I’m always pretty pleased to stumble across an overseas parcel waiting for me on the doorstep when I arrive home from work. It generally means that my latest delivery has arrived from ASOS or Topman, or one of the other online retailers who make it so easy for me to fritter away my hard-earned salary on yet more ‘must have’ items for my wardrobe. The delivery on Friday was no different, so I feverishly ripped away the layers of polythene to examine the garments inside, having temporarily forgotten what I’d actually purchased during my latest binge. As it was Friday night and I was in a bit of a hurry to get somewhere really urgently (i.e the pub) I didn’t have time to try on any of the new clothes. I just threw them haphazardly into my wardrobe and left them there for a few days, many of them still in their wrappers. Eventually I found time to fully inspect my purchases, deciding on the whole that I had picked fairly well. A few items didn’t quite make the grade but in such situations I generally decide that it isn’t worth the trouble or expense of sending them back to the UK, so I keep them anyway for ‘wearing around the house’. I have one of the smartest lounge-wear collections in the Australian Capital Territory. It struck me as a little sad that I’ve now reached this point where I treat new purchases with such indifference, as if I couldn’t really care less whether I owned them or not. Behaving like it’s actually more of a chore than a pleasure to even bother un-wrapping the parcel to try the clothes on. I’m sure that this says a lot about my completely inappropriate attitude to spending, and my warped concept of the value of money, but I don’t think that I’m alone in this behaviour or mentality. I think that it also has a lot to do with the way in which my attitude towards shopping has changed – perhaps the way in which society’s attitude to shopping has changed. I think it would be safe to say that this change came about at the point when it became so easy to do our shopping online.

For me the whole shopping experience used to be so much more of an event. It used to involve a journey into the town centre or the nearest shopping mall, where I’d meet up with a group of friends who shared this mutual interest of hitting the shops. We’d spend hours traipsing around the hundreds of different stores, trying on garments as we went, and mixing and matching items at each stop. It would inevitably involve interaction with the sales assistants and other shoppers – not necessarily positive interactions, but interactions all the same. By the end of the day you’d be absolutely exhausted as you staggered wearily home, laden with bags of exciting new purchases to try on yet again when you arrived home. The whole high street experience sometimes felt a bit tiresome and stressful, what with having to negotiate the various pram-faced Asbo teenagers playing dubstep on the loudspeakers of their mobile phones – a sound not too dissimilar to a warehouse rave inside a bag of Walkers Crisps. Then there were the incessant charity collectors at every turn, the drunken bag-pipe players and the Peruvian super-groups playing Enya’s greatest hits on the pan-pipes. Multiple morbidly obese families grazing on Greggs steak-bakes, angry eco-warriors protesting outside Boots, the nausea-inducing smell of bath-bombs emanating from ‘Lush’ and the Special Brew-swigging smack-heads who have apparently just got out of jail and are ready to make a new start, so they ‘just need to borrow 30p to get back to Rotherham’. It may have all been a bit of an assault to the senses, but at the end of the day you’d inevitably end up feeling that you’d actually earned your purchases, in more than just a monetary sense. You would put in all of that effort and then consequently you would get your reward at the end. You experienced the feeling of the build-up and then you had the positive end result – to be able to physically carry your items home and wear them straight away. It was exciting to go shopping, and it was exciting to wear the clothes afterwards. I don’t feel that we even come close to recreating this experience when we shop online. It’s more of a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am system whereby you click a few times, enter your card details and then you’re all done. It doesn’t even feel like a real transaction because nothing ever changes hands. You step away from your laptop and it’s like nothing has happened. This is probably the main reasons why it’s so easy to spend so much money online, as you don’t really feel like you’re spending real money. Until of course, the items show up on your credit card bill at the end of the month. Nowadays most of the websites save your bank card details so you don’t even need to go anywhere near your wallet – it stays safely tucked away in the pocket of your new skinny chinos, and is none the wiser to the $200 bill that you just ran up with a few clicks of the mouse. And if you’re anything like me then you’ll most likely forget that you’ve even made the purchase. A few days will pass and then it will feel like a complete surprise when the package eventually arrives. By then the novelty will have worn off, you’ll have already hit the cooling off period and in the cold light of day everything now seems like a bit of a let-down compared to the dazzling images that you sifted through on screen. In my experience, the initial excitement of shopping online is generally short-lived.

