I read the electric meter, had one last look around the empty echoey rooms and then dropped my keys through the letterbox tonight, as I finally said goodbye to the flat.

Funny, isn’t it, how you can go through months of smartening it up, advertising it, selling it, answering solicitors’ questions, redirecting your post and finally moving out your furniture, but it doesn’t really register that you’ll never see a place again until you no longer have your own set of keys.

I took mum up to the top floor for one last look out across the ‘Village’, which always struck me as a fanciful name for a suburb, and then we drove off, the little block I lived in for almost seven years shrinking in the rear window.

I left a bottle of wine and ‘new home’ card on the kitchen work-top for Timothy, the guy who’ll be living there in my stead.

Somehow I’d always imagined I would never sell that place. It was going to be an investment, and as I’d paid off the mortgage I saw it stretching into the future as a source of income that, if I hung onto it for long enough, would be a healthy supplement to a meagre pension. Fanciful, I know: I’d have had to keep it for 30 more years for that to happen.

Times and circumstances change, though, and while I might have preferred to find a way that I could have kept it for the financial security it would offer, I stood in the lounge for one last time and thought to myself – not for the first time – that while I’d been very happy there I was glad that someone else, not I, was moving in tomorrow.

With that thought burning bright in my mind it was clear once and for all that it was time to move on to something bigger, better, and more ‘me’.

You can tell a lot about who reads a paper (or magazine) from its letters page. Here’s a snippet of truly extraordinary logic from last night’s London Lite mobile mailbox, on the gay adoption furore currently grabbing headlines.

I’ve only ever been to the NFT before to use the bar. That’s a terrible admission, isn’t it. Anyhow, this evening that was rectified, as Rich had spotted an ‘audience with’ night at the Turntable Cafe on the subject of Watch With Mother, that once-great British institution that saw programmes made specifically for parents (female parents in particular) to watch with their children. That was when TV wasn’t simply a substitute baby-sitter, and programmes like Mr Benn were de rigeur.

Now the star attraction was to be three episodes of Joe, previously thought lost but since rediscovered in the BBC archives. I’d never seen it before, so it was mildly fascinating to watch these black and white works of art, where a 15 minute programme was told with as few as 25 still frames, jazzed up only by the occasional Ken Burns-style camera pan. In the panel discussion afterwards, the programme makers – two old women, one with a walking stick who would no doubt drive you mad with frustration in a post office – explained that they were all recorded ‘as live’, with the narrator and a full orchestra in situ. Why live? Because it was recorded onto video tape, then the height of technology but unfortunately, at that time, entirely beyond anyone’s technical abilities to edit.

Far more interesting, though, were the episodes of Bod and Fingerbobs that they also showed. I’d forgotten quite how cheeky and mischevous Fingermouse used to be, or how slow and laboured Bod was.

The high point, though, was undoubtedly the panel discussion, in which the two animators of Joe, Emily (the girl in the sepia pictures at the start of every episode of Bagpuss) and an animator from Bod took to the stage and talked about their work.

The two ‘Joe’ women were positively batty, but you couldn’t help admiring what they had achieved. They met one day, back in the early 60s, while wheeling a total of seven children (four for one, three for the other) around a south London park. Neither had any money, and neither a husband, so to make some money they decided they’d write a children’s book. Joe was born. This done, they made it into a short film, which they sent to the BBC and – as much a surprise to them as anyone else – it was commissioned on the spot as a series of 13 episodes, each 15 minutes long.

It was a baptism of fire, as neither had done anything like it before, but between them they fulfilled their contact and put out the shows, before going on to work on more colourful, better-known programmes, Postman Pat and Trumpton among them.

The latter of those two, quite incredibly, was recorded in a back-bedroom in Richmond, and they’d had to stop the recording every time a plane flew overhead on the Heathrow flight-path so as not to ruin the sound-track. For each episode they got paid just £15, with no royalties or repeat fees thereafter.

I warmed to them almost immediately, and they really were fascinating to listen to. Indeed, I was surprised that I found them more engaging than the Bod guy, who I’d been particularly looking forward to hearing. He did reveal one interesting fact, though: all of the Bod stories were based on Buddhist proverbs, which kind of makes sense when you look at many of the characters’ stereotypically eastern features.

Something nasty has happened to our water at home, and now it has a yucky plastic taste like it’s been laminated. Sometimes it comes out of the tap milky white, sometimes clear, and you never really know what your tea is going to taste like until you’ve made it, sipped it and poured it away down the sink. I don’t know how many tea bags we’ve used but not drunk.

So, I was interested to see mention of Belu in a single line footnote in the paper this morning. It’s apparently the first bottled water ever that doesn’t contribute to global warming (‘Penguin approved’). The bottle is made from corn, like you’d get on a cob, and if you’re patient enough and your compost bin is levelled out in the right proportions, you can chuck it into your garden, see it decompose and then shovel it back into your vegetable patch. Pretty clever, eh?

The best thing, though, is that all of the profits will fund clean water projects around the world, with each bottle you buy providing someone less fortunate than yourself with clean water for a month.

I’m not sure I’d qualify as someone who could get funding to clean up his really quite rank water supply, so I’ll just have to buy Belu instead and feel good about the fact that not only will my tea taste better, but someone else might have safe, cholera-free supplies for the next 30 days.

^{Picture courtesy of the Belu press people.}

It’s quarter past two, and we’re all back home for lunch in the middle of moving my remaining stuff out of the flat. I didn’t think there was still much there, but once you get into deconstructing furniture, bubble-wrapping glass table tops, unscrewing iron bedsteads and the like, you quickly end up with a scrap-like pile in the middle of every room.

