I'm Irish. From Cork exactly. Famous for Graham Norton and Guinness' much tastier rivals Murphy's and Beamish. Cork is a small city with a huge student population and so is quite bohemian and laid back.

Being Irish I have itchy feet and have lived away from there since I finished my degree in UCC. I then went to Manchester to do an MSc in Computer Science and after a certain amount of existential drifting I set off for Dublin.

In the late 90's Dublin was the place to be where I was told you could earn loads of money, live a honey coated life of parties and shopping and generally be quite superior about living in a city where 80% of the people were bright young things between 18-35. So, after a year of putting up with too many pretentious people I promptly got a job with Ericsson that involved traveling to various places all over the world for 10 months of the year. That was a interesting time of getting various vaccinations for odd destinations (in odd places if you know what I mean!), being abused by customers in a myriad of languages because the version 1.0 software I was installing didn't work and listening to my male colleagues who usually got sent to the more...em....volitate countries such as Lybia, Algeria (during the UN sanctions...naughty Ericsson!) and Iran. A few thousand airmiles, intimate knowledge of airport loos in 4 continents and a complete lack of social life later I'd had enough. Thankfully due to my nomadic work life my earnings were tax free (not anywhere long enough to be resident!) so I had enough in my back pocket to think about buying a house. So off I went to Scotland!

And surprisingly after 2 1/.2 years I am still here. Not planning my next move.Very odd. Originally I was working for Cisco as a Network Consultant, but then along came the whole dot com crash and there wasn't really any work for me to do. Now I work for a Scottish software company Anite Scotland as a Project Manager, mainly dealing with software development projects. After years of being a 'techie' its quite odd crossing to 'the dark side' of management. I probably have too much sympathy for my developers and customers to be an excellent PM, but I suppose the time with Ericsson where I had to shoehorn a buggy unstable system into the production environments of huge telco's has stood me in good stead. Being a PM also means getting your arse kicked by customers and your own management on a regular basis, but hey, it pays the bills.

Despite my itchy feet I'm happy enough in Scotland, living in quite a small rural village with an great sense of community. Most of the things that interest me now are countryside based (biking, horses) so I don't think I'll be running back to the city anytime soon. Besides, there's not many places you can go to the pub in your wellies and not feel odd! If my Prada wearing Dublin friends saw me now they'd choke on their champagne cocktails! Anyway, I have a better social life here than in Dublin. The pubs stay open very late and the scottish appetite for drinking and merrymaking almost matches the Irish. I do have moments where I turn to Dave and say 'lets move to Canada/America/New Zealand!!'. However the logistics of moving horse, house, cats and boyfriend have deterred me so far. Not forever though.