Although I now live and work in Reading, after spending five years in Leeds, you currently find me in cold and rainy St. Helens where I spent the first eighteen years of my life.

Despite visiting Liverpool and Manchester fairly regularly, and despite St. Helens being right in the middle of these two cities, in the last few years I’ve rarely been back here. By car it’s only an hour or so to Leeds from here, and I do wonder why I didn’t take the opportunity to come back here more often when I lived there. Now I’m in Reading I’m over three hours drive away, a route that takes you on six different motorways (or seven if you decide to splash out on travelling on the M6 Toll).

I quickly tend to feel quite restless when I’m here at home. I don’t really know why, but maybe that puts me off a little. It really shouldn’t, and I ought to be here a lot more than I am.

I’m up here on business, spending today meeting some colleagues in our Manchester office who I’ve joined in the newly wider team that I’m working in. It’s been a good day. Although I’m carrying on the role that I’ve been doing for the last two years now, I learnt this evening that my job title is changing from Service Control Manager to Technical Services Consultant. Both titles are only nominally relevant to my role in my eyes, with neither really getting close to encapsulating what it is that I do. I could argue that I do more management than consulting, but these days you can’t be a manager without having people to manage. So it is that I am now labelled a consultant.

For those that don’t know what I do, I’d be quite interested to see what you think a Technical Services Consultant might do all day – please feel to comment with your suggestions. If you’re interested in what I do actually do, then let me know and I’ll write a little about it in a future posting.

Getting between home and our Manchester office is just a thirty minute drive along the M6 and M56, and over the course of the day I’ve already entertained the thought that perhaps my next move after Reading could be somewhere a lot closer to home. The good news is that I’ll be visiting our Manchester office regularly, if not frequently, so I’ll get to spend more time at home. Being a consultant, what ever that means, has it’s benefits.