Your first flat hunt is a rite of passage. This is what we are told. Baptism of fire, Hail Mary, nothing for it but to grin and bare all and throw yourself into it until you just want to weep then throw up and die.
They do not tell you that the same is true of all house hunts you will ever to in your life. It does not get any easier. This is my third and the third time is NOT the charm.
Oh we will find somewhere. We might even find somewhere halfway decent that makes me want to tell people about my gap yah and bake scones (rhyming with stones) and point out the period fireplace. And we might even find somewhere quickly, within a week of intense hunting so when we try to explain to the dwindling number of friends who have not flat hunted how stressful it was they look at us with glassy infuriatingly uncomprehending eyes and with furrowed brows say, "It was just a week..."
"JUST A WEEK! You little (rhymes with flat hunt). The crucifixion was just six hours, Katrina took a day, Hiro-bloody-shima took fifteen minutes, don't you sit there and toss around time frames like fucking sweeties and tell me it only took a week!"
I don't say this, but I think it incredibly loudly.
Flat hunting makes you feel all irritable and itchy, like your clothes have shrunk in the wash. And it makes me tired and I get fussy when I'm tired. I do a lot of incredibly loud thinking.
"You know what I love sir? I fucking love it when you stop in the middle of the street, I can't get enough of that shit. That stumblebumble text walk? I will stick Barry White on my fucking iPod and ENJOY the view as you walk away from me. I hope the thought doesn't make you uncomfortable but if you think as slowly as you walk you're still wondering what all these bright lights are and who's shouting "It's a boy!!!"
Sometimes I don't even think it, I will say it. There was this gem from the first solo flat hunt and thank God I'm doing it with lovely people this time or I would crack.
Rewind six weeks. I was standing in the shittest flat I have ever seen in Mile End. Mould in the shower. Kitchen falling apart. Closed locked doors to other bedrooms I was assured were home to the sweetest students in the world. A man screaming at his "lazy fucking useless bitch" in the next flat over.
Standing beside me was an estate agent who looked me square in the face, like he had neither eyes nor ears nor a sense of smell, and told me:
"Now little places like this go like hotcakes so you need to let me know now if not sooner if you want it or you'll miss out big time."
The little shit.
So I looked at him square in the eye and said, "You know what, I'm not actually that desperate yet so if I miss out I'll try not to cry myself to sleep."
There was no applause and no wolf whistles...except in my imagination. The truth is I needed somewhere quick so I was getting pretty desperate. As is everyone who flat hunts for longer than two days in London. And the estate agents have us over a barrel.
The quote in the title is from Spaced and it encapsulates everything horrible about the flat hunt. Speed is the key. You need to be on the line and feeling fine. In it essence nowadays the flat hunt is done online and the viewing should really be to tell you if the area or the house is everything promised online. It is a reassurance, not an extra step. After the house view it WILL be a yes or no within half an hour. There is no room for maybes in the London market.
I am writing all this in a Starbucks (yes I know, I do have proper internet but I do not have proper chai lattes) and all the couples in the world are here. Every other table in this place people are looking into each others eyes doe eyed or doing that smile with one side of the mouth crooked up. Couples. You all do this smile and you don't notice. I think it's a special thing. I am making a study. It's a sort of wryly amused look.
The only other single person here has answered a phone with "Hi honey, where are you?"
Bleurgh.
I met the most laughable man on the night bus yesterday. Well. I didn't meet him, he merely made an impression. He had been sitting in the back of the bus talking to two young women. One a stunner in bodycon and stilettos, you know the type, and one plainer and homelier (and yes plumper) but still in jeans and a nice top and they were both clearly out for the night. They hopped off at Old Street roundabout and a minute later he came rollicking up the bus and approached the driver and asked,
"Sorry mate, which is the next stop the 78 pulls in at cos I've gone and missed the last one."
"Central Road mate."
Then, completely voluntarily,
"Right, right. Cheers. You know how it happened? I was talking to this absolutely gorgeous woman, I mean she was just stunning and I went to jelly I forgot what I was doing, like a school boy again, you know. I wish I'd asked her her number because I know she would of give it to me."
And I wish I could have caught the bus driver's eye because he and I I'm sure raised an eyebrow and gave a Scrubs Laverne "Mmmmmm-hmmmmm" at exactly the same time. And we burned to ask this balding middle aged man, "What was it sweetie? Was it that the last time a pretty woman spoke to you she said "Tall, grande or venti?"
And some of the more hopeless romantics out there will boo hiss boo at my meaness, but his story made me all annoyed. And though I'm the best wing woman in the world and though I am appreciative of fitties and our quest to get with them I got all annoyed because of her friend. Her lovely friend with the lovely smile doing a third of the talking who didn't get a look in.
But back to the vile spawn of Satan masquerading as ordinary humans. Estate agents. We dealt with an estate agent called Harris who took us to a house. A really nice house, four beds, two baths, lovely jubbly. And Harris was as cool as a cucumber. Well, according to my sources I was actually in work at the time being sweet talked by an aging banker from Barcelona. Time is ticking...
