circuitous
I found this while going through old papers. I wrote it in the fall of 2004 (I think -- although I've been singing this song for quite some time, so really, it could've been written yesterday). It does wander a bit, but it's worth it (in my biased opinion). It's really two short essays, I suppose, linked together very scantily. For the record, I don't feel exactly this way anymore. Note the modifier.
*************************************************
I cried on that phone, that payphone on Clapham Road in Brixton, across the street from Tescos. I cried like a baby to my mother. It's awful here, I said. Everyone is mean. It's just like New York City.
I hadn't learned to look beyond. Everything just hurt at that point. There was no end in sight: I had been to flats in Vauxhall, Oval, Clapham, Belham, Kennington, Tottenham Hale, Willesden, Brixton, Kilburn, Streatham, Harlesden, Leyton, and more I'd forgotten, I'm sure. I hadn't grasped 'flathunting' as the great occupation and time-occupier it is. I just didn't, couldn't, face that hostel again. It was miserable -- I was miserable -- in that phone booth. Crying, red-faced, snot running down my chin, looking out at the street. The Nigerian mummies with their fantastical headwraps and prams, the emaciated young hipsters, the stubble-faced drunks: everyone had somewhere to go, something to do, and a place to return to at night, and I felt bereft. At last, I had absolutely nothing to do. I had nothing to do but search for a place to live, and I couldn't find one. Oh sure, there were scads of places -- some within my price range, most not. Some on nice streets, most (of those within my price range) not.
It was the first time, I think, that staying or leaving was completely up to me. I was alone. No one would be angry or upset if I left. Everyone would understand. I could go home. Or I could go to Scotland, or Wales. Or I could stay with Ben and Liz until they got sick of me. But fundamentally I got to choose.
What ended up happening was a lot like what happens everywhere, all over the world, every day. I made plans to go to Edinburgh, to investigate pastures new. I got the hell out of the hostel and brought my bags to Ben and Liz's flat in Euston (thankfully I didn't have to change lines on the Tube, my poor aching back). I stayed at their flat overnight and then got the night bus the following day.
I saw a place in Brixton the day I left for Edinburgh and I loved it. The door opened and the house smelt like my childhood friend's house. There was a cat. My room was small and only available for two weeks because its occupant was coming back from visiting family abroad. But it was cheap and it was in Brixton -- and Brixton was a lifeline. In the midst of the grey brusqueness of London, Brixton was a place I understood. Well, maybe not understood, exactly, but that I got, fundamentally. Our rough edges lined up. It didn't feel like home; nowhere did. But it was a place I could love. It scared me in the right ways, in the ways I knew to be scared: dark alleys, groups of fellows engaged in outside business, shadows you needed to watch to make sure they don't move the wrong way. Brixton is grimy but not trashy (well, if you don't count all the trash, anyway). But the market's colorful, stinky hustle and bustle, and the tension-begetting mix of classes and ethnicities -- that I got. That was it for me.
In the house, they told me the room was ready whenever, and I told them I'd be going to Edinburgh, but that I'd be back. I needed to hedge my bets, just in case. I think the room was such a short let they didn't think they'd get anyone, so they were happy to just wait for me. In retrospect it seems insane, but at the time it was a godsend.
I took the night bus to Edinburgh and got there at 7:30 am on January fourth, 2003. It was absolutely stone cold and pitch black. I wandered around until I found my hostel, and discovered I wasn't allowed to check in until two pm, but the overnight clerk, a very understanding young Canadien named Dexter, who I ended up almost sleeping with two days later, showed me to the lounge, where I crashed on the very uncomfortable dorm-room style couch until the afternoon.
