Alas and alack, the lovely Fitzrovia adventure will shortly come to an end.  Our landlord has decided to do up the flat and then do up the rent, so very soon we must up sticks and shift.

I’ve been very sad about this because the Fitzrovian garret adventure has been just sublime, but I can’t say this is exactly unexpected.  We always knew it was likely that something of this kind would happen eventually.

Well, I say sad.  I’m also a little bit in denial.  I haven’t yet fully accepted the idea that I won’t be able to walk to work anymore.  I keep thinking that maybe through the usual kind of magic that happens to me something will emerge at the last minute and I’ll get to move somewhere equally fabulous and central.  But in reality I know this is unlikely.

I was reflecting on this as I walked home the other night, and I found myself on the Corinthian columned majesty of Sicilian Avenue.  I suddenly remembered being in that spot on my own about six years ago, when I came to Britain to decide between SOAS and Exeter, where I’d applied to do a Master’s.

It was my birthday (or within a few days of it) and I was alone in London.  It was, of course, freezing.  I took myself for lunch to the restaurant at the British Museum.  I remember walking up Sicilian Avenue marveling over the intricacy of the architecture, and I remember taking a photo for my mother, of Sicilian extraction.

And who would have thought, then, who could have thought that what I took a picture of those six years ago as a goggle-eyed visitor would become to me a regular portion of my routine, a stopping  place between work and home?  Who would have known at that time that my adventures would end up leading me right back there?

And as I thought of that, as I thought of the marvels that life has thus far lain in my path, I started to relax a bit about my incumbent move.  Because if that kind of unexpected yet fitting continuity can happen, then who knows what joys the next six years will bring?