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I don’t necessarily think that the old-fashioned shopping expedition is an extinct concept. We do sometimes still like to venture out and hit the shops in person, but I think that we often forego this in favour of a simpler option which takes up less time and thus frees up more valuable time to do other things, such as lying on the sofa. I know for a fact that I will never again spend another waking moment of my life Christmas shopping on Oxford Street. After the few times that I put myself through that torturous experience, and nearly suffered a nervous breakdown outside John Lewis, I made a vow to myself that I wouldn’t put myself through that ever again. I would rather go for a day trip to the Helmand Province than venture anywhere near Oxford Circus during December. Nowadays I sit and shop from the comfort of my sofa, and I wait for the gift items to arrive (hopefully) in time for the big day. I can even ask them to gift-wrap them all for me, if I’m feeling particularly lazy.

Of course, the idea of internet shopping is by no means limited to the purchase of clothes. Nowadays we can shop for just about anything online. Many people now do their weekly food-shopping from the comfort of their own homes – thus avoiding the hordes of shoppers on a Saturday afternoon, the endless queues at the check-out, the ‘unexpected items’ in the bagging area, and the disappointment of finding that the key ingredient in tonight’s recipe has already sold out. The Tesco in Hackney seems to be plagued with this problem. It seems nigh on impossible to buy arborio rice, at any time of the day or week. There’s always just an empty box sitting on the shelf where the packets of rice apparently once sat. Whilst the majority of Daily Mail readers would have us believe that the residents of the borough of Hackney are blighted with drug problems, gang violence and unemployment, I would like to suggest that they have a bigger problem with an addiction to risotto.

Whilst a lot of the aspects of food shopping online seem to make perfect sense I still think that it has something missing. Whilst I suffer quite badly from trolley-rage and other supermarket-related afflictions, I still enjoy the experience of actually going to the shops or the fresh food markets and picking out my food in person. I like to see the produce and pick the items that I want to eat, rather than have some acne-ridden 16 year old on minimum wage, pick out my shopping for me in the middle of the night in some warehouse in Basingstoke. I also like to be spontaneous when it comes to cooking. I like to see the food and feel inspired to cook something new. I’m not somebody who can sit down at the computer on a Monday evening and plan what I’ll be eating for the next 2 weeks of dinners. It would obviously be nice to have somebody carry my things to the front door of my home, and even better if they could unpack the groceries for me before tootling off, but again I feel that you need to put in some level of effort in order to reap the rewards. Just turning on your laptop doesn’t feel like a sufficient level of input. Perhaps it’s the archaic remnants of the hunter-gatherer instinct in me. Whilst I don’t need to go out with spears, clubs and poison darts in order to slaughter my edamame bean, pomegranate and quinoa salad, I still think that I’m driven by the same primeval instinct to go out and gather my food before bringing it back to the home. Having a cheerful Tesco employee named Gavin deliver it right to my front-door doesn’t really tick the same evolutionary boxes. And Bear Grylls simply wouldn’t approve.

There’s no doubt that this rise in internet shopping is having a seriously detrimental effect on the traditional high street stores and local supermarkets. Recent reports have shown that more than 50% of consumer spending now takes place off the high-street. Of course some of this will be related to the increase in shoppers using in alternative venues, such as factory outlets or out of town shopping centres, but it’s pretty clear that a large portion of shoppers have now shifted to online purchasing. A recent estimate predicted that £1 in every £10 currently being spent by shoppers involves internet purchases. The big name stores that used to prosper in the high street can no longer compete with internet-based retailers who provide discounted products, often with free home delivery. New research from PricewaterhouseCoopers has found that, during 2011, the UK high street lost 14 chain retail stores per day. The annual loss of 5,268 stores was blamed on a number of factors, including the growing number of consumers shopping online. It’s now commonplace to see boarded-up shop fronts on the high street, where retailers have recently gone out of business. The town centres are over-run with temporary ‘pop-up shops’ and discount stores that sell dirt cheap products for a few weeks and then disappear without a trace. It paints a pretty bleak picture for the future of the high street shopping experience. It probably isn’t such a big deal in the larger cities where high-end fashion retailers and department stores still prosper, and tourists support the struggling economy, but in the smaller towns and villages this is obviously having a massive impact on the local businesses.