If I was a pragmatic or practical person, I would've stayed in Edinburgh. I would've gone down to London to get my things, and come back up to Scotland. I met a group of good kids at the hostel, and I could've stayed there and gotten a job and found a flatshare and been content. Edinburgh is a gorgeous place: the castle on the hill, the Firth of Forth, glorious northern sunlight on stone. Friendly people in their own dour Scots way, and herds and herds of Aussies and Kiwis and gringos, all young, all smiling and happy to be young and to be drinking. Somehow, though, meeting everyone so easily -- knowing that the whole package was right there, waiting for me to pick it up and unwrap it -- it made it easier to leave. I didn't know if I was making a big mistake. I still don't know. But the knowledge that I could come back up and reconnect with everyone if London ended up really being shit -- plus having found that house in Brixton before I left -- made it possible for me to go back to London with fortitude. I was in Edinburgh for three days, went on a day trip to Glasgow (where I almost caved and there's still a five-pound deposit on a bedsit with my name on it; Glasgow is charming in a headbutting kind of way) and left Edinburgh two days after that on an early morning bus. Dexter saw me off.
I was terrified at my resolve. What the fuck was I doing, not taking what seemed to obviously be the easier option, why was I leaving someone who clearly fancied me, leaving a circle of goodhearted people who could become friends, leaving a town whose standard of living was significantly lower and whose people were significantly nicer. I didn't know then and I don't know now. All I can think is that there was a part of me that wanted to see if I could do it. I had faced the pit in that telephone booth outside of Tescos, I had somehow managed to climb out of it, into a place of comfort, and I was giving that up freely, in exchange for more uncertainty.
Of course, what happened then was: I went back to London. I moved into that house. I got a job that week, one of the most interesting office jobs I've had, and in Victoria no less, just four stops on the same Tube line. I found another place to live when it came time for me to move out. I stayed in Brixton; I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I can, a little bit, now. Maybe. But then, it was my security blanket, and all the better that I be a bit unusual in my choice of security blanket. I knew (and continue to know) good people there. It's hard to live in Brixton and be uptight.
And that was that. I couldn't bear the thought of coming back, so I moved blind again, this time to Ireland, voluntarily undergoing the misery I'd been through seven months earlier. To my surprise, and relief, it wasn't as bad the second time around. I began to understand why people describe travelling as "addictive."
Looking at it now, it absolutely fucking boggles and amazes me. What the fuck was I thinking, moving to London without knowing a soul (except for Ben and Liz, not to be misunderestimated).
I do feel a little bittersweet about the fact that London will again be that fresh for me. It will never again be a place withought ghosts, ghosts of myself, of my former selves, of others. It will never again be incomparable to itself. Every time I go there again, I will think about those months when it was all new and frightening and thrilling and overwhelming and exhilarating. Like Nick Hornby writes in High Fidelity, there will never be a first time again -- no more first times to climb Primrose Hill, to dodge the fishmongers and phone card vendors along Electric Avenue, to cross Westminster Bridge, or Southwark Bridge, to wander wide-eyed through Borough Market, to be caught between the right angles of the Tate Modern and the majesty of St Pau's dome, to drink at the Oxo Tower as the sun goes down and the lights come up along the river.
I loved it in a way that I don't think I'd ever loved anything, or anyone, before. There are similarities, though: I long for it, physically, in the way that one longs for the body and the caresses of a lover. And I am pathetic for it, and utterly vulnerable in my patheticness, the way that one can be pathetically, and yet invincibly, in love, and the way that love can become an armor. And there are standards, there are stubborn boundaries: I will not be there illegally. I am not willing to live there, constantly hoping I won't be caught. And I will not trap myself with papers.
And it certainly wasn't a sudden falling in love. Well, maybe with Brixton Market. I had, I have, a lust for Brixton Market -- an urge to consume it, its brick and concrete and chipping paint and smelly fish and exotic tubers, its dirty mop water and its frilly itchy underthings -- a physically shameful desire to take it inside me, somehow. With greater London, though, I should say, I am mixed. I mean, I love it. I love the crowds and bridges. And I know it's not perfect. I hated it for the first few months -- or I would have hated it had it not been for Brixton and my relatively interesting job and Ben and Liz, and Dan, to a certain grumbly extent. It thrilled me, it excited me -- it simultaneously repulsed and fascinated me, and I didn't understand how to walk down the street until at least April.