So this Harris character tells us to "noooo, relax, don't even worry about it, there aren't any other viewings today, everything's fine"
And we like the look of the place, leave, decide we're going to take it, get all excited, call the agency back and they tell us "We literally just got a holding deposit..." And Harris is mysteriously uncontactable. In this day and age? I think not...
To put it mildly we were all extremely cross with Harris who had to have known of the serious interest. So I devised a wonderful scheme of revenge.
I get dolled up, head out to the West End and find Harris in a group of his smarmy cheap suited friends and buy him a whiskey and smile winsomely. And I shall notch up the charm to 11 and make the poor bastard fall in love with me. Boy won't know what hit him.
We shall court for three years or so, going slowly because I am a classy lassy. We shall marry on a clear, chilly October day when the leaves are turning coppery and drifting to the ground.
We shall have two children, Harris Jr who is just like his dad and a little girl who shall be his princess, We shall have picnics in the park and go to his mum's at Christmas.
And then one day, one ordinary unremarkable day he will wake up in our Egyptian cotton streets and I will be gone. And the kids will be gone. And a letter will inform him of the sale of the house. And of his car. And detail unauthorised payments made from the deposit scheme his agency uses to his own personal bank account.
Aha.
But I really don't have the dedication for such a long term plan so now I'll just drink a fifth and sob angry incoherent things down the phone at him. "HARRIS! I hope you f**k your wife as well as you f**ked over us you schelfish bassshhterrd..."
Much better, pithy and and witty and nicely noir.
But even as we speak I hope to have good news to tell you for lo a hope is born...but sometimes in life horrible and inexplicable things happen and as I don't want to risk a stillbirth I shan't say a word.
Instead I shall wrap myself in a woolly blanket at Jenny's and drink hot chocolate and listen to jazz.
And email her contact at Reuters...
xo
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
Thursday, 5 September 2013
"Would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill?"
To best enjoy this blog post you must recline. You must pour yourself a glass of wine and you must put on a very specific playlist. One that begins with Bastille's Pompeii then segues neatly into Daft Punk's Harder Better Faster remix. Then the Dartmouth Airs remix of Remix to Ignition. Because you deserve smooth RnB lovin'
Jesus, the shit I have to tell you lot. And I'll do it too, the minute I figure out how to extricate myself from a smug gentleman purring on my lap.
No kiddies, it's not about to get R rated.Yet. I've had several thoughts in that direction but I think my mother reads this blog sometimes. Not that she'd disapprove. No indeed, there are fouler and more terrible things than your mother disapproving.
Your mother cheering you along, that's far worse. Once she wanted to talk about "50 Shades" and the enigma of Christian Grey in a Starbucks. Not him being mysterious in a Starbucks, when we were Star... never mind. Suffice it to say she's like Stella getting her groove back.
Enough about my beloved smother! We're back to me balancing a cat and a laptop at new landlady's who we shall call Jenny. We like Jenny, there is Internet at Jenny's house. There are warm duvets and squishy pillows at Jenny's house. There is TV, there is every good thing. And a cat, just to be a bit more Dr Seuss. I like the cat. I hope it doesn't die. Not like the last pet.
There is also me being utterly fabulous. I say utterly fabulous, I'm eating Victoria Sponge that Jenny has baked and drinking orange juice that Jenny has poured. I feel like little orphan Annie at Daddy Warbucks'.
Life goes on in the wide world. Let me tell you about it.
The quote in the title is from Charles Dickens himself and it is to his local that I went last Tuesday night, "The Olde Chesire Cheese" hidden away in a little alley off of Fleet Street. The stone step was so worn down that there was a metal grating over it to let patrons in and out. There was no question of replacing that step. Because that step was worm down by the tread of Hemingway and Dickens and Twain and Tennyson. It has been eroded by history. I went there with people from work. People from work are massively dead on.
Second reason for the dinosaur in the title, I went to see Jurassic Park at the IMAX and I loved. Every. Single. Moment. They do not make them like that any more. They simply do not.
I love Dodson, we got Dodson over here!! You see, no one cares... That was a childhood staple.
Mind you the biggest laugh was not at any of the still hilarious gems. (Example, what do you call a blind dinosaur? A Do-You-Think-Ee-Saurus!" Ah, classic) The biggest laugh was reserved for "Oh my God, an interactive CD-ROM." Touch screen darling. It's gonna be big...
And Dr Grant, don't get me started on Dr Grant because I would. And you would too. Mind you I also would Robert "Clever Girl" Muldoon. But never Ian Malcolm. Girl have standards.
We had a grand old day wandering around the South Bank and the posh people's market. We knew it was a posh people's market because of the non-segregation of the vegetables. They were artfully arranged in a sort of Bacchanal mess. And nobody was looking at me flicking though racks of knock off dresses, squinting one eye appraisingly and opining unasked-for "Sorry, dahlin' we ain't got nuffin' bigger than a meed-jum in with that lot." The indignity. Anyway, yes posh people's market.
