Salocin

The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
That stood out in the open plain
And always got it share of rain,
Never became a forest king,
But lived and died a scrubby thing.
 
The man who never had to toil
To rise above the common soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man,
But lived and died as he began.
 
Good timber does not grow with ease;
The stronger the wind, the tougher the tree;
The farther the sky, the greater the length;
The more the storm, the more the strength;
By sun and by cold, by rain and by snows,
In trees and in man, good timber grows.
 
Where thickest stands the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both,
And they hold converse with the stars
Their broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much strife,
This is the common law of life.

Author unknown.

I've spent most of my life moving from one place to another. The longest I ever stayed anywhere was during university, where I actually managed to remain in the same city for 9 months of the year for 3 years in a row. Apart from that, I move at intervals so regular that I sometimes wonder why I bother to unpack.

When I accepted the job I now have, I was asked to start within 10 days, and I lived abroad at the time. In 10 short days from the moment I put down the telephone, I had to pack, find a home in a new country, move, buy a car and figure out how to get to my office from my new home. I picked Windsor because it was close to work and seemed nice. Windsor was lovely, full of people who have 'settled', and like a picture postcard. I wanted city living, I guess. I've moved back to Notting Hill, where I lived 4 years ago, into the very same apartment, and must deal with the uprooting, destabilising experience of relocation again.

It's not the sort of thing that gets easier with time - how quickly the integration into your new home happens is largely dependent on how many people you already know there, and therefore how quickly you can integrate a social circle. Unfortunately, the people I know in London don't know each other, and are all extremely busy.

While I'm sure that this aspect of settling in will resolve itself sooner or later, it's going to happen a little slower than it did, for example, at business school, where 800 people were thrust together from the very beginning. In the interim, I spend weekends unpacking, assessing the condition of my apartment and reacquainting myself with Notting Hill. This is nice in a 'time for your own thoughts' way, but won't satisfy more social requirements.

Notting Hill hasn't changed much. I still slam into tourists who stop abruptly upon recognising the Travel Bookshop, and Americans still ask me where they can find the front door to the house Hugh Grant lived in in the movie - they're always disappointed when I tell them the owner sold it. The market is still crowded, with many of the same stalls. The illegal DVD salesmen are no longer in evidence. Instead they hide on the pavement, behind the vans, underneath the Westway (raised concrete flyover that carries a major road through the area), and show booklets containing the colourful sleeves of the DVDs they have on offer, before disappearing into an old Vauxhall Astra to produce whatever film the idiot who's buying it wants, no doubt recorded with a camcorder from the back of a theatre.

London is a very insular city - eye contact is hard to come by, let alone a conversation, and I find this is what I miss the most about America - the ability to walk into a bar and get into a conversation. I also miss the American variety of restaurants which have a long bar at which you are encouraged to eat, and where it is so much easier to have a conversation - if the other diners were too busy, the serving staff were usually friendly and interesting.

I wonder if, having found some friends, I am likely to become another one of the people whose body language shuts out the rest of the world. I hope not.

All of this is, of course, complicated further by the fact that my car has given up the ghost and the commute to work is an hour long every morning and evening if I'm driving - it's likely to be longer by train. I don't mind the drive so much, but could do without the additional hassle of having to use the trains and worry about expensive repairs. Normally, the damage to the car would be something of a concern for me, and I would be stressed and upset about it. As things stand at the moment, I resent the time needed to fix the problem, but I'm reacting with uncharacteristic equanimity and calm. There are no real decisions to take - the car has to be fixed, because if I wanted to sell it, I'd have to fix it first anyway, and once it will have been repaired, there will be little financial reason to replace it because it will work, so the problem isn't a problem, it's just an inevitable financial burden that I'm better off not worrying about.

I want to love Notting Hill - I live here now and there are no immediate plans to move, so it would be nice, for once, to be where I am, rather than be planning the next destination before I've memorised my new phone number.

I have bad luck with cars these days. It's not so much that they break on me - cars do that all the time. It's that whenever there's a problem with my car, it tends to be the worst possible variety of that particular problem. This bad luck has kicked in again, and my costs have spiralled drastically skyward as my allegedly trustworthy VW Polo has begun to show its age (and mileage)

It all started with a slight whirring noise in fifth gear. I took it to the garage and they looked it over and told me the gearbox was ageing, but certainly not due for replacement. They replaced the rear wheel bearings at the same time, which made no difference as far as I could detect, other than lightening my pocket somewhat, and sent me on my way.

Then the car started making some very strange noises - both in neutral and in gear. I called around and was told by a number of garages that this sounded like the clutch bearing, which is apparently a pain to fix because it's difficult (read 'expensive') to get to. The noise got progressively worse and I took my car to the garage as soon as I had the chance.

The clutch costs a little over 300 pounds to replace. I got a phone call this morning from the garage telling me that they had finally removed all the bits they needed to to get to the clutch, and they had found it in perfect working order. The noise wasn't coming from this bearing, but from the inside of the gearbox, which had lost all of the gearbox lubricant, and was clearly shagged and needed replacing.

The cost of a new VW Polo gearbox? 899 pounds.

The second-hand value of my car (with a working gearbox)? 1300 pounds.

The availability and cost of a second hand gearbox? Unknown.

The extent to which I needed this problem?