Once I got the rhythm, though it was like swimming a stroke I'd always known but never quite put together before. Work, play, sleep. Fret about money, about excessive smoking, excessive drinking. Continue said habits. It wasn't that different, superficially, from my life here -- ah, except that it was in London -- I knew the 159 busroute by heart, I could name the bridges in order east to west, I knew where to find cheap eats and cheap drinks, it was London and I had found my path through it. It was enough, but not too much, for me. I couldn't imagine any more. I didn't need any more. I wanted to eat the sidewalks, I wanted my eyes to become videocameras, I felt nostalgic months before I left. I knew the end would come, and I dreaded it.
And, of course, going back to visit isn't the same thing. It's the highlights of my London theme park, my personal mythology of the city: Borough Market, Coldharbour Lane, Brick Lane Beigel Bakery, Oxo Tower, Tate, Muji. Taking the handbag with a wrap in it to the loo at a club with Tanya. Late nights smoking spliffs and fags, hungover afternoons in the pub watching football. It's not the day to day crap -- being late for the bus, trying to decide whether to walk out of my way for cheaper groceries or be extravagant and stop at the Sainsburys next to the Tube, circling things in TimeOut and not doing them, getting caught in the driving rain with no umbrellas and poorly sealed footwear. I could do all of those things here, and I do, but it's not the same -- I'm not in London, I'm not in London, I'm not in London, and that simple fact makes a world of difference.
Perhaps a flat search is much more like a life search. There are many spots that are close to right, except with one or two bits that you can't quite forgive. And then you find a place that is absolutely, incredibly right -- not because it's perfect, because nowhere ever is -- but it's perfect for you. You don't mind the problems -- it's worth it, to live there. And while there are times when you feel absolutely backed into a corner and you have to settle for, say, sharing a room with an unknown French girl for a month in Galway -- you do it. You do it. And later something works out. It's absolute crap in the process. You don't have a fucking clue except that your internal gauge tells you when and what it's appropriate to settle for.
In London, I knew the spot on Mayall Road was right, I knew I needed to be there even if it was only for two weeks. I needed a tiny kitchen with a compost bucket and vegetarian sausages in the freezer and homegrown tree in a jar on the spice rack and a cat named Kittenski, and I would have lived there forever if I could have, braving the walk past Dexter's Playground (few things less savory in a neighborhood than abandoned playgrounds) every night. But then I had to move.
And I didn't want to move to a posh refurnished house on Effra Lane or Railton Road, and Strathmore Gardens didn't want me, and so I moved into the house on Somerleyton Road. Even though I knew it was illegal, even though it was on a really dodgy street. Even though it was all girls and I was intimidated by their multilingual European sophistication. And I loved that house: loved that it was cheap, loved the thin walls and hearing My and Chico make love next door, loved the little anteroom by the door where you were meant to take your shoes off and I never did. I hated the crappy crappy shower though. But it was our beautiful house, with our three tiny fridges and our back garden, and I made rice and beans for Ben and Liz and everyone ended up eating together and it was like a little paradise (albeit with Rena and Jocelyne fighting) until My left and then the council found us out and we all had to leave.
So then I found the spot near the police station. And my room was small, and Mario the letting agent was a prick, but my flatmates were fine, though certainly not gregarious. But I met Xavi, and I got to stay in Brixton.
And so I guess is really is a matter of needing different things at different times, and being aware of what those needs are, and which ones you can compromise on, and which ones you can't. I couldn't compromise on living outside of Brixton, but I could live with sulky Slovakians. I couldn't share a room, but I could live down a slightly dodgy, underlit road, with groups of dealers spaced along it.
