One of the things i enjoyed about living in NZ (hope everyone noticed i avoided mentioning NZ for a whole one blog, i’ve been trying real hard…) was living in my own place. Admittedly it was a nice wee “young professional” apartment with swimming pool and gym – all i needed was to develop an Ikea obsession and i would have been sorted. It was a nice place which i filled with 10 dollar toasters and a dodgy duvet which i never got round to buying a cover for in the year i was there. Interior design is “of the devil” in my books.
Anyhow since getting back i’ve been living with the old beloved parentals. For various reasons, the main one being having nowhere else to live but also felt it was kind of important for me to be here, when Da was sick.
I’ve been trying to escape for a good 4 months now, with no success. See it’s not that i hate my parents, or even hate living with them, if anything i think i kind of enjoy it too much and it leaves me a bit soft and lazy. I do not ask for dinner to be made for me, but it is, i do not ask for washing to be done, but it often is, (i will often hijack clean shirts from the line to stop Liz ironing them – nothing needs ironed, there shall be no ironing in heaven… not so sure about that one but work with me here).
Basically my parents are just too damn good to me. Only a self-centered narcissist like myself could anyway make this into a problem.
Bottom line, i don’t mind living with my parents but the time has come for a change.
And my difficulty now lies in finding somewhere else to live. The problem being that i’m a picky bugger (in so many ways…) and my area of residence is pretty specific, wanting to end up somewhere at the town end of the G-road.
This is something that’s been on my heart for a number of years (say about 4) but that I’ve been putting off by doing things like going to NZ. See all the Christians (like me) live in nice middle-class housing developments on the edge of town in places like Ballyhannon (where i live), and no one (perhaps understandably) wants to live in the run-down estates and working class areas of town. Yet that’s where all the non-Christians live. Surely it seems kind of obvious that if we’re going go into all the world and make disciples then maybe we need to go into all the world.
This came as something of a shock to me several years ago and has been running about in my head like a long-distance runner for the past few years. I’ll stop here before i get into a big rant and piss everyone off.
So anyway i’m slowly getting round to putting my bed where my heart is, it’s just taking a while.
Finding a house to rent on the G-road is not nearly as easy as one might think. Getting a private tenancy between the alcos and the guys on DLA and DHSS (and of course all the everyday working families…) and the guys from Latvia and Lithuania and Portugal and East Timor (who could have imagined that in Portadown 10 years ago…) living in all the rental houses then there’s not much left for the rest of us.
So the search continues, scanning the Portadown Times every week for houses, driving round estates after the kids club i help run on a Friday night looking for “To Let” signs.
Patience is not exactly one of my strong points (i fall into the impatient doctor category, emergencies and intensive care where if the drug you’ve just given hasn’t had an effect in the next 30 seconds then it’s not worth giving. We are the ADHD doctors…) but you get better at it when you don’t have a choice in the matter.
[The photo is a gable well on the G-Road – you just can’t beat graffiti artists with a bit of class…]
Nelly And I 
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