Time is simply flying by: this time last week we were cleaning the flat and packing up the last of Dayna’s stuff; now we’re staying at Dayna’s place (she’s in Wales) and have finished off just about everything we need to (“closing the loops” as Dee says)! So yeah, we cleaned our place on the weekend, and finally moved everything downstairs to Andy’s on the Monday night. (We’ve had the report back from the independent inspector now, and he comments: “Professionally cleaned” — yah!

As our time left in London grows ever shorter, we seem to be cramming more and more into each moment. Only natural, I guess, but it’s been hard on our sleep patterns! Last week I went to my first football game — Fulham vs Stoke City at the Fulham home ground, Craven Cottage. Andy organised it once he heard I’d not been any time in the five years we’ve been over here; I didn’t even get to a Rugby match at Murrayfield when we lived in Edinburgh!

Six weeks and counting. We’re getting into the “spirit of travel” now I reckon — most of the house packing is done, so I can make a booking with the shipping company with some confidence that we’ll be ready for them, and start concentrating on our backpacks and gear. In the meantime we’re trying to spend quality time in London so that our memories aren’t all work, work, work. Which is why we caught the bus to Drury Lane yesterday and walked to the Royal College of Surgeons for the Hunterian Museum: a gory selection of skeletons and partially-dissected animals (and people!

Well I think I’ve found all the WordPress plugins we might possibly need now, and so after a weekend and a day this travel journal is about ready to be used in anger (as they say – although who “they” are and why they say that I have no idea). Maps, twitter, spam-filters and the theme – all in place and ready for us to hit the road, er, tracks.

The theme of last night’s Butchers Shop, organised by hip indy magazine Bad Idea, was transhumanism. We drank a little gin, then settled into the body-warm Victoria operating theatre for a little slice-and-dice of two short stories of human augmentation: in one, our narrator upgrades his heart; the other creates a xenographic sommelier with the nose of a canine. A little role-play, some heckling, then a chance for Matthew de Abaitua to wax lyrical over Paris Hilton’s doggy palace, peacocks and peahens, and consciousness as a evolutionary frivolity.

It has been a long week this week, largely due to Dee’s work schedule: she’s been on the early-shift, which has meant getting up some time between 5am (on Monday) and 6:30am (by Friday) i.e. a case of finding exactly how late she can leave it to get to work by 7 o’clock in the morning. I’ve tried to get up at the same time, but I’m really not a morning-person.

glennji{.tweet}: I still hate the Met: Northern Line canned at 8:50am this morning; took me another 40min on the bus to get here. It’s 45min walk from home! Yep, I’m blogging tweets now. So I slept in this morning; Danielle got up at 6am, and whilst I could’ve followed her I found it far easier to roll over and bury my head in my pillow. Easier at the time, but I suspect the Universe was trying to tell me something.

A female friend of mine is considering becoming Muslim i.e. following “Islam” (which can be translated as “submission”). This mostly makes me worried for her, as Islam doesn’t have the best track record concerning women’s rights and domestic abuse. The philosopher Ibn Kammuna said in 1280CE: “… we never see anyone converting to Islam unless in terror, or in quest of power, or to avoid heavy taxation, or to escape humiliation, or if taken prisoner, or because of infatuation with a Muslim woman, or for some similar reason.

It started on Thursday night. We had organised Friday and the following Monday off work, so celebrations (read: drinking) started early, and by 10pm I was merry enough to suggest that Dee get her presents early — it was technically her birthday already back home, so why not? I’d already told her about one gift so she didn’t organise anything else: tickets to Chicago (the show, not the city) for Friday afternoon/evening, followed by dinner at a French restaurant.

Okay, it’s official — our new flat rocks! Today I walked into work for the second time ever. The first was Monday morning, when I wasn’t entirely sure where the building was — I walked into a gigantic bank building, straight up to reception and asked, “Is this the ${blah} building?”. “Oh no,” replied the young eastern European behind the reception desk, “this is number 12. I don’t know this other building.