If I was there -- and working -- what would be different that here? I would be working a crap job I don't like (check), worrying about money (check), not knowing what I wanted to do with my life (check), being utterly frustrated by men (check), smoking too much (check), not doing theater (hmmm) -- oh, but the thrill. The simple ruddy nonpareil thrill of the river churning grey in the morning. The protesters outside Parliament. Paying through the nose for a decent, or even mediocre, cup of filter coffee, not that crappy espresso and hot water crap they shove at you. Good sandwiches, no delis. Not knowing what do so, so taking a walking from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus to Piccadilly and over to Leicester Square then down to Trafalgar and getting on the bloody bus home, why did I even bother to come out tonight I'm so fucking skint. Lager and lime, and ten packs of silk cut or pall mall or benson and hedges, and off licences and the fascinating people who work at them.
It always ends up as a list, a litany, a lament for what feels lost. Why does it feel lost? Can I ever get it back? Do I want it back?
*********************************************
So this is me, now, Hannah circa 2007, looking four months down the line: it will be scary, again, getting off that plane, and it will feel like an insane decision. But it's not going to let me go, clearly, and I've not been able to let it go, and I'll be damned if I keep holding this ambivalence. I've changed, London's changed, it's been four years for chrissakes!
I posted this after a LONG hiatus, partly because I know I'm going to use the blog while I'm in Ldn as a way of keeping in touch and I wanted to start getting back in the habit of posting (cheesey, I know, sorry) but also because what's in it is true, and valuable information. It was certainly more true when I wrote it (for instance, I am no longer frustrated by men, but in fact deliriously pleased with the one I've managed to snag) but by and large, in my more painful moments, this is still where I go when I don't know where else to go. I go to my lists, to my laments, I take a walk in my mind along Brick Lane or in Brockwell Park, or I go to moveflat.com and check that I can still afford a flatshare in Brixton (answer: yes).
I'm going, and I'm excited, thinking about it makes me weep with relief and joy and fear, and that (obviously) makes me just a teensy bit crazy, but aren't you glad I've chosen to share it, rather than bottling it all up inside?
well, aren't you?
Eh, can't please everyone.
mas pronto!
*************************************************
I cried on that phone, that payphone on Clapham Road in Brixton, across the street from Tescos. I cried like a baby to my mother. It's awful here, I said. Everyone is mean. It's just like New York City.
I hadn't learned to look beyond. Everything just hurt at that point. There was no end in sight: I had been to flats in Vauxhall, Oval, Clapham, Belham, Kennington, Tottenham Hale, Willesden, Brixton, Kilburn, Streatham, Harlesden, Leyton, and more I'd forgotten, I'm sure. I hadn't grasped 'flathunting' as the great occupation and time-occupier it is. I just didn't, couldn't, face that hostel again. It was miserable -- I was miserable -- in that phone booth. Crying, red-faced, snot running down my chin, looking out at the street. The Nigerian mummies with their fantastical headwraps and prams, the emaciated young hipsters, the stubble-faced drunks: everyone had somewhere to go, something to do, and a place to return to at night, and I felt bereft. At last, I had absolutely nothing to do. I had nothing to do but search for a place to live, and I couldn't find one. Oh sure, there were scads of places -- some within my price range, most not. Some on nice streets, most (of those within my price range) not.
It was the first time, I think, that staying or leaving was completely up to me. I was alone. No one would be angry or upset if I left. Everyone would understand. I could go home. Or I could go to Scotland, or Wales. Or I could stay with Ben and Liz until they got sick of me. But fundamentally I got to choose.
What ended up happening was a lot like what happens everywhere, all over the world, every day. I made plans to go to Edinburgh, to investigate pastures new. I got the hell out of the hostel and brought my bags to Ben and Liz's flat in Euston (thankfully I didn't have to change lines on the Tube, my poor aching back). I stayed at their flat overnight and then got the night bus the following day.
