Giz a Job

Before life on board the good ship ( read: metal tube) Honey Ryder, my day consisted of, drag myself out of my flea pit at around 9.50am, splash some water on my face, have some breakfast and then hop on my pushbike and arrive at work at 10am. My work happens to be my "dream" job of working on a motorbike magazine. It doesn't pay well, but the perks stack up high. This is what is often called Golden Handcuffs and I've been wearing them for nearly seven years.

yes, life wasn't at all bad back then. I had time to go places after work, i could be home at 6pm, sometimes even earlier, I had time to do stuff in the mornings too if I wasn't too lazy. so the idea to go and live on a boat and commute to work was a bit of a deep thinking point even two years ago when the plan to live on a boat was hatched. The first problem is that Croydon ( the devils armpit of a town where I work) has no waterways particularly close to it, the second problem is that I chose to continuously cruise after having a particularly unpleasant marina experience at the start.

after much deep contemplation and a moment of wishful thinking I decided it would be worth giving it a try, to see how hard commuting between 60 - 120 miles a day really could be.

I have tried car, motorbike, scooter, trains, tubes, trams, buses and cycling. I think it would be fair to say I have tried every avenue of transportation available to me. To describe my findings on what it is like to travel between three and four hours per day just to get to work would take some time and since time is something that has become particularly scarce since I started all this, then I should get to the point.

it's sent me round the bend,

through a little village called Insanity, calling in at Asylum café for a cup of shut the F**k up along the way and then found myself heading into an unknown scary city called Quit-your-job, I found a parking space at a pub called the Golden Handcuffs and when I turned around my motorbike had turned into a horse. .

Valentines day 2008 (that's february 14th for all you non-romantics) will be the end of my working love affair, the end of an era, the end of free motorbikes. I am saying goodbye to my dream job and saying hello to a new job working at Horse & Hound magazine, which is in London and will mean a 30 minute cycle ride to and from work.

Goodbye commuting blues, Hello Dobbin.