It took me quite a while to distinguish actual posh people from my Southern English friends who had just grown up anywhere south of the imaginary line from Wolverhampton to Kings Lynn. All southern English people were de facto posh where I come from. Well, they were called a lot of things before posh, but I promised we'd keep the blog relatively clean.
Speaking of market stalls all those "pale ales" and "slow roasted peppers" were not a patch on Notting Hill Carnival. Oh yes.
We did that shit right. Dragged ourselves out at 8am on a Saturday morning and got on the Tube to Westbourne Park and arrived there before everyone. When the port-a-loos were still spotless and the streets gleamed and all the stall holders were just setting up.
Now the first thing I wanted to do before finding a suitable place to watch many scantily clad women and men parade by in wild abandon, a genuine Bacchanalia, I wanted me some jerk chicken, rice and peas and fried plantain.
I am not actually talking to you at the moment because if I was rest assured I would immediately and unapologetically launch into full "Yu'know I grew oop juust a stone throw awai from Windward Ro-wad" mode and I have yet to ascertain whether that has a happy ending. We got spectacularly pissed at last Friday of the month/pay day drinks and I ended up telling everyone about Notting Hill in that accent. And just when I though I would finish there would be a "Haaaaaaaave you met my friend" moment where I was presented to more people who now only know me as "the girl who does voices." They all came out. Sean Connery, Bernie Mac, Pitbull, Tevye the Dairyman, and the lady from the Caribbean food stall at which we rocked up.
I was so excited for food. Let us face reality, I am always excited for food. But this was special because I had never had plantain and jerk chicken before and it did not disappoint.
"Can I have some plantain too please?"
"You don' worry duhlin' I'm a puttin' a bit of everything on y'here. You don' mind spicy? Then I give you sum jerk sauce on the chicken there."
It was delicious. You pulled the chicken apart with your hands and found the good mouth watering meat and the jerk sauce tasted like all it was ever made for was to be shaken liberally over hot chicken to the jaunty rhythm of steel drums.
And in the way of the world Pooh decided to find himself a smackerel of something sweetly...alcoholic. So I tried to buy a coconut full of rum.
Mind you these things are heavily heavily policed. I saw more Metropolitan police in five hours than I've seen all day on the 12th July at home. But the point is that they ID-ed like a bitch and because I lost my drivers license to the last Cindies ever (don't ask, just think stampede by the Ganges or at Mecca, last Cindies was our pilgrimage) and wasn't carrying my passport so when refused I shuffled my feet and said awkwardly to the dreadlocked purveyor. "Can I just have a coconut?"
Now because we had come early and because we had had a chance to do more wandering that everyone else had lo it came to pass that I was the only person there sipping from this massive green coconut. And those things are full of water, just like Castaway! Or, in fact, just like real life. I desperately wanted to find paint, slap a handprint on there, lob the coconut onto the crowd and cry "WILSON!!" as it drifted away. But I resisted.
Others were not immune to the lure of the coconut.
"Daddy, daddy, that lady has a coconut."
"Yes she certainly does."
"Daddy, daddy...<whisper, whisper, whisper>"
"Excuse me, where did you get your coconut?"
Elsewise work takes up most of the week and now flat hunting does as well. Estate agents. Four bedrooms means four bedrooms. It does not mean lounge that could be converted. Do not lie to my face.
But there is writing! There is the odd little moment that happened in a Vodaphone shop when I was topping up my Dongle for the last bittersweet time. There was a nice chap there who was having trouble setting up a business line and for the last fifteen minutes (slow slow service day) me and him have been doing that odd "Are you in line, ah you're coming back into line, oh no you need to sort something out over the phone, oh yes sorry I'll move along" silent dance with shakes of the head and apology smiles. He comes off the phone and returns to the queue, smiles and reaches out his hand and says "Hi, I'm Manolo, what's your name?"
I suspect this is called flirting. I understand this happens sometimes. But I am not entirely sure and am not able to distinguish this mythical business from being nice. People are often nice to me, I think its the glasses...
And he talks for a little bit more and he's been here for an hour already, silly Vodaphone, and he has to go soon as he's meeting friends it's a Friday and what do I do for a living?
"Me? I'm a writer. The paid stuff's not all that exciting."
But I am. Under my email signature it says my name and Junior Writer in italics.
Calloo-callay.
Mind you he leaves thinking my name is Lily (because of my natural suspicion of that uncertainty) and I haven't seen him since. If I do your all to be my wingmen and swear I've been known affectionately as Lily since birth. Because that sort of stuff's on the list as well. Practice makes perfect.
Until I get a minute my friends
xo
Jesus, the shit I have to tell you lot. And I'll do it too, the minute I figure out how to extricate myself from a smug gentleman purring on my lap.
No kiddies, it's not about to get R rated.Yet. I've had several thoughts in that direction but I think my mother reads this blog sometimes. Not that she'd disapprove. No indeed, there are fouler and more terrible things than your mother disapproving.
Your mother cheering you along, that's far worse. Once she wanted to talk about "50 Shades" and the enigma of Christian Grey in a Starbucks. Not him being mysterious in a Starbucks, when we were Star... never mind. Suffice it to say she's like Stella getting her groove back.