Perhaps some people will welcome this shift to an online market place and think of it as progress. For me I think it would be an almighty shame if we all just ended up sitting at home on our sofas, waiting for our parcels to arrive. And who’s going to pick up our pasty from Greggs?

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Many of you will have read my recent article about me laying my hat wherever I live, and making a house a home. But much to my dismay I recently found myself back in the familiar territory of having to find a new place to live. Even more worryingly, as I’m not looking to live by myself at the moment, this meant venturing into the perilous realms of hunting for new housemates to share my home with. The unfortunate downside of choosing to share the expenses of the rent and gas bills is that you have to forfeit at least half of your living space to one or more people who may essentially be complete strangers. With the benefit of years of experience behind me I generally approach such situations with a great deal of trepidation. I’ve actually been quite fortunate myself, as I’ve managed to find some amazing share houses where I’ve made life-long friends with the people who I’ve met there, but I’ve also heard some real horror stories and I’ve lived with a few dubious characters along the way.

Ever since I left home and went to university I’ve lived in shared accommodation of one form or another. In the early days at university the sharing arrangement was really just based on the friends who you chose to live with in the second and third year, after leaving the security blanket of the first year halls of residence. Being an informed choice, based on the frivolous times you’d had together in halls, this was theoretically a pretty safe decision, but even then things can go terribly wrong. After all, you never really know somebody until you live under the same roof as them. Hazy memories of late nights in the college bar, impromptu karaoke sessions and drunken after-parties, soon begin to fade, and do not necessarily translate into domestic bliss. So when you come home one day to find them soaking their Moon-cup in one of your pans on the kitchen stove, this is when the cracks begin to appear.

After finishing university and being thrown unceremoniously back into the harsh reality of the outside world, you really have two choices; move back home with your parents or move into a house or flat in whichever city you decide to settle and start work. Perhaps there would have been a few of us who were fortunate enough to have the financial means to buy a house of their own at this early age, or to at least have been able to afford to live by themselves in a swanky investment-banker city apartment. However, I’d imagine that for most of us, fresh out of university with a graduate salary, a Top Shop card and a student loan to pay off, the most viable option would have been to look for other equally poor people to share with. If you happened to already have people in mind – boyfriend, girlfriend, friend, sibling etc. then this made the situation a whole lot easier. The more risky option was to go down the path of the unknown – seeking out new housemates completely randomly and hoping to God that things worked out ok.

Gone are the days of small-ads in newspapers and cards in post office windows, so the currently accepted method of finding a shared house is to hunt around on house-share websites. For those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of this activity, here’s the deal. You generally read a little blurb about the house and the prospective house-mates, and then based on this paragraph of text and sometimes photos you can decide whether to drop them an email, in the hope that they might take kindly to your begging letter and invite you round to see the place. It is pretty crucial to sift through the adverts fairly rigorously, reading between the lines and always suspecting the worst. It isn’t sensible to just go for a blanket-bombing style approach to your responses to ads as this will only end in tears. Obviously this does depend on how desperate you are to find a room. You may indeed be willing to share the ‘compact, fairly clean’ bedsit with Gareth the I.T. specialist whose interests include online gaming and battle re-enactment. It really depends on what you’re after. Eventually you line up a few viewings and this is when the fun really begins. Most of the places that you look at will be completely unsuitable. You walk in the door of the prospective house and as the smell of damp hits you, you know after just a few minutes of taking off your coat that you’ve made completely the wrong decision to venture in there in the first place. By this stage it’s too late to back-out, so you’re forced into the next 15 minutes of painful conversation. There’s loads of awkward prolonged eye contact and uncomfortable silences over the last night’s pizza remnants. It’s almost like going on multiple ill-conceived blind dates during your spare evenings after work, only without the quantities of alcohol to make it tolerable, nor the chances of anyone putting out at the end of the evening. I once went to look at a shared house in south London one wintery evening after work. As I was being shown around the flat by a slightly creepy, balding, middle-aged guy with thick horn-rimmed glasses, I noticed that he had a full-sized wooden crucifix in the middle of the lounge, complete with leather cuffs. Needless to say, I didn’t hang around for coffee. On this note, I should mention that it’s always a good idea to let people know where you’re going before you head out to these viewings. This got me thinking that, for an up-and-coming serial killer this could potentially be a pretty lucrative avenue for meeting new victims. It’s like the ‘Location, Location, Location’ meets ‘Crimewatch’.

