The end is nigh

The older I get, the faster the year seems to fly by. Life crawled by painfully slowly when I was little, I couldn’t wait to get older and do all these things I had planned in my head. Poor Emma had to endure many years of me jabbering on about The Grand Plan, all the things I want to achieve before thirty. I don’t know why I settled on thirty, perhaps I thought it was a good age to settle down and forget about Life. Of course, I realize now that Life doesn’t have to end on ‘settling down’, and the person I give credit for that is Big Thanh. Yes, my darlings, there is a Big Thanh, though she isn’t much taller than me. She was my supervisor at Conran; she got married, had a baby and then she took a year off work to go traveling with husband and one year-old baby. So, I thought, I don’t have to squeeze in traveling around the world in my twenties because I could spread it out. Do a little here, do a little there. Anyway, don’t they say that Life is a journey? Plus, in The Grand Plan of Things, I would have assumed a very important political position by the time I hit thirty and that takes some work so it would be wise to deduct some time from traveling to concentrate on career. Yes, that would be a wise move indeed.

What I really want to say is that 2004 has passed by in a happy, rosy blur. I really don’t know where all the time disappeared to. Its nearly been six months since I left our fair shores for Thailand. Think back to the long emails* I used to write detailing monsoon, landslides, full-moon parties- that was almost half a year ago.

I absolutely loved 2004. Life in Chertsey Road was wonderfully carefree, despite the constant presence of Politics deadlines looming over my head. Whenever I remember our little flat, it always put a big grin on my face. I laughed so much that it’d hurt, I love all the people coming and going to our tiny kitchen, bringing cakes and having tea, eating, drinking, hanging out of the window smoking, chatting on the ledge. I have two bestest flatmates to thank for that, but I think they already know that I love them both dearly.

* Insert 'incoherent ramblings' as appropriate