Um, wow. Like, totally, wow. Awesome.

Give me a minute while I try and recover some command of the English language will you?

And I am back. Groovy. What is all this about, I can practically hear you mutter from all the way over here. Well, guess where I am going to be on Monday morning?

You’ll never guess (unless you follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or got bombarded by my excited SMS’), so I’ll tell you. I’m going to be working in a publishing house! A proper job, that pays money and has career prospects and everything! Not work experience, a job! Picture me bouncing round Oxford like a Tigger on speed all day, and you’ve got a pretty good visual on how I am right now.

I am considered employable in my career of choice - feel free to insert any and all feather/knocking analogies at your leisure. So it looks like the move to Oxford was the right idea after all (not that I was really in any doubt, I feel very at home here already and it’s not even been a week). The road to the job wasn’t the smoothest in creation but it wasn’t exactly rocky either. It went a little bit as follows:

1. Cas toddles up to Oxford for an interview for a job which excites her just from the job description.
2. Cas puts in a moderate (she feels) showing, managing at least to refrain from crumpling into a gibbering wreck (she hopes).
3. Cas goes back to Southampton and refuses to talk to anyone about the job because she doesn’t want to jinx it.
4. Cas gets offered a different job in Cambridge, goes with her gut and says no, keeping fingers crossed on the Oxford lot.
5. Cas doesn’t get the exciting Oxford job, but still has nice things said about her in the feedback which at least confirmed she managed to maintain non-gibbering status and gives a nice boost to her confidence for the move to Oxford which is suddenly looming very large on the horizon.
6. Cas moves to Oxford, registers with an agency, manages to shoehorn her belongings into a bijou room, keeps applying for anything that stands still long enough (including bar work!) and sets about with Plan B.
7. Then the phone goes and it is the people from the Oxford job saying “remember us? Fancy just popping in for an informal chat, no pressure, I’ll tell you what it’s about when you arrive…”
8. Cas dusts off the interview suit, reminds herself that all appearances to the contrary she IS a confident, mature 26 year old who is worthy of employment, and walks the five minutes from her bijou house to the offices.
9. One large cup of tea, an “informal” interview, a brief conversation about the blog ( :O yes, the chap interviewing had read it!), an a conversation with an HR person later, I get offered the job I interviewed for way back in step 1!!!!

Holy smokes Batman, I got the job. I’ve never been so glad to be second choice in my life!

And… That’s it. I am going to treat myself with a lovely and extortionately priced manicure this afternoon, because the move has completely shredded my cuticles. If anyone can recommend a good, and NOT extortionately priced beauty parlour in Oxford, I would greatly appreciate it. There seem to be a dearth of them, which is mildly inconvenient. Plus none of them seem to do eyebrow threading which is just a big bother.

(If you want to read a related job/internet/interview/blog/private-public ramble, then if you hang on a little bit, it will be posted for your reading pleasure).