Alas, this is possibly the last time I shall catch the 18:15 from Paddington for quite some time. I’ve been looking forward to leaving my current job for the last couple of months – since my Mum died I suppose, and I started to re-evaluate my work/life balance and all that sort of stuff. But now, as I’m leaving my project in London and everyone’s being so nice, and some of the things I’ve been working hard on for months are coming to fruition, I suddenly found today, as I prepared to leave the office for the last time, that I didn’t want to go. What a strange situation. As recently as yesterday evening, I was desperate to get out of there, and now I long for more Wintry evenings spent on West India Quay, and more time to wander across town after work and meet friends.

Canary Wharf on the whole is a really strange place – it’s so artificial. It has this air of expectation and ambition – it sets out to display perfection and prosperity, to make its inhabitants feel inadequate – as if they are never doing well enough, and in the words of many school reports, “could do better”. Did it make me feel like that? Sure it did, but not for long. The “could do better” feeling lasted only until I realised that the Wharf is also a great leveller. It couldn’t survive without people, mere humans, each one capable of both disaster and triumph, each one dependant in some way on the others, no-one being immune from that inter-dependency. And everyone mills around in their suits – it’s almost like a school uniform, and we all know that school uniforms were invented to make it harder to tell the poor kids from the rich kids. You could bump into anyone in Canary Wharf – a director of an investment bank one minute, a bar manager the next. The area has more than its fair share of bars – maybe this is an indication of the amount of alcohol that’s required to fuel all that ambition.

I do like the Wharf – I have many mental video frames of happy times spent there – the sights, the sounds, the smells, being barred from pubs for not wearing proper shoes, shivering whilst waiting for the DLR in the dead of night, walking past the huge illuminated snowman in West India Quay, watching late-night skaters in Canada Square park, leaving the icy chill outside when you slip through the door of a cosy Starbucks into the warmth of Nat King Cole’s Christmas songs and a latte and cinnamon muffin, watching the Cabot Square fountain steaming in the morning frost, an impromptu evening meal at Carluccio’s finished off with a dessert wine like petrol. How we laughed at the wine! I will always look on it fondly for those, and a million other reasons.

But, despite its wonderful points, and constant bustle, it can also feel like the worst, most miserable and lonely place on earth. I’ve experienced that too, though thankfully not as much as I’ve experienced its good qualities. I’ve met some amazing people there. I’m staying in touch with the nice ones. If I’m not staying in touch with you, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not nice, but it wouldn’t hurt to send me a large cheque to prove it.

So, I’m travelling back from London tonight, and up to the office tomorrow. That’s where my ‘official’ team lives – Malvern. I’ve been working for my current company for five and a half years, and the guys there are like my brothers and sisters in a funny kind of way. I have lots of happy memories set around and about Malvern too. To be honest, most of them are of the Nags Head, or all-night hacking in L-block, or sitting at the breakfast bar in Sid and Sue’s – my loyal bed-and-breakfast family. There’s the time I had to kick open the bathroom door with the broken lock, to free the Japanese guy that couldn’t speak English. It took me ages to get him to move away from the door so that I could burst it open. We spent ages eyeballing each other through the keyhole, trying to find some common shred of language. Then there were the long summery lunchtime walks up the Malvern hills. Driving around the area trying to hack a GPS tracking device so it didn’t know where we were going. Happy nights spent sitting in the Nags with a huge reel of cable and electronic gadgetry, trying to get free credits from the jukebox. Writing RTSP clients in hotels to get *any* movie to play on *any* TV in the building at will. Late nights writing Bluetooth protocol parsers and PIN crackers. Late nights figuring why my network attack tools made the printers spew out half a ton of paper. The night in the hotel bar playing a big white grand piano whilst smoking a big fat cigar, with everyone in the bar singing along. My eyes were streaming from the smoke, I could hardly breathe, and the thing kept going out because I was trying to reduce the smoke. It was still a great night. The team trip to Bletchley Park, being shown around by one of the original code breakers, being shown the working, reconstructed Colossus by one of its original operators. Working in the kneehole of my desk to avoid being beheaded by the office frisby. The memories are countless.

I will miss everyone – both in London and in Malvern – I’ll miss them [you] all very much, and we’ll keep in contact. It’s time for me to move on though. There are more memories to be made yet.