Matt Sullivan

It's been a month since last I wrote, and what a month it has been: moving to London, starting a new job, settling into a new flat ... It seems like I landed in Heathrow only yesterday, and yet it seems like I've been living here for years. Strange how the mind adjusts , and in some respects does not, and time stretches and compresses depending on one's mood.

Well, it has been a hectic few weeks, with lots or organising, running about and general mayhem, without any real productive work done.

And the reason is that I'm making a move back to London. Yes, a return to the Big Smoke, a place that I lived in for three years back at the turn of the century, and a place that I prematurely swore I would never live in again (I had a one and a half hour tube commute each way at the time); but a place that I came to realise that I missed, for a multitude of different reasons.

I have been in London now for four days and it has been the longest that I've spent in the city since I left back in 2001. Four days of rushing around (London is hardly a place for a casual stroll -- well, not when you're fighting your way down Oxford Street on a Friday afternoon, or braving rush-hour in Green Park tube station) and reacquainting myself with the London Underground. It's all very deja-vu: places I have not seen in a few years; streets that are both once familiar and yet I'm completely lost; new landmarks on the cityscape that were not there just a few years back.

It was yet another bank holiday weekend here in Ireland. We're endowed with nearly one a month during the summer and autumn -- though not as plentiful as some of our European neighbours; Austria, for example, has 13 in total (it's a wonder Ms. K. ever left) -- and it is a typical weekend for Irish people to get married, and so it was with my good friend Dan.