A wise man once posited that it's true what they say. Things happen for a reason, but your time's coming around.

Today was probably the first day of the rest of my life. I exposed myself (no, not like that) to a new company, a new culture, and on day 1 I got whistled off to an induction day, when I was induced along with a few dozen of my peers. A disparate and bizarre bunch in many respects, but that's not important right now. Here's what's important.

I flew business class there and back. My old company was a firm economy company. I don't need to fly business class, far from i, but I am writing this from a business class lounge - something I couldn't have done in my old company.

I got to my hotel and I got a nice letter saying that I'd been booked in at a table for dinner, but if I arrived later I should just put my dinner on room service and the company would pick up the tab. In my old company there would have been a polite reminder that overnight out-of-pocket expenses would have to be met from my own pocket.

This was then followed up by a day of HR puff talking about the company culture. There were some actual members of staff there, who actually seemed to believe the message. In my old company, those people would have been far too busy to attend, so it would have been a mass of trainers.

The fact that the message from the HR day was backed up by the comfort of the travel and everything that I've seen anyone from this company say or do, actually made me think that maybe it was heartfelt. Obviously, I was working for the old company for so long that I developed a hard cynicism due to the carousel of HR policies. Here, I am cautiously optimistic.

This comes across as a company where they expect the staff to behave professionally, as opposed to a company where they expect the staff to be thieves and fraudsters. I dare say that they'd clamp down pretty hard when you stepped out of line, but it's a different approach and one I value.

Of course, this may all change when I actually have to do some work.

So, I came out of the rotten job and I have left Foreign and I'm now working up to starting a new job in a new country.

I've left Mr Twinky behind in Foreign - not because I wanted to, you understand. We did talk about smuggling him out of the country in my luggage, but it would have been easier to buy him a ticket. Someone has to stay in Foreign to manage our diverse and random interests in business and property. Someone has to make sure that any evil plans are set out correctly and submitted on time to the Evil Planning Department for approval. So he's doing valuable and stalwart work.

I, on the other hand, have the equally tough job of finding a place to stay, getting my finances back in order, getting my bank to stop giving me a ring every time I try to spend money, and learning a whole new way of working. Ideally a better one than I had back in rotten.

Seems like a fair division of labour.

The tough part is the sleeping arrangements, obviously. I'm back in my parents' home for a few weeks - on the one hand that's great, as it means I'm comfortable. On the other hand, it would be very easy to get too comfortable here and not make enough effort to move on. I'm well known for that in our family, it seems.

In the mean time, as my sister and her kids are here too, I'm in the sparest of the spare bedrooms. I'm living out of my suitcase until this evening when I move in to the room which will be "mine" in the longer term. But for now I'm in a single bed. It's a nice transition - I don't have to pick a side to sleep on, I can sleep on both sides.

Somewhere overseas, I suspect that Mr Twinky is doing the same.

I left work early yesterday.

At four o'clock in the afternoon, I was walking home. The sky was clear, it was nice and warm and there was a definite feeling that spring was in the air. But there was more - it felt like a weight had been lifted from me. I felt like I was seventeen again, finishing my exams and never having to worry about them again. After all, I'd left my pass at security, given my laptop and my credit card back, and I'd handed over my last file of work to one of my colleagues.

I've worked for the same company for most of my adult life, and now I am changing company, changing career and moving to work in a different country again. It's going to be an interesting few months - but today I am taking it easy, knowing that I won't be back there on Monday.

Only got four days left at the job, and today was marked by a power cut which left us without computers all afternoon. So we went home.

It's a good start to the last week, and certainly better than the faint disappointment of my leaving present and card. Someone I've known for eighteen years gave me "best wishes" and the daughter of Satan left "I'm sure we'll meet again" written in her own dark blood. At least she called to ruin my night out by suggesting we meet for a drink this week. Like that's going to happen. Given that the sick atmosphere in our office is largely due to her, the reasons for me to spend any time with her are rapidly diminishing.

I have thirty hours left. Thirty hours of working for this company which has been wonderful and hellish in roughly equal measures at different times.

Shortly after the power went down, I heard that the project I had been working on for most of the last year and finally passed on to someone else three weeks ago had been - pretty much - canned. A great result, I think, and not before time. The week's started well. Only thirty hours left to avoid the daughter of Satan with her cold dead heart.

There's this junction that I cross every day. Traffic coming in to it has to do a little wiggle and cross over the tram tracks before carrying on. There's no way that the cars about to do the wiggling can see if the road ahead is clear, and there's no real way for them to notice that there's a second set of lights that is supposed to stop them from crossing on to the tram tracks when there's a tram a-coming. The result is pure chaos.

Essentially, it's possible for traffic coming in both directions to believe it has the right of way, and more often than not, this leaves a tram stuck for a minute or two while the whole knot tries to untie itself. Add to that a few cyclists and the bizarre urge that some pedestrians have to cross roads, and you're looking at a little pocket of stress for all involved.

It doesn't have to be this way.

The situation only arose a couple of years ago, when they built the trams, changed the contraflow, and vastly ramped up the amount of traffic struggling through this chicane. I can imagine what the 3d imagery looked like - a mother and a push chair on the traffic island, a couple of cars, and a tram full of smiling tourists - rather than sardine-frazzled commuters. It probably looked deadly.

It was never going to be like that, but it could be a damn sight better.

Almost every traffic junction in the city has some sort of problem. Pedestrian traffic lights that don't change unless there's no traffic. Junctions where both pedestrians and cars are stopped at the same time, when one or other could move without risk. A one-way system that drives cyclists and, recently, motorbikes on to the pavement. And this is in a city which acknowledges that it has traffic problems - some of the blame for those problems must lie with those responsible for planning the traffic system. or maybe it's deliberate - maybe they want to force people out of the centre of the city by making it impossible to drive there safely and in comfort?

I'm gradually beginning not to care.