Whilst it can be slightly unsettling to go through the whole flat-hunting process and end up looking at hundreds of  unsuitable places, on the other hand it can be equally frustrating to find the house of your dreams, only to be rejected by the judging panel of prospective housemates. It’s a bit like turning up for your first X factor audition every evening – you have to be all smiley and chirpy for everyone you meet, even though you feel like an extra from a Radiohead video. After a series of rejections you start to really doubt your own interpersonal skills. Often you feel like you have wowed the judges with your sparkling personality, but then you wait two weeks and hear nothing back. Sometimes in the case of group interviews you can tell that you’ve nearly won all of them over, but you know that there’s one of them that just isn’t going to give you their vote – the Louis Walsh of the panel, if you will. The whole process is pretty draining and you really can’t wait for it to be over, but eventually you do find a suitable match of both housemates and house, so you move all of your belongings in and wait to see whether you did in fact make the right decision over that 20 minute chat and a cup of tea, or whether you actually moved into a house with a borderline schizophrenic.

As I said earlier, I’ve had pretty mixed outcomes from my shared house experiences. The last house that I lived in in London was the best shared house that I could have hoped for. Five like-minded twenty-something year olds living in perfect harmony, next-door to a pub, on the edge of the park in London Fields, with plenty of house parties and Sunday roasts to keep the housemates happy. Despite having only met these people through the usual channel of house-share websites, I can happily say that they’ll be friends for life. However, this was probably the exception to the rule. In one less successful house-share scenario I found myself living (unknowingly) with a gay porn star called David, who had a penchant for very loud sex in the room next door to mine, with his vast array of dubious looking ‘boyfriends’. When I first moved in I was led to believe that he worked at a hotel near to Heathrow airport, but it soon emerged that he was actually providing a very different kind of room service to what I had in mind – and filming it all to boot. One particular boyfriend, Anton, was mistakenly under the impression that there was a level of exclusivity in his relationship, so he would call up on the house phone at all times of the night to check on where David might be.  I was usually quite scared of answering the phone, as I was never very good at lying, and I knew full well that David was mostly likely in some sweaty basement in Soho, getting up to all kinds of mischief that probably shouldn’t be printed on this website. Now I’m not exactly a prude myself but having to negotiate round giant black d!ld0s stuck to the side of the bath-tub of an evening, eventually became a little too much for me to deal with, so I packed my bags and moved on to my next venture.

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Since moving to Australia I haven’t had quite so depraved a set-up as the one that I had in London. I did find myself living with a slightly crazy girl who had a habit of throwing away all of my food whenever I went away for the weekend, and was also quite partial to the odd screaming and crying fit when things didn’t go her way. I don’t deal with the effects of female hormones at the best of times, but when they take on the form of a screaming banshee, careering through the house and slamming doors in her wake, it all gets a bit too much to deal with. She also had the unfortunate habit of telling lots of really ridiculous lies to me or my other housemate. The problem with this was that she wasn’t very good at keeping her story straight and she tended to forget which lie she’d told to whom. I must admit I did quite enjoy the unpredictability of living in this little ‘Jackanory’ existence for a little while. It was interesting to see what might come out of her mouth next. But eventually you do long for a more stable environment and a little normality to go home to in the evening.