Enough about my beloved smother! We're back to me balancing a cat and a laptop at new landlady's who we shall call Jenny. We like Jenny, there is Internet at Jenny's house. There are warm duvets and squishy pillows at Jenny's house. There is TV, there is every good thing. And a cat, just to be a bit more Dr Seuss. I like the cat. I hope it doesn't die. Not like the last pet.
There is also me being utterly fabulous. I say utterly fabulous, I'm eating Victoria Sponge that Jenny has baked and drinking orange juice that Jenny has poured. I feel like little orphan Annie at Daddy Warbucks'.
Life goes on in the wide world. Let me tell you about it.
The quote in the title is from Charles Dickens himself and it is to his local that I went last Tuesday night, "The Olde Chesire Cheese" hidden away in a little alley off of Fleet Street. The stone step was so worn down that there was a metal grating over it to let patrons in and out. There was no question of replacing that step. Because that step was worm down by the tread of Hemingway and Dickens and Twain and Tennyson. It has been eroded by history. I went there with people from work. People from work are massively dead on.
Second reason for the dinosaur in the title, I went to see Jurassic Park at the IMAX and I loved. Every. Single. Moment. They do not make them like that any more. They simply do not.
I love Dodson, we got Dodson over here!! You see, no one cares... That was a childhood staple.
Mind you the biggest laugh was not at any of the still hilarious gems. (Example, what do you call a blind dinosaur? A Do-You-Think-Ee-Saurus!" Ah, classic) The biggest laugh was reserved for "Oh my God, an interactive CD-ROM." Touch screen darling. It's gonna be big...
And Dr Grant, don't get me started on Dr Grant because I would. And you would too. Mind you I also would Robert "Clever Girl" Muldoon. But never Ian Malcolm. Girl have standards.
We had a grand old day wandering around the South Bank and the posh people's market. We knew it was a posh people's market because of the non-segregation of the vegetables. They were artfully arranged in a sort of Bacchanal mess. And nobody was looking at me flicking though racks of knock off dresses, squinting one eye appraisingly and opining unasked-for "Sorry, dahlin' we ain't got nuffin' bigger than a meed-jum in with that lot." The indignity. Anyway, yes posh people's market.
It took me quite a while to distinguish actual posh people from my Southern English friends who had just grown up anywhere south of the imaginary line from Wolverhampton to Kings Lynn. All southern English people were de facto posh where I come from. Well, they were called a lot of things before posh, but I promised we'd keep the blog relatively clean.
Speaking of market stalls all those "pale ales" and "slow roasted peppers" were not a patch on Notting Hill Carnival. Oh yes.
We did that shit right. Dragged ourselves out at 8am on a Saturday morning and got on the Tube to Westbourne Park and arrived there before everyone. When the port-a-loos were still spotless and the streets gleamed and all the stall holders were just setting up.
Now the first thing I wanted to do before finding a suitable place to watch many scantily clad women and men parade by in wild abandon, a genuine Bacchanalia, I wanted me some jerk chicken, rice and peas and fried plantain.
I am not actually talking to you at the moment because if I was rest assured I would immediately and unapologetically launch into full "Yu'know I grew oop juust a stone throw awai from Windward Ro-wad" mode and I have yet to ascertain whether that has a happy ending. We got spectacularly pissed at last Friday of the month/pay day drinks and I ended up telling everyone about Notting Hill in that accent. And just when I though I would finish there would be a "Haaaaaaaave you met my friend" moment where I was presented to more people who now only know me as "the girl who does voices." They all came out. Sean Connery, Bernie Mac, Pitbull, Tevye the Dairyman, and the lady from the Caribbean food stall at which we rocked up.
I was so excited for food. Let us face reality, I am always excited for food. But this was special because I had never had plantain and jerk chicken before and it did not disappoint.
"Can I have some plantain too please?"
"You don' worry duhlin' I'm a puttin' a bit of everything on y'here. You don' mind spicy? Then I give you sum jerk sauce on the chicken there."
It was delicious. You pulled the chicken apart with your hands and found the good mouth watering meat and the jerk sauce tasted like all it was ever made for was to be shaken liberally over hot chicken to the jaunty rhythm of steel drums.
And in the way of the world Pooh decided to find himself a smackerel of something sweetly...alcoholic. So I tried to buy a coconut full of rum.
Mind you these things are heavily heavily policed. I saw more Metropolitan police in five hours than I've seen all day on the 12th July at home. But the point is that they ID-ed like a bitch and because I lost my drivers license to the last Cindies ever (don't ask, just think stampede by the Ganges or at Mecca, last Cindies was our pilgrimage) and wasn't carrying my passport so when refused I shuffled my feet and said awkwardly to the dreadlocked purveyor. "Can I just have a coconut?"
Now because we had come early and because we had had a chance to do more wandering that everyone else had lo it came to pass that I was the only person there sipping from this massive green coconut. And those things are full of water, just like Castaway! Or, in fact, just like real life. I desperately wanted to find paint, slap a handprint on there, lob the coconut onto the crowd and cry "WILSON!!" as it drifted away. But I resisted.