I saw a place in Brixton the day I left for Edinburgh and I loved it. The door opened and the house smelt like my childhood friend's house. There was a cat. My room was small and only available for two weeks because its occupant was coming back from visiting family abroad. But it was cheap and it was in Brixton -- and Brixton was a lifeline. In the midst of the grey brusqueness of London, Brixton was a place I understood. Well, maybe not understood, exactly, but that I got, fundamentally. Our rough edges lined up. It didn't feel like home; nowhere did. But it was a place I could love. It scared me in the right ways, in the ways I knew to be scared: dark alleys, groups of fellows engaged in outside business, shadows you needed to watch to make sure they don't move the wrong way. Brixton is grimy but not trashy (well, if you don't count all the trash, anyway). But the market's colorful, stinky hustle and bustle, and the tension-begetting mix of classes and ethnicities -- that I got. That was it for me.
In the house, they told me the room was ready whenever, and I told them I'd be going to Edinburgh, but that I'd be back. I needed to hedge my bets, just in case. I think the room was such a short let they didn't think they'd get anyone, so they were happy to just wait for me. In retrospect it seems insane, but at the time it was a godsend.
I took the night bus to Edinburgh and got there at 7:30 am on January fourth, 2003. It was absolutely stone cold and pitch black. I wandered around until I found my hostel, and discovered I wasn't allowed to check in until two pm, but the overnight clerk, a very understanding young Canadien named Dexter, who I ended up almost sleeping with two days later, showed me to the lounge, where I crashed on the very uncomfortable dorm-room style couch until the afternoon.
If I was a pragmatic or practical person, I would've stayed in Edinburgh. I would've gone down to London to get my things, and come back up to Scotland. I met a group of good kids at the hostel, and I could've stayed there and gotten a job and found a flatshare and been content. Edinburgh is a gorgeous place: the castle on the hill, the Firth of Forth, glorious northern sunlight on stone. Friendly people in their own dour Scots way, and herds and herds of Aussies and Kiwis and gringos, all young, all smiling and happy to be young and to be drinking. Somehow, though, meeting everyone so easily -- knowing that the whole package was right there, waiting for me to pick it up and unwrap it -- it made it easier to leave. I didn't know if I was making a big mistake. I still don't know. But the knowledge that I could come back up and reconnect with everyone if London ended up really being shit -- plus having found that house in Brixton before I left -- made it possible for me to go back to London with fortitude. I was in Edinburgh for three days, went on a day trip to Glasgow (where I almost caved and there's still a five-pound deposit on a bedsit with my name on it; Glasgow is charming in a headbutting kind of way) and left Edinburgh two days after that on an early morning bus. Dexter saw me off.
I was terrified at my resolve. What the fuck was I doing, not taking what seemed to obviously be the easier option, why was I leaving someone who clearly fancied me, leaving a circle of goodhearted people who could become friends, leaving a town whose standard of living was significantly lower and whose people were significantly nicer. I didn't know then and I don't know now. All I can think is that there was a part of me that wanted to see if I could do it. I had faced the pit in that telephone booth outside of Tescos, I had somehow managed to climb out of it, into a place of comfort, and I was giving that up freely, in exchange for more uncertainty.
Of course, what happened then was: I went back to London. I moved into that house. I got a job that week, one of the most interesting office jobs I've had, and in Victoria no less, just four stops on the same Tube line. I found another place to live when it came time for me to move out. I stayed in Brixton; I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I can, a little bit, now. Maybe. But then, it was my security blanket, and all the better that I be a bit unusual in my choice of security blanket. I knew (and continue to know) good people there. It's hard to live in Brixton and be uptight.
And that was that. I couldn't bear the thought of coming back, so I moved blind again, this time to Ireland, voluntarily undergoing the misery I'd been through seven months earlier. To my surprise, and relief, it wasn't as bad the second time around. I began to understand why people describe travelling as "addictive."
Looking at it now, it absolutely fucking boggles and amazes me. What the fuck was I thinking, moving to London without knowing a soul (except for Ben and Liz, not to be misunderestimated).