So it seems it can be quite hit and miss when it comes to finding the perfect domestic scenario. Often these sharing arrangements can work out really well, despite being decided upon during an initial meeting of just a few minutes. This whole scenario has got me thinking, that I find it quite strange that we feel comfortable enough to go down this route in the first place. We appear to be quite happy to move in with somebody on a long-term basis, after only having met them once. I guess that we must do this based on our gut instincts alone. It seems a bit of a drastic course of events really, when you consider how important it is to have a happy and comfortable home life. If you think about the rigorous application, interview and reference-checking process that you put someone through in order to feel confident about offering them a job in your office, it seems that we take a much softer approach to choosing our housemates. Even if it doesn’t work out so well at work, you only have to spend 40 hours of your week with the employee in question, whereas the rest of your time is spent in and around your home. After all, this is your private sanctuary where you want to relax and forget about the worries of the working week. You don’t want this to be ruined by having a housemate from hell.

Most of us grow up in a family home where you don’t actually have the choice as to who you wish to live with, and in most instances you do actually get along pretty well with your family, despite their faults. So up until the point that you leave home you’re pretty comfortable in your surroundings and you don’t actually question the whole co-habiting arrangement. It’s only when you get older and you have to make decision as to where you’re going to live, that’s when you realise that you do have a choice as to who shares your personal space. This is also where you begin to see fault in other potential sharing scenarios. You often have close friends who you love to hang out with and who are great fun on a night out, but you would never consider living with them long-term, as it would probably ruin the friendship. The same is true for your relationships along the way. It’s a pretty big step to choose to move in with your girlfriend or boyfriend. People don’t take this decision lightly, as it can change the whole dynamic of the relationship, and you really have to be sure that it will work out for the best. You probably wouldn’t move in with a partner until you’ve been together for a year or so, but you would quite happily move in with some random who you met last week on the internet.

Obviously as you get older you develop a pretty good sense of judgement when it comes to meeting new people. You have a good sense of your own likes and dislikes, and the sort of people who you naturally get along with. So often a short chat with somebody and a good look at the inside of their home can actually be sufficient to base your initial judgement on. I like to think that I have honed my perceptual skills over recent months and I’ve managed to find a good mix of people in my new house-share. But you never can tell. You never can tell……
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It occurred to me that this is something of a modern phenomenon that I should even be able to contemplate such options of prolonged travel or living overseas. In my parent’s day it certainly wasn’t so common for young people to just up-sticks after finishing Uni and set off on wild adventures of self-discovery. It just wasn’t an option back then. For a start I don’t think that people had the finances available to fund such trips. If you were lucky enough to even go to university then it would inevitably lead to getting a job straight afterwards, in order to justify the 3 years spent studying when you could have just as easily started earning a living straight from school. I can imagine that the suggestion that you were hoping to take a year off in order to go off and see the world, would have probably gone down like a lead balloon at the 1960′s kitchen table, and you certainly wouldn’t have been able to take out a bank loan to fund it. I also think that attitudes towards travelling have probably changed somewhat in recent years. A declaration that you were setting off to explore the Amazon rain forest, or to travel across Outer Mongolia, would have probably been met with looks of derision, if you weren’t already being wheeled off to the local lunatic asylum. Nowadays it seems that ‘gap years’ are more common than ever, and they appear to be quite appealing to new employers who would perhaps favour a gap year veteran over a fresh-faced young graduate, straight from university. We’re pretty lucky to have these opportunities at our finger-tips and I think that we often take it for granted that we have the freedom to travel so widely and choose where we want to live and work.

