Towards the close of 2013 I found myself at odds with Nottingham, the city I lived and worked in for 14 years. It's contradictory visions for business and citizen support vs cooperate profit and capitalist ideology no longer made it a viable place for me to call home. On a civic standing the city council has failed me and despite my best efforts to reconcile my growing dispare in the face of community disquiet I realised Nottingham didn't have place for me. Funding battles, community in fighting, budget distortions, bad reporting, opaque blinkered sensibilities left me looking in on an urban silo. A provincial ego imploding and blind. Intoxicated on decentralised politics spinning stories, believing their own misinformation.

The start of 2014 was dark.

My light has been Derby. Since May I've been commuting. Connect Derby threw a life line and presented a compassion and humble ambition which is being delivered day by day - Real.

It still feels a little too good to be true. PCM has moved to Derby. I'm in a new land with out a strategy working on a plan, drawing up a road map, developing a network.

Sometimes Nottingham feels too close for comfort.

In June my partner and I finally realised our home was lost too and we'd have to move after a 2yr battle with the owner of the adjoining property renting to inconsiderate tenants plus a party wall water leak the owner allowed to drip, drip, drip from a damp patch in the bathroom to a water cascade out of the electric sockets in our kitchen below finally resulting to a collapsing ceiling next door. It was made all the more incomprehensible by the incoherent incapacitated local authority. There is nothing they can do.

Nottingham has not been kind and annecdotal reinforcement from acquaintances convinced me it was happening to many others in Nottingham didn't help. It just drove me deeper in to dispare.

So here I am September 2014 inconsolable and broken.

Derby has given me hope.

Derby is a trangible future.

But the transition is traumatic.

I'm left fragile and muted.

image credit: Don’t fall through the cracks: learn about and change the issues now (please take the time to read the article, if you feel this too) http://bit.ly/ZmEYQ8