Today: London. Tomorrow: West Yorkshire...

Today is my last day in my office, and my last day in London. My last commute on the District line, my last battle through the swarming chavs that hover around the tube station, my last train journey through the southern suburbs of the city.

It doesn't feel like it. In any way.

My bosses do not want me to leave. They offered me many things, included an undisclosed (and probably extremely unexciting) pay rise in order to stay in London. They offered me help with accommodation, benefits, anything so that I would attend my workstation dutifully day after day.

As a result, the London-based meetings which I were praying were to be infrequent are looking to be regular and lengthy. So my joy of leaving London to become a pseudo Northerner once again (I have acquired many colloquialisms and inflections from my Northern friends) has been somewhat tainted by the fact that I'm not really leaving. It seems that if other people think I am not really leaving, and they pay my wages, they have an uncanny ability to actually pretend, unsettlingly effectively, that I'm still here. By, and this is the really clever part, making me be here.

I am digging in my heels as best I can (in silent protest, as per WebStress), and have not yet reduced myself to being so detrimental at meetings that I am simply not invited in case I single handedly destroy client relations by introducing them to my vast array of expletives and inappropriate comments that I have kept to-date well hidden (on numerous occasions with great difficulty), but I'm not far off.

I am, I know, extremely lucky that my bosses have been so accommodating in order to let me work from home, and a good few counties away.

But in knowing that they desperately really don't want to, my leaving is tinged with guilt, and as a result, on a Friday evening, when I should be settling down to a bottle or two of wine and some beans, I have offered to meet a client for an 'informal' discussion.

And this client has, on numerous occasions, made me cry due to not wonderfully tactful comments (to put it extremely mildly).

So you can see the extreme level of guilt that has nestled its way effectively into my conscious, and made me, basically, a complete mug.

I may derive some secret hidden pleasure from these guilt ridden, masochistic endeavours. But if I do, I'm damned if my conscious has ever knowingly bumped into it.

And so, to client.