Aside from these plentiful gap year adventures on offer, I think the idea of moving overseas on a more permanent basis is something that’s become increasingly common in recent years. With more and more graduates signing up to work for multi-national corporations, with offices spread around the globe, there are often plenty of opportunities to relocate to offices outside of the UK. The recent financial down-turn and the resultant rise in unemployment in the UK has probably also had an effect on emigration rates, as skilled workers are able to find more plentiful job opportunities overseas – often with better pay packages (and better weather) to make it an even more appealing prospect. Then of course there is the most basic, logical explanation that young people just want to try something new and different, so they seek out job opportunities overseas. As long as visa and work-permit restrictions allow for it then it’s easy enough to pack your bags and leave Britain behind, with a view to setting up life on foreign shores.

Now this all sounds pretty straightforward, and in many ways it is, but since moving overseas myself I’ve found that it can be difficult to spontaneously decide upon a place as being your ‘home’. After all, what is it that makes a place your home? For most people it would be the friends and family that surround you and the people and places that make it so familiar. For others it may be more material than that; it may be the bricks and mortar that make up the property that you have purchased and so lovingly decorated to make it into your own personal space. Everybody is different in the extent to which they find it easy to let go of any of these things, in order to start again from scratch. How long do you need to spend in a place in order to make it feel like home? Do you suddenly find one day that the local shop-keeper or bar owner knows your name? Do you look around you and realise that you’ve made enough friends to be able to count them on the fingers of two hands? Do you find your ideal job or meet the man or woman of your dreams and decide that this is where you want to spend the rest of your life? At what point do you feel at home in your current surroundings and let go of the last place that you called home?

Having grown up in Sheffield, in the north of England and then moved down south to study and eventually work, I initially held on to the north as being my ‘spiritual home’. After all, this was where most of my memories were based and this is where I still had my family home with all of the childhood recollections that went with it. Along with this I had all of my family and friends; both school friends and the friends that I had met over the years in the various drinking establishments and dance-floors that Sheffield has to offer. Even after moving to London I still felt that I would eventually return to the rolling hills of South Yorkshire. But after a few years in East London the people and places began to get under my skin. I started to feel that maybe London was the place that I wanted to spend my life. Perhaps I could just go back to Sheffield for monthly visits? Perhaps it isn’t always the best scenario when everybody knows your name and knows your business? I must admit that I found it a little unsettling that I could change my mind quite so easily and could readily cut the ties with the only place that I had called home for all these years.

Skip forward to 2012 and now I find myself living in Australia, on the completely opposite side of the world to either Sheffield or London. I’ve been here for over a year now and whilst I love the lifestyle, I can quite confidently say that this will not be my life-long home. It doesn’t really grab me in the way that other places have done, and the 24 hour flight back to the UK makes it difficult to maintain the ties with friends and family that I so frequently rely on. Whilst I know that I won’t make a life-long home for myself in Australia, at the same time I can’t really say where else this home might be? Since moving overseas things have changed somewhat back in the UK. I no longer have my childhood home back in Sheffield. I no longer have a room in the shared house that had made my time in London so amazing. Of course, physically finding a new house to live in is quite a straightforward process, but deciding where this house should be is probably the most difficult part. You have all sorts of factors to consider; career, lifestyle, property market, proximity to family and friends….the list goes on and on.

One of the biggest perils of being a ‘grown-up’ is that you now have to start taking into account other people’s plans and goals, as well as your own. This becomes particularly crucial when you find yourself in a long-term relationship. The minute that you meet your ‘significant other’ your problem is essentially doubled. You now have two people to think about – two people who may have completely different goals and career aspirations – and you now have to try and keep both parties satisfied. Unless by some minor miracle you have both chosen similar careers that will lead you both to the same desired country, where you both happen to have an abundance of family members and friends in close proximity, then it’s inevitable that somebody is going to have to compromise at some point. Admittedly relationships rely heavily on compromise – it’s all about give and take, but it’s asking a lot for one of you to relocate to a completely alien destination, away from all of the comforts that you call home. In the interest of fairness, you could of course pick somewhere mutually alien and both give up all of your familiar home comforts, but then we reach the same problem again…where do you choose? Do you pick somewhere equidistant between your former homes? Even if this means you both living in Turkmenistan?