Others were not immune to the lure of the coconut.
"Daddy, daddy, that lady has a coconut."
"Yes she certainly does."
"Daddy, daddy...<whisper, whisper, whisper>"
"Excuse me, where did you get your coconut?"
Elsewise work takes up most of the week and now flat hunting does as well. Estate agents. Four bedrooms means four bedrooms. It does not mean lounge that could be converted. Do not lie to my face.
But there is writing! There is the odd little moment that happened in a Vodaphone shop when I was topping up my Dongle for the last bittersweet time. There was a nice chap there who was having trouble setting up a business line and for the last fifteen minutes (slow slow service day) me and him have been doing that odd "Are you in line, ah you're coming back into line, oh no you need to sort something out over the phone, oh yes sorry I'll move along" silent dance with shakes of the head and apology smiles. He comes off the phone and returns to the queue, smiles and reaches out his hand and says "Hi, I'm Manolo, what's your name?"
I suspect this is called flirting. I understand this happens sometimes. But I am not entirely sure and am not able to distinguish this mythical business from being nice. People are often nice to me, I think its the glasses...
And he talks for a little bit more and he's been here for an hour already, silly Vodaphone, and he has to go soon as he's meeting friends it's a Friday and what do I do for a living?
"Me? I'm a writer. The paid stuff's not all that exciting."
But I am. Under my email signature it says my name and Junior Writer in italics.
Calloo-callay.
Mind you he leaves thinking my name is Lily (because of my natural suspicion of that uncertainty) and I haven't seen him since. If I do your all to be my wingmen and swear I've been known affectionately as Lily since birth. Because that sort of stuff's on the list as well. Practice makes perfect.
Until I get a minute my friends
xo
Sunday, 18 August 2013
Of children and sweet shops
"What in the name of God happened?!"
"I don't know! One minute she was calmly telling me her landlady's internet is out again, the next she was curled up on the floor in a foetal position muttering nonsense."
"Wait, wait, wait...was the failure of internets before or after she'd got next weekend planned?"
"Ah, I think she was going on about not knowing the route for the Notting Hill carnival..."
"I wouldn't worry, it's London performance anxiety."
"What?"
"It's very simple. Any and all indicators that she may not be making the most of each and every waking second in London is sure to induce a bit of existential anxiety. She grew up on a farm in the middle of mountains. Plopping her in the middle of London but taking away the resources to plan to see all of it is tantamount to pushing a child into a sweetie shop and telling them it's closing in thirty seconds."
"So what do we do?"
"This..."
<Bamboleo, bambolea, porque mi vida yo la prefiero vivir así...">
And as the pulsating Latin rhythms of my alarm clock jerks me into wakefulness I realise it has all been a horrible dream. Except it hasn't and the internet is still kaputski. But I'm not panicking. Starbucks, as ever, got my back, Jack...
As you very clever people may have figured out a lot has happened in almost two weeks and I have been very remiss in not blogging. But then again I am now a juene professionale as they don't say in Paris and I have started my first proper job. It won't be featuring in the blog. The blog is about making the most out of living in one of the largest, most vibrant cities in the world and writing about it and for it and not my days at the office. I am, however, in love with my job. The dopey kind of love where you smile when you think about him/her and feel that feeling of the first sip of hot chocolate when its snowing outside. Blah di blah di fuckitty blah... Enough sentiment.
I am also a year older and not very much wiser. We had a wonderful time at my birthday. I'm sure that's a fair statement, they all seemed happy. I, however, had had a more wonderful time than most and was carted to friends' home through the winding warrens around Brick Lane, stumbling most disgracefully and schlurring my wuurrds like Sean Connery after a head injury.
Good clean fun.
It is with great regret and no small amount of distress that I must inform you all of the sad and untimely demise of Fucking Nuisance, our small rabbit friend. Departed this vale of tears 10/08/2013. My fucking birthday.
I got that dress from the market. It was well lush. I were all dressed up, war paint on and ready to go out on the lash when I thought I'd check up on little FN and see if she (for it was a she, don't worry I didn't interfere with it, we found that out off landlady's friend) was okay and well fed.
I found her, lying there, as if in sleep but for eyes open; seeing not this world but rather some far off plain beyond what we ourselves can know. She looked somehow smaller in death and a hush was over that little hutch, a hush that could not be explained by mere absence of little snuffles and rustlings. It was altogether more eerie and definite.
The fucking point is that the sodding little bugger was belly up and I'm going to fucking have to tell my landlady that someone has cocked up massively and her little bunnikins is dead as a sodding doornail.
I don't know if anyone noticed but I get sweary and non-PC when distressed...
It wasn't anything we had done! There were frantic phone call summits to this effect and the fear of autopsies and independent reviews conducted by duly appointed watchdogs hanging over us.
It was grand, turns out she was hundreds of years old. But we still had to dispose of her legally and safely, you can't just pop rabbits in bin-bags, leave 'em outside and hope for the best, you know.
Check these facts out.
It costs £56 for a vet to dispose of a rabbit.
