i’ve done all the dumb things

Long, long overdue update! No I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth though it feels some days like I have… it’s been a weird Christmas, though, what with an uber-frantic last week at work, the visa disaster (still in limbo - probably won’t know how it turns out until I actually submit the application and hear from the home office, which may take months), the frantic scrambling rush of card-mailing which I got so lazy with that I still haven’t sent a little pile of them, the absence of any big dinner on Christmas day itself. Thinking back, for the first time it dawned on me that for the past four years, my Christmas day has always been spent in a big way - in Spain, in Oxford, in York, in Germany - though Christmas eve this year with Jake,Wee Zi and Eleena was lovely in its own quiet, cosy way.

I like the little reunions that mark each holiday season, I like the catching up and the greetings and the fact that at some point of time over these two weeks from Christmas to New Year everyone always thinks of someone else, old friends, distant family, whom they wouldn’t have thought of for a while. I like Covent Garden at this time of year, I like the lights and the mulled wine tea in Whittards, I like the tinsel round my computer at work. I got to speak to my family on the phone, see many muchly beloved Yorkies and spend New Year’s Eve counting down to the truly spectacular midnight fireworks at the banks of the Thames with Nic and Weez which was really the pinnacle of the whole break for me. Walking an hour and a half from Westminster to Pimlico after it all, armed with a tiny and largely unhelpful map from TFL, through crowded celebrating streets which eventually thinned out as we neared Victoria - random strangers tapping me on the shoulder to say happy new year with a smile and dancing drunkards taking their turns on the tarmac - we were all so cold that freezing would probably have been an understatement, we couldn’t feel our toes, we’d been standing for hours in an insane crowd, but ah the atmosphere!

On top of that I was also sick in a big way from Christmas day itself, on and off (still coughing a little), which has contributed to the past week feeling like a great big daze; I spent hours and hours of it sleeping off fevers and medication and sniffles and general malaise. Though I can’t say being sick for Christmas is very much fun, on hindsight it was probably good for me to have been forced into bed for long periods of time, and not be up stressing over my visa or jostling with crowds at Boxing Day sales or spending hours trying to get anywhere when half the transport network is shut down.

It is back to work and nose to the grindstone for me tomorrow, but it’s been a good rest. If only it were warmer… the weather, as always, has been abysmal. At least one thing here is constant.

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bright lights

The lights on Sloane Square were beautiful today. I thought I’d become jaded towards London after nearly two months, but as I turned a corner on King’s Road this evening, Christmas shopping bags in hand and feeling completely exhausted from what has been a very, very tiring week at work (plus an all-nighter looming tomorrow - don’t think I’ll leave before 11pm), this ethereal, otherworldly blue mist of lights suddenly unfolded before me. I felt the old enchantment rushing back, I found myself putting everything down and whipping out my camera like a tourist all over again.

London still has its magical pockets, after all.

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back to basics

You know your sanity is at a low, low ebb when you find yourself opening your food cupboard in search of your green tea, murmuring “green tea green tea green tea green tea green tea” under your breath repeatedly while staring blankly at the open cupboard, and doing so for a few minutes on autopilot before actually getting the green tea out to make your drink.

-is mildly mortified-

*

It always comes down to the people, doesn’t it?

I like my colleagues. I very much like my marketing manager, who is acerbically wry and suitably jaded for someone whose job is to churn out appropriate rubbish for the press, while still managing to be really personable and easy to get along with - no mean feat for a cynical person - and this is fortunate, because he’s my line manager at the moment. The other interns, and the temp development officer who just started a week after I did, are very lovely. We chat easily on pub nights and are beginning those slow, slow agonising painful steps towards getting to know new people.

Nothing changes the fact, however, that my nakama are all far away. Some are closer - some are close enough for spur-of-the-moment visits, frequent or infrequent, and I am very grateful for that; more and more though my thoughts keep dwelling on the people I love who aren’t here with me in London, which is… all the people I love.