Your career progression may lead you down a certain path, which requires you to move overseas, but does that necessarily mean that your company will support the relocation of your partner too? Perhaps if you are married then this might be possible, but what if your relationship isn’t recognised by your company policy? What if you can’t both obtain a work permit? What if there aren’t suitable jobs for your partner in your planned destination? Do you expect them to give up their career and become a house-wife/house husband? Again, this is probably a more recent phenomenon that you should have two equally career-minded individuals in a relationship, who both have to make important decisions as to where their career will take them. You’ll have to forgive the stereotype but I think perhaps in earlier years it would have been the man that went out to forge a career whilst the woman stayed at home and raised the family – but this is no longer always the case.

Nowadays we can expect that both partners, regardless of gender, would wish to make a career for themselves, before they contemplate settling down and raising a family. If this career progression involves global relocation for either or both of the partners then this is where the potential conflict arises.

Whilst I said earlier that I thought myself lucky to have all of these global choices at my finger-tips, I also think that it brings with it a whole heap of potential problems and an emotional minefield that has to be dealt with. Maybe I should have just stayed where I was and kept staring at the map for a while longer.
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Civilian Muggee with Charity Mugger

Picture the scene – you’ve just come out of Boots and made it past Girl A (Oxfam) after narrowly escaping Boy A (RSPCA) who was sneakily hiding behind the fountain. Now you’re well on your way to the relative safe-haven of The Body Shop. You don’t even want to go in the Body Shop, as the smell of white musk body lotion makes you feel sick, but you treat it as a temporary refuge whilst you plan your next manoeuvre. But then suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere pops Girl B (Greenpeace) and you walk completely unguarded into her dread-locked trap. At this point I know that I’m going to be stuck there for the next 10 minutes whilst I try every possible method of getting away

I’m sure that some of you will think – why don’t you just ignore them or walk off? Unfortunately this is the bit that I really struggle with. I fully admit that I’m rubbish at being impolite. Maybe it’s because I’m British. Maybe I’m just too nice. It certainly doesn’t do me any favours as I feel my soul being gradually drained away as they embark on their incessant monologue, leading up to the critical “Give me your bank details” finale. I’ve tried numerous tactics to try and avoid getting trapped in the conversation but they really are very persistent. I foolishly assume that having my ipod earphones in will somehow protect me from their advances, but it doesn’t really help. You generally just end up with one of them bouncing up and down in front of you, waving their hands in your face until you’re forced to take out your earphones. The other day I fell for a particularly underhand tactic that was being employed by two girls in the town centre. They had positioned themselves in the middle of the dual-carriageway on the pedestrian crossing so there was literally no way of escaping, short of diving into the oncoming traffic, which I thankfully deemed a little too drastic a response.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I disagree with the motives behind the fundraising itself. I fully support most of the charities that are out there on the streets and would gladly give a one-off donation to any of them if somebody were shaking a collection bucket. It’s just that I have a problem with this particular method of aggressive fundraising in which the charity invariably wants you to sign up on the spot to arrange a regular monthly donation by direct debit. It’s obviously a very lucrative method of fundraising as so many of the charities employ these street fundraisers but I find it terribly invasive, to the point that I end up not wanting to donate to the charity at all. I think one of the things that aggravates me the most is the fact that these fundraisers are actually employed to do this, and they are working towards set targets. It takes on a kind of ‘double-glazing salesman’ tone, of which you are immediately suspicious. I’ve been involved in various fundraising drives myself but it was always the good old-fashioned collection tin method – trying to collect people’s loose change, rather than asking them to sign away their monthly earnings. And the smile on my face was always genuine. I was out there on the street of my own free will, doing a good deed for the day, rather than earning money to fund my next round of tequila shots in the college bar.

Where's the love?

Is it wrong to feel so vehemently anti-charity? Does this make me into a Scrooge-type character? Perhaps, but I also think I should have the right to choose who I donate to, and the right to politely decline their attempts at interaction when I’m obviously very busy going about my day. I don’t think this is something that is going to go away in a hurry. If anything it’s a problem that seems to be getting worse. I guess I’ll just have to keep practicing my dodge technique, or perhaps even learn to say no.

