My family are the greatest. A phone call from my mum and a long MSN chat with my brother, and I’m feeling on top of the world. I guess it’s easy to romanticise Chinese New Year when you’re not around for it and haven’t been for 5 years, and I definitely remember things I disliked about it, but there are many things I miss: the camaraderie, the food, the festive feeling and the red, and sitting round the steamboat on New Year’s Eve with the fishballs and oyster sauce strategically in front of my plate.

London’s big, full-on celebrations in Chinatown and Trafalgar Square aren’t till next week, so it’s all been strangely muted so far. I took myself out for a saunter down Regent Street yesterday. It was decked out for Valentine’s and I spotted a mind-boggling number of people, girls and guys, with bouquets and roses in hand, as well as an inordinate number of shop windows with hearts in them. I grabbed a pre-dinner flat white from Sacred at Kingly Court, one of Time Out London’s top coffee places, and sipped it slowly as I walked. For a non-Monmouth coffee it was pretty impressive. People-watching comes naturally when you’ve nowhere to go; you learn all over again the pleasure of walking for walking’s sake, not as a means to an end but the end itself, doing the whole Victorian flaneur thing as you stroll down the pavement scoping out the buildings and the rush of the crowd around you.

It started pouring down with rain later in the evening, so I retired to Euston where I camped for a good hour or so with a copy of PopCo by Scarlett Thomas. I finished The End of Mr Y late-ish last year and enjoyed it, but I’m liking PopCo even better – it’s really a book of puzzles wrapped in the guise of an smart, sassy, very adult story, and if you, like me, enjoy lateral thinking, games, codes, paradoxes, the Monty Hall Problem, and the occasional mathematical stumper, PopCo is your book. It also contains a recipe for a vegan cake, which I fully intend to try out once I am safely relocated into an oven-friendly household.

Today’s my last day off till June so I am planning to enjoy it to the fullest, which naturally involves gaming (check), Monmouth Coffee (planned for this afternoon) and reading in bed (planned for tonight). In between I’m also hopefully going to settle this question of moving out once and for all, with a second visit to my prospective new house this evening, and perhaps starting to re-pack my things once again. How surreal, all this nomadding about. Hopefully this will be the last move for a long while.

I am now a proper North London dweller… or will be, once all these infernal bags and boxes are unpacked.

Back soon, busy being snowed under by my belongings!

So having finally been driven over the edge by the tragic lack of central heating in my house, plus a series of painfully snowy journeys to work, plus the frustrating inconvenience of having to drag my laundry to a dodgy laundromat in freezing winter, plus a taxing sleep shortage thanks to the length of my daily commute, AND (the killing blow) a sobering afternoon spent doing my accounts and realising how much I could save living in a place that was 1) nearer to work 2) had a washing machine 3) had central heating… I wasted no time in house-hunting, and went to view a room yesterday.

I navigate my way there from work fine. It is blessedly nearby. I am there in no time at all. I permit myself dreamy imaginings of sleeping in on weekday mornings as I ring the doorbell, and am greeted by a smiley, shy-looking Middle Eastern lady who introduces herself as Iranian and a masters student in actuarial science (I nod as if I know what that is), and shows me the room and the flat and the kitchen. The place has everything I want and more on top of that, so I’m happy. I’m standing in the kitchen doorway wondering what questions I’ve forgotten to ask when suddenly, I am offered a cup of tea.

This totally throws my internal programming off (sadly, I am one of those people who have a system error in their brains when something unexpected happens, causing a mental BSOD). I have never been offered a cup of tea or any sort of hospitality at any flat-viewing I’ve been to before, so I’m not sure what exactly I am meant to do, but Mona is already putting the kettle on. She tells me that a few other people have come to see the room and everyone wants it because it’s cheap, but it is important to her to find someone whom she can live with. Suddenly, everything clicks! This isn’t just me viewing the flat, it’s her viewing me!

