10:05 p.m. - 2024-04-09
country mouses in a city of town mouses

Life as it often does will send you off the normal path down along another, and that may just lead you to places you never expected to be or return to ever again. I'm in London tonight with The Maid ( Marion ) herself. Two country mouses in a city of town mouses and it does feel that way. Some urgent family related business ( The Maid's family ) meant she has to see some legal people in person about a potential inheritance from an old aunt on her mother's side of the family. We are here for a few days, and I had this afternoon to myself and will also have tomorrow afternoon to wander the city streets visiting places of interest.

When she asked me last week if I would travel with her, I sent off a few emails to old contacts of mine from my days working and living in London. I wasn't expecting much of a response but was pleasantly surprised. I met up with two of my old colleagues today for lunch. Az & Matt both still work at the corporate headquarters in Newgate Street and are doing well for themselves. Az is now in senior management, still married, and has three kids now. Matt is engaged to his partner at the tender age of 34 and has also climbed the corporate ladder into technical management. We are all bit rounder than the last time we met at a team building event in York about seven years ago, but what really made me smile was that they were both the same people I used to know. For all the serious adulting they have been doing, London life hasn't changed them one bit. There were no airs and graces of self importance, and they still remember who they were from back in the day. Bravo! I also walked out to Bermondsey to where the apartment I shared with Paulina was. I'm not sure why I did that, but I guess it was to see if I felt anything being there again. I didn't.

I called my old HR liaison manager Gillian from Goldman Sachs after she left me her number on an email reply. She moved out of London at the start of the pandemic with her husband and two kids and they now live near Cookham in Berkshire. Her husband took early retirement, they bought a riverside house, and he has a boat moored at the bottom of the garden onto the Thames. She hopes to retire in 2026 and for the most part is still full time home working which is why she couldn't meet up in the city at such short notice.

I learned a few things from her. Paulina has been back in the UK several times in the past ten years. She has a daughter Kasia, now ten years old. I had to sit back and think about that as it brought so many memories back to me, good and bad. Gillian didn't elaborate why, but it sounded like there was maybe an ongoing custody thing with her daughter's biological father who still lives in London. She said all Paulina's colleagues at GS were shocked when she left suddenly just before Christmas 2013. It wasn't until late spring 2014 that they found out why. I told her it was much the same for me, and it wasn't until 2015 before everything was resolved as far as I was concerned. Gillian has given my contact details to one of Paulina's old friends from Goldman Sachs back then, Natasha. I'm going to meet up with her tomorrow for lunch. I did know Natasha socially from back then, but that was eleven years ago and I didn't have her contact details. Apparently, there are things I should know that she can tell me?

Marion said the meeting with solicitors today was very boring but for the most part she knows now why she was asked to attend. She will find out tomorrow what it all means for her in real terms. All our travel costs are being paid for by the solicitors so I'm sort of along for the free ride because she asked me if I would come, and well I couldn't let her travel all this way on her own. She's just a little old country mouse. She doesn't like the city so far and said to me that the only reason people not from London would want to come here or live here is to try and make their fortune, or were running away from something, or had no one else, and no other place to go.

Touché

The Maid has spoken.