I keep thinking, I want to see ____, I want to be with ______, I wish _______ were here, I really want to hear from _______, I wonder what ________ is doing now (insert various names as thoughts wander). Sometimes it’s people I’ve not seen or talked to for ages, sometimes people I’ve chatted with just lately, sometimes, even, people I’ve seen lately; maybe it’s the recent memory of the meeting that puts them oddly in the forefront of my mind. There are friends with whom I feel I have only kept up a friendship because we have both made the effort to keep in contact somehow, there are friends with whom I know I’ll always fall right back into intimate conversation when we next speak even though we’ve not talked in months and months, there are friends (this category is largely Yorkies) whom I feel irrationally very fond of despite the short, short time we’ve had to get to know each other. I think of all of you, often. I miss you.

It’s a strange addiction: the more I keep thinking of people, the more I can’t stop. It’s like the thoughts themselves provide some phantom company; a summoned shadow of the person missed that makes me feel, for a moment, like they’re there.

You can’t make me dance around
But your two-step makes my chest pound
Just lay me down
As you float away into the shimmer lights

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these precious few hours

It is amazing how much energy is suddenly generated at the thought of not having to go to work tomorrow… even if the alternative is waking at an unearthly hour (far, far earlier than I’d have to for work) to catch a 7:20 am train to Stratford-upon-Avon, for an interview that will only yield yet another problematic unpaid placement if successful!

At least I get to speak with some RSC people. That’s quite cool, right? And every future contact, even if in an interview context, is a precious precious one - a fact I am fast learning in this industry.

*

To dredge up a very old cliche about every big city, I feel like London has two faces, and most people only see one. There is beautiful, glamorous central London, the London of Harrods, Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, Tower Bridge, Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, the British Museum, the West End… I could go on forever but you know what I mean, the whole world knows what I mean. It’s the London everybody knows even without having been here and the London everybody sees first when they do come here. Even less shiny locales such as Camden, Greenwich, Borough and Portobello Road Markets, have all been subsumed into the sprawling, mythic umbrella of London’s exoskeleton.

And then there’s the other London. It’s almost Neverwhere-like, maybe, in how screamingly obvious it is yet also so easy to miss. There’s the London where people live and work and buy their groceries and pay their bills, where the pavements are sparsely littered with small, dense, dimly lit 24-hour convenience and grocery stores selling vegetables in boxes outside, where I catch the same bus 5 days a week and hurriedly take my coffee along the way because I’m always running too late in the mornings to drink it at home. My neighbourhood is about as untouristy as you could possibly get in London (nobody, but nobody, would come here unless they lived or worked here), and there is a delightful gritty earthiness about it all. There’s no hint of the grand or the legendary, no hint of historical significance, no dizzying cultural heights or glitzy lit-up shopfronts… just a bunch of everyday people going about everyday things.

This is the London I’ve been living in and slowly getting to know over the past month, and a part of me is growing strangely, bizarrely attached to it. On the whole, I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m only passing through this city, that it isn’t really home because I’ll be leaving it one day, that it’s only a pitstop in the journey I’m taking. But there is an undeniable charm and real, raw, honest vigour about this London when you set it beside the other one. I never thought I’d say this of this city, but I could really grow, if not to love it, then at least not to dread it entirely.

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strangely reconnected

I finally have internet at home again, after not having it for… well, I suppose it’s been nearly two months in total, since I only had it for one solid week while in York since coming back to this country in mid-September. It’s a really weird feeling. I’ve grown so adept at entertaining myself without internet, and have come so much to treasure this post-work evening period of me-time where I’m gloriously solitary and unaccountable to anyone, that being online again is just… really weird. I can’t say I’m not thrilled (I was counting down, even), but it is a strangely unexpected and sudden lifestyle shift. There’s something to be said for spending my evenings curled up in bed with library books and tea, after all.

