Decisions, decisions...

I am leaving Sofia. I can't take being apart from my family any more, especially when my little girl keeps crying when we do our nightly MSN video calls.

So, the plan is to get a job back in the UK and head home. Much as I like Sofia, it doesn't have enough to keep me from missing those who I love. I'm not sporty enough to get in with the football-playing crowd, and I'm not enough of a drinker to spend all day sitting in Irish bars.

I feel pretty wretched about it because I've made a commitment to a company (albeit on a freelance basis), and now I'm letting them down. The company seem a reasonably decent bunch, as companies go. I seem destined never to find the perfect job in the perfect location; it's always one or the other. Maybe I will just have to accept this and make a balanced judgement.

And as I keep getting told: I have to stop running. After leaving a company I spent seven years with in 1999, I have spent the best part of a decade trying to find the perfect job in the perfect place, and have spent no more than two years in any one place. I think the average is probably six to nine months, because I've been freelancing for a lot of it. It's starting to look bad on the CV.

I think I just need more from my career. I hate being stuck in open-plan offices, having to wear ties, pretending to be interested in a Matrix-like stream of numbers on a screen. I despise the whole rat race, the Protestant Work Ethic, the Office Politics and the soul-crushing, life-draining regimes and conventions that we have created for ourselves. While, I hate to sound precious, I know that I'm a creative person. Quantity Surveying doesn't really cut it on the creative side of things, in my experience. 18 years of it is enough experience to validate that view, I think.

So, my plan is, to find steady work that pays for me and the family to live. At the same time, I intend to enrol onto a Creative Writing course, which I will do in my spare time. It will stimulate me and help me improve my writing skills. If I get good and get lucky, maybe I can start earning some money from it. If I'm really lucky, I can mix careers. But one step at a time. Ambition is the last refuge of failure, if you take Oscar Wilde at his word.

What is my ambition, though? A shit-load of money? A huge house with a Bentley parked in the garage? No. I have lost interest in conspicuous consumption and crass consumerism. I don't buy into this whole Keep Up With And Ahead of The Joneses culture. I don't care if that makes me a loser, or an outsider. I've been along the road of buying pointless gadgets and nice sofas and flashy cars, and it didn't make me feel better for longer than a few minutes. It just got me into debt. It was like a drug. And I made myself ill with the cycle of stress and junk food that helped me through it. Nowadays I feel numb when I go to large shopping centres or watch commercials on TV. I've started going cold turkey and I let it all wash over me. I don't need the latest mp3 player, the fastest computer, the best games console or the sexiest mobile phone. In fact, I don't need a mobile phone. Mobile phones epitomise the modern world for me. They sell the notion of personal freedom, but are really just the lock and key on our cages.

My ambition is to be happy. I'm coming to realise that a life free of all the bullshit I've just talked about can be a happy one. When we break it down to what we really, really need, it isn't a lot. Air; food; water; shelter; heat. On top of these fundamental things we need companionship, friendship and love, and that doesn't cost anything. If only we could all be satisfied with this...maybe the world would be a better place. I don't know; I'm starting to sound like a hippy now, but it's really what I believe, or coming round to thinking. I don't pretend to understand human nature. It pleasantly surprises me and infuriates me in equal measure. Sometimes I'm optimistic about the future; at other times I wish an asteroid would do the Universe a favour.

But there we go. Writing. I've always wanted to write. I wrote a complete book as a young teenager, and wrote many ludicrous B-movie Sci-fi stories as a child. Maybe I can develop as a writer and learn how to plot and build characters and tell great stories that entertain and provoke. I am musical as well (especially after a curry, the wife says), and can hold a tune, but I'm probably too old to harbour ambitions of rock stardom now, and singing in clubland has never really appealed to me. Then again, I could combine the writing and the music, and maybe eke out a living...?

This has turned into a lengthy, self-indulgent soliloquy. I think I'm just writing it down to make sure it doesn't sound completely - rather than faintly - ridiculous, and get a few things off my chest at the same time. Therapeutic. That's what they call it these days.

It's been fun. And I promise: I'll be back, in one medium or another. Whether you like it or not.