Back in the London

So, I do still have to spend time in London. It's not all coffees in the square and two hour lunches and 300 days of sunshine a year. Sometimes it's lead grey skies and constant drizzle and dirty unreliable expensive tube and train journeys and meeting rooms and sandwiches at my desk.

I come back to London for two extremely practical reasons. Firstly, I want and need to see my wife. Secondly, I need to earn some money to survive.

I have a pretty volatile relationship with my wife. We miss each other when we are apart. We argue when we are together. I love her to pieces. It's called being married. We are so good when we are on song. It's the pits when we are not. If she can't come out to France, I need to come to London to see her.

I gave up my very well paid full time job with all the usual benefits because I had a mid-life crisis. Shit. No income. It's all very well rebuilding your life, experiencing a new culture and renovating an apartment but it all costs money.

The trouble for me is that London holds an enormous number of demons that could take over my life again if I am not careful and without the support of family and friends. That scenario has played out once for me already. I wasted six months working part-time for a start-up business that was going nowhere and paid me very little. Worse than that, I allowed myself to fall back into the clutches of my evils. Stupid.

Despite that, I still need to earn. A good friend was raising investment money to bring a new medical product to market and asked if I would help. I jumped at it - a good product, a different field of business, helping a friend. It paid me enough to cover costs and take some pressure off my stressed-out wife. It allowed me to start the renovation in France. It allowed me to be in France. I can do a lot of the work from France with the wonders of modern technology. It was perfect. Unfortunately, the business has just run out of money ...... Bugger.