Update - it's been 18 months, so...

If you want a TL;DR version of this latest instalment of my blog, then basically everything is sort of on hold due to a fairly large change in our life at the moment.  If you want to know the full details, then read on!

As it's 18 months since I started this blog (which means it's 2 1/2 years I have left to achieve these stated goals, aagh!), I thought an update is in order.  As a reminder, here's my 'To Do' list:

1) Write a film script.

2) Write... something else.

3) Improve my career prospects.

4) Buy a house.

Unfortunately, there's not huge progress to report, but I feel there's pretty good reason for this.  It's having an impact on my being able to fulfil the first two things on my 'to do list', has implications for the fourth, and has effectively put a halt on the third item.

Basically, after a few months of hard work supporting my wife in achieving her dream of completing training to become a Health Visitor, we are now 'officially' homeless; the owners of the house we have been renting over the last two years have sold their property and we had to move out at the end of August.  I say we are 'officially' homeless, in so much as we're registered homeless with the local council, but we're actually staying with my dad temporarily (until we get a new home).

You see, after 6 years of renting, and having to move almost as many times in as many years due to landlords either wanting to sell their property or wanting it back, as a family we're getting fed up of this.  And after a misadventure involving living in France, and getting my wife through 5 years of training in order to do her dream job, our coffers are pretty empty.  This writes out getting a mortgage due to the requirement of getting a loan - and as banks are a lot more strict about things like debt, they won't touch us (we've had to get a few credit cards to help support us during my wife's training).

So we have decided to follow the route of applying for a council house.  At the moment there is no small amount of stigma attached to people relying on 'social accommodation' from certain sections of the media (but really, people need to ask themselves when they see a headline demonising people on benefits, what are the tax-avoiding, wealthy owners of the newspaper benefiting from at the expense of the rest of us, which they don't want to have the public's attention drawn to?)  But the reality is, in the current climate, it's not 'jobless scroungers' ((TM)The Daily Mail, etc) that need this type of housing - it is people like my family, who are working in reasonably paid jobs, and yet are still unable to get mortgages, who are now looking at the council house option.

We registered a few months ago when we found out about the imminent sale of our previous rented property, and now we're 'officially' homeless we have a higher priority for a suitable house - however we're still at the vagaries of chance, basically the unknown quantity of when said accommodation becomes available.  Could be weeks, could be months.  In the meantime my Dad has very kindly let us stay with him, while we await rehousing.  But we feel doing this is worth it if only to get the stability of what will effectively be a permanent home (without worry of being given notice to vacate on the whim of a landlord).  It might be that we do decide to save for a deposit and eventually buy a property, so renting from the council at a cheaper rate than the public sector will give us the opportunity to do that.  Or we may just stay with the council.  But either way, the fourth item on my list doesn't seem such a big ask now.

On top of this, our current housing situation is having practical implications for the first two items on my list - basically, I've not had time to progress with these.  We now live about 45 minutes from our home town, so out commute now includes a round trip to get children to school.  As I was doing most of the writing on my film script on my (admittedly short) train commute, as I'm no longer doing that I've not had the opportunity to carry on with that.  Due to having to vacate our former home I've had no time to go to the cinema or write anything for my Film Blog, either.

But it's not all bad news on these counts.  Firstly, I had been working on an outline for the film script (actually, not so much of an outline, but a pretty detailed description of everything that happens in it!) and was very nearly about to start writing the final act and finish this.  It's all there in my head, pretty much, once things have settled down I will be able to sit down and finish this (if not by the end of the year, then certainly by next spring).  Then all I need to do is wrestle that down to a more manageable 2-3 page treatment, and a then an actual screenplay...  Secondly, as we're less busy now we're out of our former home, more cinema trips are on the horizon, which means I'll be back to posting reviews and articles on my Film Blog in the next week or two.

There is still one more item on the list, and obviously with everything else that's been going on I've just not had time to do even think about job hunting or training.  But now my wife has finished her training and won't need any further support with that, I'm in a position to start thinking about any potential training I could do.  I'll spend the next few months giving it some more thought, so watch this space...