I really, really want the room, as it is, as previously noted, cheap and lovely and very near work. I feel a bit antsy and nervous and like I am in an interview. But then we sit down in the cosy living room and she tells me about these nightmare Polish party girls who have come round to see the flat, and we chat about why there are so many people moving to London (including ourselves) when the weather and the transportation system suck, how people in the north of England and Scotland are much nicer, what exactly my job entails (I always find it very difficult to explain), what exactly actuarial science entails (which she also must have found difficult to explain because I don’t understand it very much better than I did originally), how difficult it is finding a job now… and before I know it I am nearing the end of my tea and her phone goes off because the next person viewing the flat has got lost and needs directions.

This alerts us both that said next person will be here in 15 minutes’ time, and I should probably be off before she turns up, so I thank her for the tea and tell her I’m really keen on the room, and ask if more people are coming round to view it. She says there are a couple more but I needn’t worry – she’ll hold it for me, but it would be good if I could move in ASAP. I promise her I’ll negotiate my leaving date with my landlord. We bid each other goodnight and I skip down the stairs back towards Finchley Central station, feeling hopeful.

I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, what you would call an adventurous or impulsive person; the unfamiliar unnerves me, I am generally very nervous about new people, and sudden changes, like I said, induce mental BSODs. So even I was surprised and slightly flummoxed to find myself agreeing, at 2:30pm today, to move out in 2 weeks’ time, and signing a document to that effect in my landlord’s office, and discussing dropping off of keys and return of deposit.

Considering that on, oh, Thursday, I was totally not aware that I would be moving at the end of January, I think I can be excused a brief period of dazedness. But looks like it’s gonna be bags and boxes again, very, very soon.

The last time I wrote, it seemed unreal to me that only one week of January had gone by, it seemed to have been 2010 forever and the world seemed to have marched right on as if the year had never changed. Today, the opposite is true – I am surprised that two entire weeks of January have flown past already, I wonder where half the month has gone, and I am striving to hang on to the bright promise of the year ahead that I felt so strongly on January the first. It’s hard at times not to be mired in the trivial and inconsequential, and not to get bogged down in seemingly endless slogs, but I haven’t lost it all. I still feel it – that livewire spark – that glimmering, teasing hint of great things to come.

Work commitments are piling up, not just in the office but out of it – events, training workshops, things at which I am to be a delegate of the company, which is still new enough to me to be fairly exciting; I am looking into moving to North London and possibly sharing a house again (much as I truly enjoy living alone it is far easier to move into a house where internet and bills are already sorted), I am still trying – this ongoing, neverending journey – to get to know the city better because however many of its nooks and crannies I explore, it never seems enough. And I am thinking, albeit somewhat vaguely and inconclusively, on the future and what I plan to do now that I have a permanent job. I am asked that a lot; I don’t have any answers right now. I wish I did.

I thought to myself on the Tube this morning that if I do wind up moving, perhaps the time will have come to really, properly audit my possessions, to cut everything down to whatever I can carry in whatever luggage I have (1 big suitcase, 1 medium suitcase, and a backpack), and either throw out, donate, or ship home everything else. The amount of stuff I have after over 5 years in this country is, naturally, astonishingly voluminous. And given that I am likely to be a nomad for the foreseeable future – perhaps it is time to pare it all back, once and for all, and do the nomad thing properly, in the appropriate spirit of liberation from material goods.

Here’s how out of it I was at work today:

R: Ugh, all the tea towels are grubby! I really want new ones!
Me: I know… they’re really gross. We should just go to Poundland and buy some. They’ll only be, what, a pound?
R: Ooh, they’ll only be, what, a pound? Really? Are you sure? A pound exactly? From Poundland?
Me: …right, home time.

It was weird. Even though I’d been at work for every working day of the holiday season, today still felt oddly reminiscent of the first day of school all over again, with the office suddenly bustling back into life after the quiet solitude of Christmas and New Year. I’d grown accustomed to the Tube being pleasantly deserted as London gradually emptied itself out over the holidays; this morning’s jam-packed crowd at the Victoria line platform was something of a nasty shock.