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Anyway, back to the task in hand. As time goes on it’s no great coincidence that my most salient memories are those that happened fairly recently, so it’s fortunate that I’ve chosen to think back to this time last December and my fond memories of that month.

Christmas Part 1 - London

December is always fun. You’re surrounded by family, friends and work colleagues who are generally more jovial than normal, due to the pattern of binging that occurs throughout the month. Everybody looks forward to time off work, time spent with their nearest and dearest, and the opportunity to over-consume at every given opportunity (without the usual post-consumption guilt response that goes with it). I particularly like this time of year, but last December was especially important to me as I was preparing to emigrate to Australia on the 4^th January, so this was my last chance to make the most of my time left with my UK family and friends. Having finished up work in London in the week  before Christmas and sent all of my belongings back up north in a van, I then embarked on a series of  final farewells to my groups of friends in London and Sheffield. With no intended disrespect to baby Jesus, for having gatecrashed the annual event, Christmas 2010 essentially became Charley Barber’s leaving do.

Having spent the latter half of December in a cava-induced haze I’m pleased to still be able to pick out some amazing memories of late nights and early mornings spent with Team Sheffield and Team London – some of the best friends that a guy could ever hope for. One of the nights that stands out in particular is my final night in London before I caught the train back home on Christmas Eve. A big group of us had gathered together in the Duke of Wellington in Dalston. As the night wore on, the mulled wine and Hendricks gin was in full flow and the juke box was kicking out all of the festive favourites.

Christmas Part 2 - Sheffield

With our arms round each other, swaying on our bar stools we sang along to Wham and Mariah Carey as if none of us had a care in the world. I remember looking around at the motley crew that had assembled there and thinking just how lucky I was to be surrounded by these familiar smiling faces who had become my best friends and confidantes throughout the previous year. Eventually the bar-tender got tired of our (under-rated) vocal performance and as the bell rang for last orders we made our merry way back out into the frozen streets of East London. The night was still young and most of us had no work the next day so we decamped back to the nearby home of one of our strongest team members and continued the festivities into the early hours.

At some point very late into the proceedings I must have passed out in an unfamiliar bed and that is where I found myself when I awoke rather disorientated on Christmas Eve morning. Initially panicked at the prospect of having to get back to London Fields and then on to St Pancras train station by lunch time, I reluctantly set off on my final walk of shame on British soil. To make matters worse the sub-zero temperatures meant that it was a pretty treacherous walk of shame to boot. I slipped and staggered haphazardly down Dalston High Street looking like a drunken Bambi on ice. And so it is, that I left London in the same state that I had spent a large portion of the last 2 years – reeking of gin, still wearing last night’s clothes, gripping a bottle of Lucozade, and smiling profusely at the wonderful time that I’d had there.

During my time in South America, whilst volunteering on a street children project in rural Peru, I decided that more than anything I wanted to be involved in the international development sector. So eventually I found myself back in London, working for a health and international development consultancy company. I immediately fell back in love with London – and the friends and lifestyle that went with it, but after a couple of years of fast-living it was time for a change. It was around this time last year that an opportunity arose to move over to Australia to work on behalf of AusAID (the Australian Agency for International Development) in their Health Resource Facility in Canberra. So it would seem that, at least for the time being, I appear to have found my calling here in Canberra as the Operations Manager of a really interesting project. Although my thoughts still occasionally turn back to the Wonder Woman ambitions, I now accept that the costume needs to be reserved for Halloween and special occasions.

Overall, Australia has been good for me. I came here and found the sunshine that I was looking for. I found love, unexpectedly. I found that I do enjoy healthy eating and exercise, and sleeping more regularly at the weekends. I found that I can cope by myself without my amazing family and friends to turn to at the first instance. But I also found myself occasionally feeling lost and completely out of my depth.  This is just a heads up..as you may see this coming through in my unfinished thoughts. I don’t honestly know where this writing task will take me? I can’t promise to change your world, but I will hopefully occasionally make you smile.