(Yes! It is I! Anna Pickard! Hello! Not dead, etc…)

Here is a five things, just as proof of life (for you) and proof of write (for me)

1) Three weeks after moving in to our new house, the bathroom wall has so many tester patches of paint on it, it might as well be a patchwork quilt. After all these years of renting, the ability to make decisions about what colour rooms should be is harder than I ever expected. I always thought I’d be bold and colourful, but no, no, just paralysed by the freedom to choose.

2) It is raining. From my desk in the co-working space, I can’t see more than a block for the driving mizzle. This morning, I pondered working out how to put the heating on. Poor do, June. Poor do.

3) I just discovered that Edgar Allan Poe spent some time attending school in a wine bar around the corner from where we lived in Stoke Newington. That certainly would explain a few things: his later death from complications arising from alcoholism, the murderous looking orangutan that used to work as a conductor on the no.73 bus, and the fucking raven that once took up residence in our bathroom and wouldn’t stop mumbling nevermore every time anyone went to the toilet.

Admittedly, the wine bar may not actually have been a wine bar at the time he attended school there, but let’s just say it was. Let’s just SAY.

4) After a week of commuting from New House to our office/creche on the train with his father while I was away working last week, Doozer has strong associations between the choochoo (and when did he ever meet a train that went choo choo?!) and Dada. So this mornings journey was one 25-minute-long string of Dada! Dada? Dada. Choochoo widada. Choochoo. Dada. DADA! He pointed at the train driver and shouted Dada!. He swung around to several different fellow passengers and pointedly asked Dada?, or exclaimed Dada! in an increasingly accusatory tone.

Thats not your dada I said, trying to set strangers minds at rest lest they were standing there trying to remember if we’d ever met, let alone doinked. Your dada’s gone to London today. I might as well have turned around to everyone and said it straight: We do KNOW who his father is, honestly. He knows, in fact. And it’s not you, I promise.

5) I was wondering about giving myself a random post title to try and write something every day for the next wee while as an exercise, so went looking around for random post title generators. I found a couple, but since the first suggested posts were were Six things I hate about Belize (I can barely think of two, one of which being not knowing how to spell it, the other being I can’t afford to go there), I despise Malaysia (I don’t THINK I do?) and Let me tell you about mayonnaise (Again?!) I have decided against it.

I’ll think of something.