All good things come to an end.

I’d been meaning to write this for a while, and then I saw Alex’s post on his leaving-bash, and decided now was as probably a good a time as ever.

So: I’m leaving the New Statesman after nearly two years there. It’s been a great two years, and a fantastic first job. I’ve had a lot of great opportunities, learned a vast amount, and been given the space to put that learning to use. I’ve also worked with some lovely people, who I’m not planning on losing contact with anytime soon. I’ve developed a great deal – as a designer, as a developer, as a writer, and most importantly as a person – in those two years, and enjoyed them hugely.

But, you know, first jobs come to an end, and we move on. And so I’m soon going to be starting work at the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and a whole host of other journals, to work as a CSS Developer. It’s a slightly bigger operation than the Statesman, which will be an interesting experience for me, and I’m looking forward to the new challenges it’ll bring.

I’ve got two weeks left at the Statesman; then it’s off to Etech, and when I return from there, I’ll be starting at Nature. Then, 2006 can really begin.

That’s the upshot of this weekend.

Over the past few days, I’ve had a slowly growing pain in my right thigh. Like needles, jabbing away, and it really hurts when I bash it into things. By Saturday, it had spread from a single spot to the whole thigh, and it hurt quite a bit. So I called NHS Direct – rather late, I must admit – and they suggested I go to the local hospital. Which is a half hour walk, so I took a taxi.

At one in the morning.

Turns out I don’t have Deep Vein Thrombosis, after all.

No, I have pulled a muscle in my right thigh. The muscle that keeps you sitting upright. “Have you been doing a lot of sitting?” asked the doctor. Yes, I said, yes I have. All day at work, and then all night at home (or for a few hours at least) bashing away at my presentation for Emerging Tech. And it’s not just duration – stress levels are quite high, too, regarding that.

In short: I’ve been sitting too hard.

Then I walked back from the hospital at 1.30am. Which pretty much threw Sunday out of joint.