I do feel a little bittersweet about the fact that London will again be that fresh for me. It will never again be a place withought ghosts, ghosts of myself, of my former selves, of others. It will never again be incomparable to itself. Every time I go there again, I will think about those months when it was all new and frightening and thrilling and overwhelming and exhilarating. Like Nick Hornby writes in High Fidelity, there will never be a first time again -- no more first times to climb Primrose Hill, to dodge the fishmongers and phone card vendors along Electric Avenue, to cross Westminster Bridge, or Southwark Bridge, to wander wide-eyed through Borough Market, to be caught between the right angles of the Tate Modern and the majesty of St Pau's dome, to drink at the Oxo Tower as the sun goes down and the lights come up along the river.
I loved it in a way that I don't think I'd ever loved anything, or anyone, before. There are similarities, though: I long for it, physically, in the way that one longs for the body and the caresses of a lover. And I am pathetic for it, and utterly vulnerable in my patheticness, the way that one can be pathetically, and yet invincibly, in love, and the way that love can become an armor. And there are standards, there are stubborn boundaries: I will not be there illegally. I am not willing to live there, constantly hoping I won't be caught. And I will not trap myself with papers.
And it certainly wasn't a sudden falling in love. Well, maybe with Brixton Market. I had, I have, a lust for Brixton Market -- an urge to consume it, its brick and concrete and chipping paint and smelly fish and exotic tubers, its dirty mop water and its frilly itchy underthings -- a physically shameful desire to take it inside me, somehow. With greater London, though, I should say, I am mixed. I mean, I love it. I love the crowds and bridges. And I know it's not perfect. I hated it for the first few months -- or I would have hated it had it not been for Brixton and my relatively interesting job and Ben and Liz, and Dan, to a certain grumbly extent. It thrilled me, it excited me -- it simultaneously repulsed and fascinated me, and I didn't understand how to walk down the street until at least April.
Once I got the rhythm, though it was like swimming a stroke I'd always known but never quite put together before. Work, play, sleep. Fret about money, about excessive smoking, excessive drinking. Continue said habits. It wasn't that different, superficially, from my life here -- ah, except that it was in London -- I knew the 159 busroute by heart, I could name the bridges in order east to west, I knew where to find cheap eats and cheap drinks, it was London and I had found my path through it. It was enough, but not too much, for me. I couldn't imagine any more. I didn't need any more. I wanted to eat the sidewalks, I wanted my eyes to become videocameras, I felt nostalgic months before I left. I knew the end would come, and I dreaded it.
And, of course, going back to visit isn't the same thing. It's the highlights of my London theme park, my personal mythology of the city: Borough Market, Coldharbour Lane, Brick Lane Beigel Bakery, Oxo Tower, Tate, Muji. Taking the handbag with a wrap in it to the loo at a club with Tanya. Late nights smoking spliffs and fags, hungover afternoons in the pub watching football. It's not the day to day crap -- being late for the bus, trying to decide whether to walk out of my way for cheaper groceries or be extravagant and stop at the Sainsburys next to the Tube, circling things in TimeOut and not doing them, getting caught in the driving rain with no umbrellas and poorly sealed footwear. I could do all of those things here, and I do, but it's not the same -- I'm not in London, I'm not in London, I'm not in London, and that simple fact makes a world of difference.
Perhaps a flat search is much more like a life search. There are many spots that are close to right, except with one or two bits that you can't quite forgive. And then you find a place that is absolutely, incredibly right -- not because it's perfect, because nowhere ever is -- but it's perfect for you. You don't mind the problems -- it's worth it, to live there. And while there are times when you feel absolutely backed into a corner and you have to settle for, say, sharing a room with an unknown French girl for a month in Galway -- you do it. You do it. And later something works out. It's absolute crap in the process. You don't have a fucking clue except that your internal gauge tells you when and what it's appropriate to settle for.
