We’ve spent the last couple of days in York, looking at lots of flats and houses and trying to decide which one we want to live in.

We narrowed it down to either Oak Tree House or Honeysuckle Cottage, but couldn’t choose between them. Oak Tree House is a very nice apartment, a bit further from the university than we’d ideally have liked, but a stone’s throw from every other amenity you can imagine, unless you can imagine some very weird amenities, or some very short-range stones. Honeysuckle Cottage is even nicer, and bigger, and a little bit closer to the university, but so utterly in the middle of nowhere that you won’t be throwing stones at any amenities without the use of an industrial strength trebuchet. It was a tough call.

Unfortunately, houses don’t seem to stay on the market for very long in York, so we had to make the call very quickly, and so we found ourselves sitting in the car more or less tossing a coin to determine which estate agents to drive to and sign up. It was heads, which meant we went for Honeysuckle Cottage.

The next stage was the bit I’d been worried about. When we rented our current abode we had all kinds of trouble. Jess is a penniless student and I’m self-employed, with less than three years of tax returns to offer as evidence of my capacity to regularly bring home the bacon (why they wanted the rent paying in bacon I have no idea). Matters weren’t helped by the fact that the estate agents Eley Long are liars who made every effort to make things as difficult as possible and told outright lies to both us and the owners, apparently in an inexplicable attempt to stop the place from getting let (or at least from getting let to us). We eventually thwarted their evil schemes by throwing large quantities of cash at everyone involved, but it wasn’t exactly an easy process, and I had a horrible feeling I was about to go through it all again.

“Hello,” I said to the estate agent. “I want to rent Honeysuckle Cottage.”

“Hooray! Do you earn lots of money?”

“Yes!”

“In that case just give us a deposit and it’s yours!”

Lawton Letting are a much better estate agent to deal with than Eley Long the liars.

So that was that, and everything seemed lovely and twinkly, but then this morning they called to inform us that they’d spoken to the landlady and it turns out she’s only willing to let the place for a minimum of 12 months. This was a bit of a setback, because we only wanted it for 6 months initially, partly because we might want to buy somewhere, and partly in case we decide that actually living five hundred miles from the nearest supermarket isn’t such a clever plan after all.

So I rang the estate agent dealing with Oak Tree House and confirmed that it’s still on the market, but they’re being a bit less relaxed about my self-employedness and want us to jump through some of the same hoops as Eley Long, though hopefully this time they won’t actually be aflame.

As of the now, we have absolutely no idea which property we’re going to end up living in. Which is quite exciting, in an annoying and stressful and not at all exciting sort of way.

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk drawing a picture like the hard-working freelance illustrator that I am, when Jess said:

“My family’s going to the Lake District for the day and they want to know if we want to come too.”

Well, my work wasn’t anything that couldn’t be put off - I’m not that hard-working - and it was, for once, lovely and sunny, so I downed tools and away we went for a merry afternoon besides, and occasionally on, one of the many large watery expanses in that part of the country. It was all jolly pleasant, more so because it was entirely unexpected, and worth recording here if only so that when I’m an infirm old man lacking the stamina to get out of bed and do anything more energetic than watching Countdown in my carpet slippers, I can read these memoirs of my youth and remember a lovely day, or, depending on my rate of mental decay, not remember it at all.

Anyway, at one point we found ourselves in a little souvenier shop with a rack of greetings cards by the door. The cards were familiar to me, because the jolly nice chap who makes them got me to do some more card designs for him last year, and he showed me then some of the designs he already had. Those were the ones I was looking at on the rack, and I got all excited because if they were selling them then they just might also be selling the ones I did for him, and I’d never seen one of my drawings in the wild before. Could this be the first time?

It was one of those racks that rotate, so I rotated it all the way, hoping to see something I’d drawn with my own very hands. Three hundred and sixty degrees later, all my dreams were dashed, and I walked away downhearted.

I glanced back over my shoulder, all bitter like, at the rack of cards that had got my hopes up only to laugh in my face, when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. Protruding from the top was a little sign advertising the display to passing shoppers, and the sign was the one I drew for him with my very own pictures on!

So now I’ve innocently walked into a shop and seen my work on show like I’m a proper artist! Now who’s just an unemployed computer programmer who ekes out a living by prostituting his dubious ability to scrawl the occasional doodle for which he’s totally unqualified, eh? Well, I am, obviously, but I’m in a shop!

