La Macaque Sur Mon Dos

What with the Da Vinci code and all its spawnings (it's all good fun, but if you're really bothered read 'Holy Blood and Holy Grail' instead), there has been a lot of discussion about the nature and location of the Holy Grail recently. Well stuff the Holy Grail, I know something much harder to find: somewhere near enough London that 'im indoors can still work here, far enough out that we don't feel like we still live in London and can breathe without it hurting, far enough out that the rent is significantly cheaper, but not so far out that the travel costs cancel out the savings on rent. It also has to be at least not less nice than Kentish Town, which seems to be somehow a lot harder than it sounds. I did start out with all these outlandish ideas about being able to get a cat finally, but I see now that I'm being totally unreasonable. Good job I don't want any kids, or the way things are going I should be getting stuff frozen now so that when I could finally afford even a place big enough to keep them in it's not biologically 30 years too late. Really truly I want to get all the way out of dodge, decamp to Devon and eat a lot of peaches, but for the foreseeable (which is slightly longer if you're me... Put those matches away!) the money is here, and I need the money to put in the bank so I can buy a house when I do get to Devon. All I need is somewhere that wont ruin me and all my plans to live in while I secure a permanent job for long enough to get a mortgage decision. But the further you go from London to look for lower rents, the more the travel costs to get back in to do the job to pay the rent. London is a big vampire mass that sucks the things you need most from you then sees what else it can extract when you think you've been bled past dry and have nothing left to lose and let your guard down because it would cost your last scrap of energy to keep it up. So unless I find said flat (in which case I fully expect to have a ruck with the Plantards about the bones and chests of documents in the cellar), or one of you is a millionaire who needs a multi coloured Lily Munster type to scare the kids away from your electric fences, someone handing out jobs in the BBC Radio Comedy Scriptwriting department for £17K and travel expenses paid, or someone with a flat to rent out somewhere with clean air and some trees within the £6 a day return fare to London radius that you're desperate to offload for under £600 a month, my options are: Get a job I'm utterly unqualified for because I wasted my time having my intelligence insulted by a bunch of dickhead archaeologists too thick to understand essays written in proper formal English when I should have been learning to type and do shorthand which can actually earn you some fucking money, give up completely and just shoot myself now, or move to fucking Woodford. That's how self-destructive a rage I'm in- I'm actually considering Woodford. And when they say 'That way madness lies', that's the direction the signpost points. I'll be arrested within a year for the utterly reasonable massacre of most of the teaching staff of my old school. I need the attention of a trained mental healthcare professional. Dear Claire, Sincerely, Bored of London, by the way; the police are getting younger every day.