good evening pals....

and hello from the sunny west country!

so, my new town is as fun and funner than i hoped it would be......there is a cider bar on a boat, a lovely cathedral with a seat in it dedicated to my great-grandparents, a very cute old-town section of the city centre which i had never seen before i arrived, and a general feeling of a city full of all-age working-holidaymakers! i'm not sure if its the amount of water in the city or just the slightly higher average temperature than life in the north, but it really does feel like living in a holiday town......on my first weekend here i went roaming round town on the saturday, and got pleasantly lost.....weirdly feeling very at home and not at all daunted.....and i have continued to feel that way.......the early evening i a particularly nice time to be out on the little high street that is the centre of my neighbourhood....its like a whalley-range, hulme kind of high street with one of everything and lots of people out and about, alot of whom are from alot of different countries and seem to add their own ingredients to the general feel of ease and slow-walking.....no-one seems to be in a hurry here.......haven't found my coffee place yet, but that's ok, these things sometimes take time.....the cider boat is enough to be going on with for now! i love it.....and me and roz went out for tea one night and wound up in a place that looked, felt and tasted like it should have been on the sea-front in barcelona, which cannily enough is where we were the last time we had dinner together!

as for the job, well......can you imagine a happier anna than one who gets to study maps of iraq, learn about the kurdish people, study unhcr statistics and send letters to the home office and various embassies all in one morning's work?! i imagine not......last week i was mainly learning about what happens to people who find themselves in the Uk as victims of human trafficking, and what if anything can be done to assist them once they escape their captors...turns out that by law we can't do all that much, which makes me hopping mad to say the least...victims of trafficking do not automatically qualify for refugee status or other forms of national protection, since they still have to prove a well-founded fear of persecution on their return home, to gain such a status......i would say that having been sold by your own family would be grounds for a pretty huge amount of fear, but actually its fear of having nothing to go back to, much more often than it is fear of persecution...........anyway i have a job now which allows me to help see the system circumvented, one case at a time, seeing the rules navigated round and the rule makers confounded by how flimsy their own rationales are shown in public to be......i love it.......and they all drink real coffee....i have never seen such a frequently-used cafetiere...this makes me happy....

as for the man, well, i can honestly say that i am embarrassingly in love...lately its all got much, much worse, as i think we are both starting to allow ourselves to dream a future together into being and its pretty darn fun i can tell you.....

....my new housemates are still getting to know each-other, one only having been born of the other two weeks ago....they are doing well, especially when one isn't howling and the other has got some sleep.....

come visit me....! as my friend joe said to me when we met for a pint or two last week, 'it's a hip-happy-town, you're gonna love it!'