You can't just wing it, decide to bury it and dig down in a city garden because you might hit anything from gas mains to phone lines...apparently.
It's different in the country. Daddy was/is a farmer, a very good one, and once he told me did I know that not one lamb had died in Northern Ireland that year.
I said how the fuck could that be? (Except I didn't swear in front of my lovely Daddy...)
He said that every time an animal dies you're supposed to fill out all these forms and pay the Department of Agriculture to come and safely dispose of it.
But farmers have acres of land, not a lot of money and all the work time that self employment allows (sunrise to sunset) so they bury the lambs and that's that.
I was unfamiliar with the dead rabbit in a city situation. Not the council's job, that's only if it's in a public place. Not the RSPCA, they're more in the business of tending to the sick and wounded fauna. It seemed to be solely on us to take care of the rabbit... And not in a Mother Teresa way.
We were saved from any further stress by our landlady's friend turning up and doing the needful. I never did ask what became of FN...
Enough talk of dead rabbits, no matter how hilarious/distressing the matter may be!
In other news the flirtation with George Alagiah has come to a natural end with work resulting in me only being able to catch the enigmatic and dashing Jon Snow on Channel 4 at 7pm. George was flirting a bit too enthusiastically with the slutty weather-girl anyway. And Jon Snow does have those ties.
We're not going to talk about older men and my TV schedule anymore as some revelations about my predilection for PM Question Time resulted in sustained and unfair mockery. For shame, you know who you are...
We are going to talk about the wonderful and highly recommended Alternative London Tour of Shoreditch/Brick Lane which brought the amazing street art to life and was well good.
It's free! Free!! Well, a pay-what-you-feel-it's-worth, but when you're waiting on your first end-of-the-month paycheque the only remuneration you can afford is usually a handshake.
We saw such amazing artwork. Huge cranes and stork in exquisite detail. Artists who had flown to London's East End from Brazil and Puerto Rico and China and South Africa and had left veritable works of art on streets for everyone to enjoy.
There were Lego-style Luke Skywalkers, scattered Space Invaders, entwined lovers formed of interlocking ribbons of paint, caricature Del Boys, epic fantasy landscapes and deep philosophical statements. Every one of them could have been hung in the Tate Modern and indeed many artists HAD been featured in the high halls of fame. But they loved street art and they kept it up.
I would have paid a fiver just for this one bit of information.
Remember Spitalfields? The market? And why on earth was it called Spitalfields? I'll tell you now...
In the 1650's French Protestant Huguenots were fleeing persecution in Catholic France. They fled to the Roman-walled city of London seeking asylum. They weren't allowed within the city walls but were granted fields around the City as amnesty. These fields were used to build temporary accommodation and artillery ranges but primarily they were used as field hospitals to treat the ill and injured.
Hospital fields.
Spitalfields.
But enough for now! Speaking of culture, next week is a bank holiday weekend which hasn't meant so much since school. And I am looking forward to both Notting Hill carnival and visiting St Paul's and the Tate Modern. Vive la culture!
And vive the building of experience and expertise. One cannot write about nothing after all.
And soon we'll have to think about proper writing.
But until then, London awaits some more!
xo
"I don't know! One minute she was calmly telling me her landlady's internet is out again, the next she was curled up on the floor in a foetal position muttering nonsense."
"Wait, wait, wait...was the failure of internets before or after she'd got next weekend planned?"
"Ah, I think she was going on about not knowing the route for the Notting Hill carnival..."
"I wouldn't worry, it's London performance anxiety."
"What?"
"It's very simple. Any and all indicators that she may not be making the most of each and every waking second in London is sure to induce a bit of existential anxiety. She grew up on a farm in the middle of mountains. Plopping her in the middle of London but taking away the resources to plan to see all of it is tantamount to pushing a child into a sweetie shop and telling them it's closing in thirty seconds."
"So what do we do?"
"This..."
<Bamboleo, bambolea, porque mi vida yo la prefiero vivir así...">
And as the pulsating Latin rhythms of my alarm clock jerks me into wakefulness I realise it has all been a horrible dream. Except it hasn't and the internet is still kaputski. But I'm not panicking. Starbucks, as ever, got my back, Jack...
As you very clever people may have figured out a lot has happened in almost two weeks and I have been very remiss in not blogging. But then again I am now a juene professionale as they don't say in Paris and I have started my first proper job. It won't be featuring in the blog. The blog is about making the most out of living in one of the largest, most vibrant cities in the world and writing about it and for it and not my days at the office. I am, however, in love with my job. The dopey kind of love where you smile when you think about him/her and feel that feeling of the first sip of hot chocolate when its snowing outside. Blah di blah di fuckitty blah... Enough sentiment.
I am also a year older and not very much wiser. We had a wonderful time at my birthday. I'm sure that's a fair statement, they all seemed happy. I, however, had had a more wonderful time than most and was carted to friends' home through the winding warrens around Brick Lane, stumbling most disgracefully and schlurring my wuurrds like Sean Connery after a head injury.
Good clean fun.