I don’t normally dread waking up for work, but today was pretty tough. Not to mention very, very cold – I put that New Year’s resolution of walking more into practice this morning, and walked where I’d been bussing back and forth since winter started – and the heavy, misty chill crept right into my bones. One of my colleagues said this must be the most depressing day of the year, when you find yourself back at work in the first week of January, and I’d be hard-pressed to argue with that. Though perhaps depressing isn’t really the word for it – more… strangely disorienting. -1°C / feels like -6°C. It’s only going to get colder – got to wrap up warm, now.

(or, the mandatory new-year’s-eve pondering post that louis prodded me into writing)

I suppose I could say, what a year it’s been. I suppose a lot has happened, though I feel that often I was stumbling from one route marker to another, amazing race style, with not a clue what would happen next – only with the knowledge that there had to be an end to the leg, and an end to the race. From settling down in London and getting to know it better, to my two weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon working for one of the world’s greatest theatre companies, to the frantic flurry of job-hunting and hopping, to finally landing something, to making it permanent – I can’t do justice to it all in one post – and that’s just work. I haven’t even begun to say anything about meeting new people, rekindling old friendships, eking out the beginnings of a new life, the harrowing feeling of post-university emptiness, the sweetness of summer on the south bank, flying home, talking, thinking, loving, losing, hoping, living.

I suppose I could say, indeed, that 2009 was quite a year. But to be honest, I don’t think the events of the year made all that much of a difference; I think it would still have been quite a year had I not worked where I worked and found the job I did in the end, if I were still jobless now, if summer had been a torrent of rain, if I hadn’t taken that holiday home, if I had taken up, say, cooking classes rather than Japanese. It would all still have been something, it would still have been an experience to remember. And I suppose, too, that this is true not just of 2009 but of any year, any time; had I not done my MA in 2007/08, I would have done something else, and whatever it was, it would have left its indelible mark on my experience of 07/08 too, for better or worse.

One of my colleagues said in the office today, over discussing New Year’s Eve plans (mine was, obviously, the most boring), that he felt 2009 had just kind of drifted along, but that 2010 was going to be the year. I don’t know that I agree with the drifting, but I do feel, for no reason at all I can put my finger on, that I am more than ready for 2009 to be over – because 2010 is going to be, as noted, the year – and it won’t be because of what happens, whatever may happen; it will be simply because I am alive. The world is changing around me, and there is a long road to walk yet, and a lot of life to be lived.

So yesterday afternoon, someone looked up and said, “hey, it’s snowing!”

The few of us in the office flocked round the large balcony window and looked at the few flecks coming down. It was pretty and swirling, but didn’t look like it was going to be disruptive or anything (famous last thoughts).

Fast forward another hour or so, and the snow was pouring down so thick and fast the sky was white. You couldn’t see the blue/grey/sunset/whatever colour it actually was, only a whitewash; the pavements and roofs had disappeared under an ever-thickening layer of fresh snow, and the roads were beginning to pile up. I opened the TfL website and kept it open the rest of the day to keep an eye on the ever-changeable Northern Line; it seemed fine, all the way to closing time.

The cold and the flurries hit me like a hurricane when I opened the door of the building and stepped outside; it was the kind of snowfall that pelts you, where you can feel the wet flakes on your lashes and your lips. I usually walk about 15 minutes to the Tube, but decided it would be madness in this weather and opted to wait for a bus instead in the sheltered bus station, where I bumped into a colleague who’d evidently reached the same conclusion.

We waited, and talked, and waited, and ten minutes later were joined by another colleague. We looked out the windows of the station and realised to our consternation that the vehicles outside hadn’t moved in the entire time we’d been there, at which point we realised that the roads were probably stuck in a horrible gridlock, and that we weren’t about to get anywhere waiting for the bus.