I have so much to say about life in London so far that I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to break it into two posts - but work always leaves me exhausted and it will have to come this weekend instead. ♥

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one hand clapping

There are some times when everything goes so horribly wrong that you can’t even cry because you’re too stressed to. BT - as I had rather foreseen, given their unspeakable inefficiency and disregard for customer service - stood me up today after I’d taken a day off work to stay home and wait for their engineer to finally set my phone line up. This is after I’d very patiently waited around for two whole weeks since moving to London. Without any foreseeable date when my phone line can finally be set up, I remain stranded indefinitely sans internet at home. Without a phone line to call BT on, I have to ring them on my mobile, and rage silently as I wait on the end of their inevitably, impossibly long hold queue.

The York city council is after my landlady to pay council tax for last year, from which I should be exempt on account of my being a student, except they claim I have to fork out for the period of time when I straddled undergrad and postgrad and was very, very briefly not techically a student. She’s naturally panicking about receiving letters threatening court action, and it falls on me to deal with it. Except that the council refuse to speak to me any further, for confidentiality purposes, as the account is in my landlady’s name! And I can’t talk to my uni welfare adviser over the phone because they don’t dispense advice that way. So I have to email her and await a reply. Did I mention my lack of internet or phone line at home? Or that the sum in question is somewhere in the region of £300, which is by no means an expense I can easily afford?

I’ve been yelling on the phone a lot this afternoon, for various reasons, and none of the above are anywhere nearer to being properly sorted out. On top of that I’ve cut two days of work so far, within a week of starting, because I had to wait at home for boxes to arrive on Friday and today I blew it all waiting for BT. I know I have perfectly good reasons for skipping out on work but I don’t like doing it; I feel lazy, I feel ashamed. I haven’t spoken to my family in eons, I haven’t spoken to so, so many people. Most of the time I feel fine. When I don’t, though, I really, really don’t.

I know this will all pass and I won’t even remember this turmoil, many months later. For now, though, this is one of those times, and I’m gritting my teeth as best as I can through the profound frustration and disconnectedness. Days like this when I can’t cry no matter how much it’s welling up inside me, I want to go out, buy a massively expensive tub of Haagen Dazs, and eat it all - but it’s been raining and hailing all day and the weather is at odds with my ice cream therapy. So it has to be hot chocolate, and I guess I should be grateful after all that I still have hot chocolate in my cupboard to turn to in a pinch. Some things, unlike others, don’t fail you.

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brixton oval

I am sitting in Brixton library with 3 minutes left before the library closes to use their free internet and no time no time no time to write everything I want to - but in a tiny nutshell, my first week in London has been rife with ups and downs, my first day of work was slow but enjoyable, and I have been so amazingly and unstintingly supported by friends and family who have called, texted, emailed, walled, come down to London for me; ♥ particularly to Wee Zi and Kevin, and thank you, thank you all so much!

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out of the shire

the reactions of others (notable exception pepper), when i tell them i am in fact incredibly nervous about moving to london, are so unequivocally “why???” that i really start to wonder if the problem is with me. it is an exciting city, it is vibrant, the job is interesting - i have everything to gain and nothing to lose, it seems; and yet i am nervous as hell, and when i say this i am almost without exception greeted with blank incomprehension bordering on disbelief.

i don’t want to be whiny and all “nobody understands meeeeee” because that’s ridiculous and childish and i know it. but is it really honestly so strange to be this nervous about something, even if it’s a path i chose and forged out for myself? of course i wouldn’t be nervous, were i moving back to singapore to take a comfortable paid job there, but this is a whole different ballpark and yes i am terrified. i can’t explain it, i know i’ve nothing to fear, and yet - i fear.

i can feel myself all on edge and irritable and frustrated, mostly with myself for being like that; i am so, so tense right now i could snap. and it is probably all my fault - as everyone keeps telling me, i’m just overthinking it all and it will be fine once i get there. but for now, for now, on this last night in york, let me be afraid without feeling bad for it.

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