It is with great regret and no small amount of distress that I must inform you all of the sad and untimely demise of Fucking Nuisance, our small rabbit friend. Departed this vale of tears 10/08/2013. My fucking birthday.
I got that dress from the market. It was well lush. I were all dressed up, war paint on and ready to go out on the lash when I thought I'd check up on little FN and see if she (for it was a she, don't worry I didn't interfere with it, we found that out off landlady's friend) was okay and well fed.
I found her, lying there, as if in sleep but for eyes open; seeing not this world but rather some far off plain beyond what we ourselves can know. She looked somehow smaller in death and a hush was over that little hutch, a hush that could not be explained by mere absence of little snuffles and rustlings. It was altogether more eerie and definite.
The fucking point is that the sodding little bugger was belly up and I'm going to fucking have to tell my landlady that someone has cocked up massively and her little bunnikins is dead as a sodding doornail.
I don't know if anyone noticed but I get sweary and non-PC when distressed...
It wasn't anything we had done! There were frantic phone call summits to this effect and the fear of autopsies and independent reviews conducted by duly appointed watchdogs hanging over us.
It was grand, turns out she was hundreds of years old. But we still had to dispose of her legally and safely, you can't just pop rabbits in bin-bags, leave 'em outside and hope for the best, you know.
Check these facts out.
It costs £56 for a vet to dispose of a rabbit.
You can't just wing it, decide to bury it and dig down in a city garden because you might hit anything from gas mains to phone lines...apparently.
It's different in the country. Daddy was/is a farmer, a very good one, and once he told me did I know that not one lamb had died in Northern Ireland that year.
I said how the fuck could that be? (Except I didn't swear in front of my lovely Daddy...)
He said that every time an animal dies you're supposed to fill out all these forms and pay the Department of Agriculture to come and safely dispose of it.
But farmers have acres of land, not a lot of money and all the work time that self employment allows (sunrise to sunset) so they bury the lambs and that's that.
I was unfamiliar with the dead rabbit in a city situation. Not the council's job, that's only if it's in a public place. Not the RSPCA, they're more in the business of tending to the sick and wounded fauna. It seemed to be solely on us to take care of the rabbit... And not in a Mother Teresa way.
We were saved from any further stress by our landlady's friend turning up and doing the needful. I never did ask what became of FN...
Enough talk of dead rabbits, no matter how hilarious/distressing the matter may be!
In other news the flirtation with George Alagiah has come to a natural end with work resulting in me only being able to catch the enigmatic and dashing Jon Snow on Channel 4 at 7pm. George was flirting a bit too enthusiastically with the slutty weather-girl anyway. And Jon Snow does have those ties.
We're not going to talk about older men and my TV schedule anymore as some revelations about my predilection for PM Question Time resulted in sustained and unfair mockery. For shame, you know who you are...
We are going to talk about the wonderful and highly recommended Alternative London Tour of Shoreditch/Brick Lane which brought the amazing street art to life and was well good.
It's free! Free!! Well, a pay-what-you-feel-it's-worth, but when you're waiting on your first end-of-the-month paycheque the only remuneration you can afford is usually a handshake.
We saw such amazing artwork. Huge cranes and stork in exquisite detail. Artists who had flown to London's East End from Brazil and Puerto Rico and China and South Africa and had left veritable works of art on streets for everyone to enjoy.
There were Lego-style Luke Skywalkers, scattered Space Invaders, entwined lovers formed of interlocking ribbons of paint, caricature Del Boys, epic fantasy landscapes and deep philosophical statements. Every one of them could have been hung in the Tate Modern and indeed many artists HAD been featured in the high halls of fame. But they loved street art and they kept it up.
I would have paid a fiver just for this one bit of information.
Remember Spitalfields? The market? And why on earth was it called Spitalfields? I'll tell you now...
In the 1650's French Protestant Huguenots were fleeing persecution in Catholic France. They fled to the Roman-walled city of London seeking asylum. They weren't allowed within the city walls but were granted fields around the City as amnesty. These fields were used to build temporary accommodation and artillery ranges but primarily they were used as field hospitals to treat the ill and injured.
Hospital fields.
Spitalfields.
But enough for now! Speaking of culture, next week is a bank holiday weekend which hasn't meant so much since school. And I am looking forward to both Notting Hill carnival and visiting St Paul's and the Tate Modern. Vive la culture!
And vive the building of experience and expertise. One cannot write about nothing after all.
And soon we'll have to think about proper writing.
But until then, London awaits some more!
xo
Thursday, 8 August 2013
"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals..."
Come! Come! The night is young and there is much to see...
Boy howdy does a lot happen when you're not expecting it! Whereas all I could present to you four days ago was an a hand job at 20,000 ft we now have a veritable smorgasbord of occurrences and happenings that it is my pleasure (my extremely narcissistic pleasure) to document.
I'm back in Starbucks. I buy a filter coffee for £1.50 and furtively rescue the marshmallow Rice Krispie bar lurking at the bottom of my bag and hope no one says anything as I nibble it. No one ever does but all it takes is one beleaguered employee in a green apron whose girlfriend told him that "you're just not the man I want to spend the rest of my life with" last night and is itching for a fight but was never any good on sports days and so instead takes sadistic pleasure in throwing me out for bringing in outside food. He probably has low self esteem.