So steeling ourselves, we went back out into the snow to brave the walk to the station. We rang someone who’d left the office a good ten minutes before me to see how far he’d got, and we found out he’d got on a bus but was stuck in traffic not moving. One of my colleagues kindly lent me his umbrella as I’d left mine at home, over-optimistically, and was the only one without hood or hat. The snow went crunch crunch beneath our feet as we fought our way through. All I could think of was how much I didn’t want my socks to get wet, and how surreal this all was.

Then – wouldn’t you know it – after all that, about 2 minutes before we reach the station, colleague K gets a call on her phone which consists of her going “Oh, you are kidding! I’ll pass that on. Can we come and find you?”

And then we find out that C, who left the office before us and had been on the bus, had just arrived at the station only to see the last southbound train go, and find out that the Northern Line from here down to Camden Town had literally just been suspended.

Of all the – !

So we meet up with C, who fills us in further; Tube staff had essentially told him that they weren’t putting on any bus replacement services as the roads were gridlocked, they had no idea when the trains would be up and running again, and their advice was “go wait in the pub for an hour and come back later.”

How very British, I thought, amused despite my frustration, as we did just that and trooped down to the nearest pub for chips and drinks. We were an odd motley crew; we all get along fine, as does everyone in my office pretty much, but we wouldn’t typically be found hanging out with each other. But then there we were, all us South Londoners, trapped in Zone 3 of North London with no conceivable way of getting home that night other than to walk as far south as we possibly could to where we could get to Camden Town (or, heaven forbid, to walk to Camden Town itself, that would have taken a couple of hours). It was warm indoors, and the swirling snow outside in the dark was oddly picturesque, with the white covering car rooftops and pavements. We clinked glasses and wished each other merry Christmas. I looked outside at the still traffic and icy roads, and the surreality of it all hit me again, as I wondered if I would get home at all that night.

One hour later, as advised, we trooped back down to the station, only to find that southbound trains were running at a frequency of one every half-hour to an hour, and station staff were advising everyone to “exit the station and seek alternative routes”. (C: “what alternative routes?!”)

My gloves and socks were damp, K had to roll up her jeans so they wouldn’t get wet on the bottom, and everyone’s coats were dripping, but we resignedly waited it out till the train came. By the time I got home it was nearly three hours after I’d left the office. And throughout all this, the layer of snow on the ground could not possibly have piled up beyond two inches.

Sometimes, London, you really exasperate me. But at least I’m not alone.

Armrest politics:

How do they work?

So I am pretty protective of my personal space on the tube (well, in general I guess, in public spaces, but the tube is the one place I am regularly jammed in close with sweaty funny-smelling strangers). I also try, as far as I can, to be a considerate commuter. This means that when someone’s arm is on our shared armrest, I immediately shrink away a bit so that my arm isn’t anywhere near the armrest. It also makes it very uncomfortable when both my armrests are being hogged by the people next to me.

Sometimes people just sprawl out and take both armrests. Sometimes, the sheer sprawliness of my neighbour passengers forces my arm off an armrest where it was already very comfortable. Should this be condoned? Should I refuse to give up an armrest even if I see the person next to me hasn’t got use of the other one, due to it being hogged? Am I thinking too much about this? Should I just blatantly hog armrests myself and pretend to be asleep all the time?

(Possibly more to the point: why doesn’t TfL just upgrade the trains already so that everyone has more space?)

things that keep me going through a manic time at work and a notoriously contagious office flu bug that has just found its way to me:

1. 80s music (everybody wants to rule the world, natch)
2. the relative peace and quiet in the office given half of it is off ill or away
3. baking unprecedented amounts of cake
4. new covent garden chicken soup
5. my 2-litre bottle of ribena and the stroopwafels stashed in my office drawer (thanks kevin!)
6. strangely warm weather, in spite of rain
7. the smell of said rain (fewer things in the world more instinctively soothing, to me…)
8. glee
9. up finally hitting the cinemas here on friday
10. jason mraz
11. being complimented on a total gem of a skirt that i picked up at a swishing do (thanks debbie for bringing me!)
12. a massively enjoyable dinner and boardgaming evening at tse yin’s
13. knowing that in a month and twelve days i will be sydney-bound and ON HOLIDAY
14. being able to, on occasion, say to myself i don’t care if it’s lame to sleep before 10pm because i am going to do just that! like tonight.

