The move to Manchester finally makes a sort of sense. That is, it made perfect sense before it happened, but there has been a pervading concern since that date that leaving university was a horrible mistake and that I should have walked straight into a postgrad. It didn't help that my job was reasonably worthwhile but vacuously under-stimulating.

My job is still both of these things, but familiarity seems to have loaded a bit of perspective into my situation. As such, I have decided to make the most of my stint outside the academy and do some writing.

I already have a paper journal, which is updated on a daily basis with ritualistic fervour. I also have a livejournal, whose relationship to this blog is currently somewhat ambiguous, but whose last real entry is over a year old and whose content is perhaps more documentary than I intend this to be.

This uncharacteristically adult behaviour is difficult to conclusively blame upon anyone. The acquisition of a diegetic soundtrack, via David's old CD Walkman, has ordered a lot of the time I spend in my own head while walking and on trains. Some of the resultant marriages - recorded sound to four other real-time senses - have been

• cinematic (melancholic electro-pop whilst walking home through the rain after an hour spent reading Ulysses in the Cornerhouse)
• ridiculous (most notably, struggling 1.1 miles down Portland Street with about 40 empty wine bottles to the Travis singles collection)
• awkwardly moving (I will not be listening to '1000 Oceans' by Tori Amos on the way to work again).

To some extent, a lot of the content of this blog will have been shaped through such marriages. I switch off slightly during work, so there is usually an intellectual backlog when it's time to put my headphones on again.

Last night, before it was time to go out, it was dark, cold, and raining. Embedding The Radio Dept. into this particular type of Sunday evening convinced my emotional nerve centre that it was October 2005, and I remembered that I usually feel quite romantic during the autumn, often intransitively. The autumn has traditionally been when things have changed (clothes) or started (school years, personal relationships). Such recollection has perhaps been one catalyst for this eventual embrace of graduate life: I have never been uprooted during the summer before, so it is hardly surprising that I wasn't seasonally equipped for it.

But now it's the last day of summer, at least by the farming calendar, and I am ready to feel things and listen to a lot of music. Like Green Day in reverse, it will be September when I wake up.(1)

(1) I wish my life came with footnotes.