I could never have done it without help and, of course, Andrew’s large car. Turns out you can’t fit double beds in the back of my Fiesta.

Mid-morning, we all sat down and had one last tea party in the rapidly emptying flat, sitting on the settee for the last time before we whipped all the cushions off into bags for storage. It was a mirror of the same tea party we’d had almost nine years ago when I’d just bought the place, and my furniture – the same furniture we were packing up today – was yet to be fully moved in.

My purchase has yet to go through, so I’ll be storing my remaining belongings in Andrew’s garage, along with the rest of my stuff. I did, though, get a fat wad of papers through from my solicitor, detailing the sale details of the house I’m in the process of buying.

Those details included what the current owner paid for it when she bought it. I won’t reveal here how much it was, except to say that it was just 4.1% of what I’m paying now.

She is 66.

You can tell it’s getting cold and food is getting scarce. The foxes usually stay down at the end of the field, but this one came out to check the squirrels this morning, and sat on the stump at the end of the garden, giving us a much closer look than normal.

Again, sorry for the graininess; this was taken in the half-light.

Pride comes before the fall, they say, so it’s probably only right that I slipped over this morning and fell flat on my back. I had, after all, been quite proud of getting around that ice rink last night without doing just that. It wouldn’t have been so embarassing if I hadn’t done it in front of a policeman, but I did, and so my shame was only complete when he sprinted over to pick me up.

The irony is that despite the fact we had 2cm of snow last night (or, ‘the worst snow in London for years’, as one paper put it), this all happened in a subway where no snow has fallen for the last half century. Admittedly there was skiddy nastiness on the floor, which I got all over my hands and jeans, but still… a silly excuseless act.

In other news, I got the survey back from the new house. Well, the second house. It’s a little over 60 years old, so nowhere near as old as the first one that failed its survey so miserably (and expensively), but even so the difference is striking.

This new house was build in 1948, yet it seems to be rock solid, has barely shifted in the last 60 years, is dry, has good plumbing, is warm and, generally, seems to be worth the asking price.

It’s a relief, I’ll admit, as there is so little for sale around here within a reasonable (walkable) distance of the station, so if this one turned out to be little more than an asbestos-filled wood and brick skeleton I’d have had nowhere else to look for the foreseeable future.

As such, let the wagons roll. Legal searches, here we come.

My goal for the night was not to fall over on the ice at Somerset House. This is much more easily achieved if you’re not trying to skate on it. But that’s precisely what I was doing.

In the event I actually did much better than simply not fall over – I managed two whole laps without touching the edge. This surprised even me as, for the first 20 minutes or so I’d been waving my limbs in all directions, like Bambi on two pairs of roller skates, while Rich zipped around like a flea on speed.

I think it was a confidence thing, really, as once I realised the secret was just to lean forward a little, keep your knees slightly bent and go for it, it wasn’t actually so difficult. It would have been a lot easier if everyone had been going at the same speed of course – all either fast or slow – but instead they seemed to come slicing in to the edge, where I spent a lot of my early minutes, at a whole spectrum of unpredictable speeds.

But despite this, in a whole hour of cruising around the rink, first slowly but eventually at a fairly respectable speed, I came off with a sense of satisfaction and pride and not a single bruise.

We celebrated with the season’s last two cups of mulled wine.

^{* Credit for the title of this post must go to Private Eye.}

We’ve caught a bad case of man flu here at offline.co.uk. Not the site author (touch wood), but the site itself. Somehow, at some point over the weekend, about a year and a half’s worth of photos disappeared from the archives. So did the templates and most of the plug-ins that help it do whizzy things behind the scenes, like link back to older entries on the basis of their relationship to the current date.

What happened? I don’t know. All was running smooth and clean on Saturday morning and, two days later, after walks in the woods, geocaching in the mud, winning at backgammon and draughts, losing at Scrabble and perudo, eating plenty and fooling my metabolism into thinking Christmas had come around again, I got to work this morning to log on and… nothing. Zip. Nada. A proxy error in the browser, and 20MB of files missing from the FTP window.

My host, which has always been very good in the past, is stumped. The tech supporties are escalating it upwards to their systems engineers because they ‘can see no reason why that would have happened’. But, but, but they say it could be 48 hours before they come back with an answer and that I should only get in touch again after that time, not before.

That’s less than entirely impressive, and I’m backing up in preparation to switch lock, stock and wholesale barrel to the host that I use for the rest of my sites. I’d considered that in the past, but never moved on it, too afraid that I’d lose some data on the way. Now, though, when the data seems to have been digitally destroyed with no effort on my own part, there seems little reason not to move to a cheaper, better-organised set of servers on which you can pick your own password.

So, for a few days things may be a little bumpy around here. Keep your seat belt fastened and your hands inside the car until it comes to a complete stop.

London is windy. London is very windy. They’re running one train an hour down my train line, rather than one every ten minutes. I walked through Bloomsbury Square at lunchtime and a tree had blown down in the gale. This thing was a monster – easily 50 feet tall – and yet there it was, laying on its side, with a massive root-ball exposed to the elements. By the time I came back from lunch the park had been locked off, and a slate from the hospital over the road from our office had been blown off the roof and smashed one of the MacUser windows (pictures on Chris of the Phin‘s blog).

So bearing all this in mind, would you choose today to stand on the roof of a four storey building and paint the skylights, like this insane guy we could see from one of our more in-tact windows?