Or, Slough, at any rate. Had dinner (and spent the night) at Antony and Marcia’s new place, out in the barren wilderness between London and Reading. A good time had by all.

I’m jealous. It’s a lovely house, for what sounds like a very reasonable rent. Slough itself seems quite pleasant and suburban, rather than the concrete hellhole it used to be – there are still traces of it, but it really does seem to be gentirfying at a frightening rate. I honestly could see myself winding up living there, or somewhere very like in the next year or two.

All I’ve got to do is come up with some way to afford a mortgage. This may be a bit more problematic. I don’t want to look for a new job, because I like where I am, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get a decent mortgage on my current money. Still, I can postpone the decision until well after San Francisco.

In other news: I am informed by several of you that the text message thing I had mentally filed under “complete and utter scam” may not have been quite as bad as I thought – apparently, it’s a service run by Genie, and someone will have fed it my phone number in order for me to have got that message.

Of course, I have deleted the message, which rather preculdes me phoning it back (although I’m unclear on whether or not you get to find out who it was sending the message anyway). But I am rather intrigued to know who would be feeding my number into it. I mean, I think I know all the women who have my phone number, and in the first instance, most of them aren’t single, and secondly, of the two or three who are single, I feel pretty confident in saying that they don’t fancy me.

Yes, it could of course be a man, or someone who isn’t single. I am discounting these options, for no other reason than because if I must have mystery people sending me weird text messages, I’d like to believe they are someone that there’s at least a chance I might want to sleep with. Of course, it could just have been a wrong number. If so, I choose to believe that it was an attractive wrong number.