Housekeeping.

Sorry about the interruption  It doesn't seem to matter how often I set up my domain to automatically renew, every year it runs out without warning and every year my blog turns into an advert for backpacking on valium. Anyway, we're back and apparently everything will be fine next November 21st. We'll see.

We still live in the highlands. Despite having paid a hefty deposit on a house in south London. We were supposed to exchange contracts on Friday. Then we were supposed to exchange contracts today. Today no one bothered to even pretend that we're supposed to exchange contracts tomorrow.

The highlands are.... interesting.  For the first six weeks the countryside was beautiful and there was daylight, which was nice to get outside in. Now it's dark, almost all the time, and fungi has started growing in every corner of our cottage. Dry laundry left on the floor near a wall is not dry when you return to pick it up. Daylight doesn't penetrate the 2ft deep walls and you end the day realising that you haven't seen the sky once, in fact you can't actually be certain that the sun rose today. It was dark when you got up and it was dark when you went to bed, and those two bits of the day, lying under the velux window are the only times of the day when you see anything above ground level, the rest of the windows in the house being a ground level and looking right our onto other peoples' walls.

Darkness, inactivity, isolation, November, are getting to you. It's too cold to exercise outdoors, so you just don't. Instead you watch a lot of telly and drink a lot of Lidl wine. The £3.65 Cote du Rhone is surprisingly tasty. At least, it was until that night you drank too much of it, and some gin too, and today when you queued in Lidl to buy your muesli, the placement of the drinks aisle next to the queue you inevitably have to spend 20 minutes waiting, it very presence made you feel slightly queasy. Abstinence.

Despite this, I'm glad we tried this 'countryside' thing. I always thought we wanted to live in the countryside, I secretly worried that London was a bit of a fall back plan because we weren't ready to take the plunge into rural living. It turns out that we really, definitely, absolutely don't want to live in the countryside. We're city people, which has come as a surprise to both of us. I'm glad that we learned this now, that we're moving to London having let go of the thought that we'd be moving to The Island if only we could work from there.

There's a lot that I've loved about being here though; woods, beaches, cows, breweries, time spent with my mum, fish and chips, sticks with moss growing on them, farm shops where you can buy 30 eggs for £4 and a week's worth of fruit and veg for £8.

I'm ready for London now though. I miss my friends and public transport and leaving the house on foot and there being more options than 'up the road to the horses' or 'down the road to the chickens'. Not that those aren't both excellent options, but I feel like maybe we've done them to death for this winter. Universe, please.

Other things. I got an iphone and instantly got sucked back into the world of instagram. I joined it back in the spring, when we lived in Glasgow and I had a crappy, cracked android phone, but I barely used it because it was so slow and made my phone crash two times out of three. Then we moved here and there's no phone reception so I just put my phone in a drawer and forgot about it. During that time I realised how much my blog was losing content to instagram and twitter and vowed that I was giving up both. Yeah, that didn't work. I use twitter a lot less now but instagram is irresistible  This is me, if you want to follow. I like instagram and I like filters, I have no time for people complaining that being able to make them instantly pretty lets anyone think they can take a good photo. So there. I won't be posting any more iphone pictures here though, if you want to see them you can follow me.

I think that's it for now. Feel free to ask me questions if there's anything I've missed.