In London, I knew the spot on Mayall Road was right, I knew I needed to be there even if it was only for two weeks. I needed a tiny kitchen with a compost bucket and vegetarian sausages in the freezer and homegrown tree in a jar on the spice rack and a cat named Kittenski, and I would have lived there forever if I could have, braving the walk past Dexter's Playground (few things less savory in a neighborhood than abandoned playgrounds) every night. But then I had to move.
And I didn't want to move to a posh refurnished house on Effra Lane or Railton Road, and Strathmore Gardens didn't want me, and so I moved into the house on Somerleyton Road. Even though I knew it was illegal, even though it was on a really dodgy street. Even though it was all girls and I was intimidated by their multilingual European sophistication. And I loved that house: loved that it was cheap, loved the thin walls and hearing My and Chico make love next door, loved the little anteroom by the door where you were meant to take your shoes off and I never did. I hated the crappy crappy shower though. But it was our beautiful house, with our three tiny fridges and our back garden, and I made rice and beans for Ben and Liz and everyone ended up eating together and it was like a little paradise (albeit with Rena and Jocelyne fighting) until My left and then the council found us out and we all had to leave.
So then I found the spot near the police station. And my room was small, and Mario the letting agent was a prick, but my flatmates were fine, though certainly not gregarious. But I met Xavi, and I got to stay in Brixton.
And so I guess is really is a matter of needing different things at different times, and being aware of what those needs are, and which ones you can compromise on, and which ones you can't. I couldn't compromise on living outside of Brixton, but I could live with sulky Slovakians. I couldn't share a room, but I could live down a slightly dodgy, underlit road, with groups of dealers spaced along it.
If I was there -- and working -- what would be different that here? I would be working a crap job I don't like (check), worrying about money (check), not knowing what I wanted to do with my life (check), being utterly frustrated by men (check), smoking too much (check), not doing theater (hmmm) -- oh, but the thrill. The simple ruddy nonpareil thrill of the river churning grey in the morning. The protesters outside Parliament. Paying through the nose for a decent, or even mediocre, cup of filter coffee, not that crappy espresso and hot water crap they shove at you. Good sandwiches, no delis. Not knowing what do so, so taking a walking from Marble Arch to Oxford Circus to Piccadilly and over to Leicester Square then down to Trafalgar and getting on the bloody bus home, why did I even bother to come out tonight I'm so fucking skint. Lager and lime, and ten packs of silk cut or pall mall or benson and hedges, and off licences and the fascinating people who work at them.
It always ends up as a list, a litany, a lament for what feels lost. Why does it feel lost? Can I ever get it back? Do I want it back?
*********************************************
So this is me, now, Hannah circa 2007, looking four months down the line: it will be scary, again, getting off that plane, and it will feel like an insane decision. But it's not going to let me go, clearly, and I've not been able to let it go, and I'll be damned if I keep holding this ambivalence. I've changed, London's changed, it's been four years for chrissakes!
I posted this after a LONG hiatus, partly because I know I'm going to use the blog while I'm in Ldn as a way of keeping in touch and I wanted to start getting back in the habit of posting (cheesey, I know, sorry) but also because what's in it is true, and valuable information. It was certainly more true when I wrote it (for instance, I am no longer frustrated by men, but in fact deliriously pleased with the one I've managed to snag) but by and large, in my more painful moments, this is still where I go when I don't know where else to go. I go to my lists, to my laments, I take a walk in my mind along Brick Lane or in Brockwell Park, or I go to moveflat.com and check that I can still afford a flatshare in Brixton (answer: yes).
I'm going, and I'm excited, thinking about it makes me weep with relief and joy and fear, and that (obviously) makes me just a teensy bit crazy, but aren't you glad I've chosen to share it, rather than bottling it all up inside?
well, aren't you?
Eh, can't please everyone.
mas pronto!
posted by Hannah at 2:09 PM
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