do. I was grateful to be standing myself so I could frown at all the sitters and not have to worry about offering him my seat.

By the time we reached South Kensington it looked like the day was about to liven up when a passenger a few carriages back hit the panic alarm. We were all set for police in riot gear to storm the platform, or paramedics to battle bravely trying to save some guy’s life only to have him die tragically right before our eyes. Turns out a woman dropped her shoe on the tracks - high drama on the District line.

The Tate gallery was as I remembered - lots of marble and open spaces, people talking quietly and looking suitably impressed. There was the usual art gallery mix of tourists with backpacks, family day trippers, and serious arty types sitting in corners staring intently at big blobs of colour. Like a Rorschach, if you stare hard enough they all eventually turn into something - probably butterflies. The highlight for me was a Phil Collins exhibition - a recording of two groups of Palestinian teenagers dancing all day in front of the camera. I’d never considered Phil Collins to be Tate material, but it was different and provided a good excuse to sit on the floor and rest our legs.

Like all men, I have a thing about asking for directions. Driving around aimlessly, convinced that eventually I’ll stumble across my destination seems to make more sense than stopping the car and asking a stranger. The rooms were sorted in chronological order, so all we had to do was work up the centuries until we reached the 1860’s. How hard could that be?

We couldn’t find Beata Beatrix. There were other Rossetti’s, but none that held my interest. We wandered through all the nineteenth century rooms, looking in corners and under chairs, but it wasn’t to be found. Maybe someone had made off with it and the gallery was keeping things quite. Turns out I should have checked the web-site before leaving. Only three Rossetti’s were on display, and of course the one we travelled across London to see was not on the list.

You live and learn.

But the day was not a complete bust. Phil Collins aside, there were a few unexpected surprises, most notably Singer Sargent’s Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. Now this one brings back memories…