It has been a truly stressful week at work so far for everyone and I have been arriving and leaving nearly an hour early/late every day so far this week (and it’s only Wednesday!) just to make a dent in my workload, so tonight in an omg-i-need-to-destress! moment I chopped up six apples into tiny pieces. And then I made an apple cake. Which is this very moment in the oven as I type, making my little room smell absolutely delicious (thanks, Smitten Kitchen!) and making me very hungry.

Yesterday it struck me all over again, en route to Waterloo to meet Debbie, how placidly British people put up with the craptastic public transport system: the train in front of ours on the Northern line broke down and after being trapped in between Mornington Crescent and Euston for positively ages, we pulled very slowly into Euston, whereupon our driver mumbled sheepishly that, erm, the train at Warren Street was broken and, erm, wasn’t going anywhere, and he reckoned our best bet was to get off here and hop onto the Victoria line instead, because “this train will be here for quite a while”.

And of course with the mass exodus of people from the Northern line onto the Victoria at Euston, human traffic slowed to an epic, molasses-like crawl. Everyone was inching onwards step by step, like a zombie horde, I was pushing 20 minutes late, really hungry, knew there wouldn’t be enough time anymore to grab dinner before having to leg it over to the National Theatre for All’s Well, still stressed from work, and quite cranky as a result; of the innumerable times I have been inconvenienced by the Tube and by TfL as an organisation, this was probably the first time I had seriously considered filing a complaint.

As I occupied myself through the zombie shuffle by wording a polite yet suitably annoyed email in my head, I heard an announcement that there were “minor delays on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line” and nearly laughed out loud. Suddenly it all struck me as absurdly ridiculous – honestly, if TfL considers a train breaking down and having to throw all their passengers off a bunch of subsequent trains “minor delays”… what complaint can I make that would possibly register? And why is TfL like this? And what’s going to happen in 2012 when the Olympics come here and whole masses of sports fans are trapped on a stuck train together?! /rant

Anyway, I did thankfully make it on time for the play, though Deb and I had no time for dinner and had to grab some Krispy Kremes instead (not the healthiest of substitutions but yummy nonetheless). I’ve never seen one of Shakespeare’s problem plays before, and after seeing All’s Well that Ends Well… yeah, I can understand the “problem” tag. It struck me as oddly jarring in critical parts, especially in the portrayals of Helena and Bertram; I can’t decide if I’m supposed to like them, or why Helena likes Bertram at all, as he is sort of a useless prat, or whether it’s misogynistic or positive towards women, there seems to be a bit of both (but then again that vacillation is so Shakespearean, isn’t it – it ended on a really ambiguous, unresolved note too, as Debbie pointed out afterwards). It’s pretty rare that I don’t take to a Shakespeare play right away, the only others I can think of are Taming of the Shrew and Romeo & Juliet (but really, who likes R&J??), but I found it difficult to outrightly enjoy All’s Well and I suspect it has to do most with the play itself rather than the production, which was beautifully staged and generally well-acted. I’m glad I saw it though and did much prefer the conciliatory second half to the first half, but I so much entirely prefer The Winter’s Tale, which is the most recent other Shakespeare I’ve seen.

And to my horror, going to the theatre is starting to remind me of work instead of being a respite from it – perusing the National’s brochure, and looking round their posters and spaces, all these subconscious assessments and comparisons kept popping up in my head, and a never-ending litany of work tasks I needed to accomplish looped nonstop in my thoughts! Yikes.