Amidst the bedlam that was a return to work after almost three weeks away, I completely forgot the small matter of having passed the second-year anniversary of my starting at my current job.  The lads at HR though were not exactly keen to let me forget ; and I was suitably reminded via a letter in my home post box advising me of my eligibility to enrol on the company enhanced pension plan. Bar a few moments of drudgery,  it has never really felt like I have been stuck out here for the past two years, even though I’ve twice come close to leaving; once to Nigeria, and the other time to our biggest competitor across town.

For one, the two lasses I have had to share Room 3.26  with for all of a year and a half –  the Irish drinkard-swearer  Si and her not quite prim and proper Glasweigian side kick –  have provided me with invaluable insights into the minds of women. Having to over hear conversations about repairing broken nails, spray tans, weight watcher points, trips to the hair dresser and excited squeals over scoring a pair of Louboutins for 900 pounds is about as mind numbing as it can get. Thankfully, these conversations have not segued into the murky waters of bikini waxes and other more quintessentially feminine matters, yet. My timely offshore trips and a six month period spent working at a different site appear to have helped maintain my sanity.  I suppose in some dark, murky parallel universe out there, some inertial frame exists within which there are positives to all these. If in 2015, that all Nigerian chic decides that her bedside prattle will consist in its entirely of the highs and lows of the not all together trivial pursuit of getting a broken nail fixed, I suspect that I will merely smile smugly to myself and zone out, thankful that between a feisty Irish lass and her side kick I have heard it all.

Mid way through January I am two books to the good and a good way through the third. A re-reading of Jeffrey Archer’s Shall We Tell the President was quickly followed by Drew Dyck’s Generation Ex-Christian, an evangelical’s attempt to unpack the reasons why 80% of children reared in church disengage by the time they turn 29 [I appear to be a classic ‘drifter’ by the way –  adult PK, single and firmly in the throes of a cognitive dissonance I seem unable to escape. 😦 ]  Mid way through Binyanvanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place, I am increasingly enthralled by the self deprecating wit which he pens this memoir – but then since Open City and  The Sense of an Ending I have been on a one man crusade to devour everything written that explores the conflation of memory and reflection that is a well written memoir.

I am hoping that my reading will cover a lot more genres this year  – worldviews both Christian and secular, memoir, business, the usual fiction and which ever book wins the Booker this year. Given the way my year in books has started off, it might yet be a good one.