Once I’d stopped reeling from the shock, I began to wonder why the rack was so entirely devoid of the cards I’d drawn. Had they been a terrible flop? Did my public hate me? Had the jolly nice chap taken out a mortgage on his wife to pay my hefty fee, only to lose all his money and have her repossessed by the bank?

Well, I hadn’t spoken to him all year, but by one of those spooky coincidences that makes you go “Ooh, that’s a spooky coincidence", he phoned me today about some new cards he wants doing, and apparently the old ones are selling quite well after all. So that’s alright.

The extreme length of the summer holiday between A Levels and university, combined with Jess’s total inability to entertain herself, has meant that she’s been getting bored a lot lately, so I decided to take her on a mystery trip for a super fun day out. Unfortunately my attempts to think of an appropriate destination were mostly unsuccessful, but eventually I hit on something that looked suitably thrilling - a sort of cross between a theme park and an obstacle course, the Crocky Trail. All the reviews I could find said it was brilliant, except for a couple that said it’s stupidly dangerous, which I discounted as having been obviously written by paranoid wusses. My only concern was that it might not be entirely suitable for adults - at least, adults who haven’t got small children with them to justify their presence - so I decided to sacrifice the mystery element of the trip and ask Jess her view.

The consensus of opinion was that it would indeed be whizzo fun, but we should probably take her little brothers along.

Well, I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, within twenty minutes Jess and both of her brothers had all been injured, and the latter were in tears. I think perhaps I should have paid more heed to the paranoid wusses. We cut our losses and took them to the zoo instead.

And then yesterday Jess got her results, and being the clever person that she is she did quite spectacularly well, with the result that we’ll be moving to York in October. So hurrah!

Several years ago, I was minding my own business when suddenly my brain went whiiirrrrr and the following poem popped out:

I don’t know what the fuss is,
Cooking’s easy if you try.
Just take two octopusses
And you’ve got an octopi.

Some time later, I was putting together a little website called simong.org, and in the absence of anything more interesting to justify its existence decided a few poems might make tolerable filler material. Thus that little rhyme got its Internet debut, hidden away in an obscure outpost of my humble domain, and there it remained. It’s still there today if you can find it.

Last night, Jess was bored, and somehow fell into the belief that googling for me might serve to alleviate her ennui. Well, I’m usually called SimonG on the Internet, so if you search for my full name the results fall mostly into one of three categories - acknowledgements from past clients who’ve got my drawings on their sites, discussions of the cunning comment spam fighting techniques I blogged about a couple of years ago, and, inexplicably, my Octopus poem. My favourite - ignoring the one which seems to be putting me in the same league as P.G.Wodehouse, Spike Milligan and Monty Python, or the one comparing me to Ogden Nash, both of which I’m far too modest to mention - is this excellent review:

The rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B. An interesting poem, the title made me not wants to read it (but I did anyway). This poem is about cooking something up and Goodway says to cook two octopuses up and you will get octopi. It seems to me that the author wanted to use the word octopuses and that he wanted to find something else to rhyme with it. So he made the first line end with “fuss is” so that it would rhyme with the third line “octopuses". The last word of the second line is “try” and rhymes with the fourth line’s last word which is “octopi". Although there isn’t a specific refrain that Goodway had in mind for this poem, he uses the word “octopus” in three ways in this short poem. One is the title and two other ways are throughout the poem. Something that I found interesting is that the poem is about cooking something up, and the end result is putting two octopuses together so that “you’ve got an octopi". Which isn’t exactly what we were looking for, we wanted to cook something, not make two octopuses.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. And to anyone who suggests this 190 word analysis of my 21 word poem is a little excessive, I say nonsense! Is it possible to over-analyse genius? No, it isn’t. So there.

Well we’ve spent this week in Leicesecestershire looking after cats and hedgehogs while my parents vacated this country in favour of EuroDisney. On Wednesday we took advantage of our increased proximity to Milton Keynes and hied thither to go skydiving, only without the sky. It was jolly good fun - to get an idea of what it was like, climb to the top of the nearest tall building and throw yourself off. Only we didn’t get the painful bit at the end.

Except Jess did get a slightly painful bit at the end, because her shoulders have been hurting ever since, and no amount of massage seems to have helped. If she’s not feeling better by this evening, I’m going to lie her on the floor and jump on her back. That’s bound to sort them out.

Other than that, our week down south passed relatively uneventfully, and our mission to look after cats and hedgehogs was reasonably successful, except it turned out that I’d spent the whole week putting the dog food in the empty pen, instead of the one with the hedgehogs in. I wondered why they weren’t eating much.

And that’s about all that’s been happening really.