Full Circle

Well, another month, another entry

Today is the first day back at the new office. Yes it sounds strange, but since I have been with this company, about 7.5 years now. During that time we've moved offices several times. I started in the West End office, this is a mixed blessing. The location - good restaurants, high tech shops and a fair mix of clothes, paper, furniture and other odds and sods means that any purchasing needs are catered for. And the proximity to Soho, the cinemas and theatre land and the nether world means that if you can't find something to occupy yourself for entertainment then your needs are probably beyond the legal norm.

The West End office itself, by way of contrast, is probably some of the worst office space available. Yes, it looks OK, but the aircon doesn't work, it has limited space and the lift has an irritating tendency to deposit visitor at floor 2 and 3/4. Since Harry Potter and his Hogwarts colleagues are sadly missing this means a call to the lift engineer or the firebrigade to get the poor souls out.

Anyway, this was my office home for the first few years. Then we took a lease on some property on the East End - Brick Lane. A disused sweat shop - aka clothing factory. The sort of place that made me feel as if I'd spontaneously flown a few thousand miles south to Bangladesh. 20 minutes on the tube from Charing Cross and it's a whole new world. Same weather, completely different place, new sights, sounds, smells and ambience. This is the cultural centre of the Bangla community in London. Curry houses line the street. A radical change from the leather shops that used to be the mainstay of business there when I lived in Hampstead (as a lodger.I couldn't afford a house there!). So, what with curry houses, beigel shops (a legacy of the Jewish history of Brick Lane), Spitalfields market and Noodle King up the road your culinary tastes are generally well catered for. Let's just hope curry is what you want. Just recently the City has been encroaching. New office blocks around Spitalfields and a whole gentrification of the area. Now 'Meejaa' competes with curry and sari shops for space. The side streets are shifting emphasis from seedy down at heel shops to wide expanses of glass fronted offices which look in on Mac laden desks. And yes, the flat prices are rising to match the new wealth.

Then Easynet had a reverse merger with another company, and for a while my offices were several in Chertsey. The back end of no-where and a nightmare to get to, and once you were there you wondered why you'd bothered. Still the offces were good ......... Yawn, ZZzzzzz.

And so back to Brick Lane, and then back to Whitfield St (9 months - a pregnant pause I suppose) and now back to Brick Lane. Full circle again and again.