I'm projecting this all on name-tag David. He looks the type.
Any way, I'm here again because of the wish to save the internets that came with the dongle I got offa Vodaphone. Dongle. Sounds a bit rude. Wayhey...
Not that I didn't try to get the blasted internet working at home. Landlady's away for her holidays so it was just me poking at the damned router trying to figure out what was going wrong.
I thought I'd cracked it. We'll just hook up the laptop to the router via wire, the way we did in Madrid! We all remember Madrid.
The problem was this. To get to where the other end of the router was located I had to wade through a room full of all the oddments of 45 years that had accrued in my landlady's study/lounge/spare room.
In fact, the house itself is full of such oddments.
The point is this; the house is a little cluttered because of the aversion to tidying.
Well, I say a little...
So there I am, trying to attach the wire to get what should have been wireless internet. I'm cursing the lack of light; the bulb is blown and I'm relying on the light filtering in from the next room. I look up and realise I am being watched.
I am being watched by hundreds of pairs of glassy, lifeless eyes from the stuffed animals that range the room. And these are not your typical Build-a-Bear animals with lolling smiles and hearts for noses. These are the animals that come up from time to time on Antiques Roadshow. The animals with black, black eyes and oddly stitched grimaces. There is a ventriloquist's dummy with the jaw broken at a frankly alarming angle. The silence is overpowering, which is odd as outside the window there should be a main road. Disturbed by ABSOLUTELY NOTHING an old rabbit tumbles down the slope of a duvet stacked against the shelves.
I get the fuck out of there.
Haven't been in since.
Lessee, Sunday me and a friend did a frankly appalling thing and I became the person I hoped never to be. With the ink on prestigious degrees still drying (well, on mine anyway, I'm the newer graduand) and jobs in the City waiting for us we sat in Regent's Park, drank champagne and lunched on Whole Foods purchases.
Mind you, the champagne was on offer and hadn't even been put in the refrigerator, for pesto's sake and we barely had the ice to chill it dahlin'!
Loved every guilty minute.
On Monday I was clawed a by a rabbit. Clawed, I tell you! I grant you it was like being mauled by limp lettuce but still! I only tried to give the bloody thing its dinner and this is the thanks I get...
"Come here rabbit, that's a good rabbit, nice pellets, nom nom nom, let me stroke yo..YOU LITTLE PRICK!"
We have no idea/cant be arsed to remember the thing's name so we have christened it Fucking Nuisance.
And when I turned round from feeding Fucking Nuisance (FN for short) I am faced with what I can only describe as the opening scene from Lost World. You remember, the second Jurassic Park where the wee girl is on the beach and she's stupid enough to feed the little Compsognathus-es (Compys) and they eat her?
I turned around and there was a cat trying to eat me.
I like and respect cats. I love dogs because I understand dogs. I speak their language.
Growl = no me gusta, back off.
Head dipped, tail up = I want to play
Circle = I want food
Belly up = I am submissive, also, rub my tummy
Whine = I am upset
Loud bark, tail stiff = I think I'm the Sherriff of the world, get the f**k out of Dodge before I eat you.
Loud bark, tail wagging = God you look interesting, come be interesting over here.
I thinks cats mainly just want food. Cats are equals, fiercely independent and tough little sumbitches.
It was waving it's spread claws at me and meowing; it stretched up and down making little clawing motions at me.
"God, I don't know what you want! Take my money!! Also, don't eat the rabbit..."
It was showing a large amount of interest in poor old FN who was swiping again. You ain't got the stuff to face this kitty FN, put that limp wrist away.
Long story short (I almost never use this phrase) the bloody thing is still prowling around outside.
In other news, I am a recent and fervent convert to the London bus. I had been a lover of the Tube. I loved the wee map and the trains and the sense of "I'm very busy and important, look at me not making eye contact because I charge clients for that shit."
But the bus; oh it costs £1.50 a go to go anywhere and you get to see the beautiful city. You feel like you're on your own little tour of London as sights like The Shard and the Gherkin, St Pauls and The London Eye come in and out of view suddenly and excitedly like a magician's silk scarves. You get to speed through areas you've only read about; Whitechapel and Stepney and Westminster and Highbury and Islington.
I took the route to work yesterday just to get used to it. I did it on the way to help a dear friend move into her own London accommodation. Accommodation that I had scoped and signed for her after her own stressy searchings through Spareroom. I were in London. I were free. I am experienced in such matters. I was only too pleased to help.
I tell you I could have been a solicitor if I wanted. I drew up the contract and when I say I drew up the contract I put bare terms down exactly on two black sheets of A4 paper and got both parties to sign. This will be the only time I give a little bit of advice from my own legal education. Do NOT fret about short term leases. The facts are these. You've already made a contract from the moment you both agree to lease, from the deposit is paid and keys are handed over. This is the essence of contract, Written proof is essential but think of it as merely evidence to prove the contract (v v v simplified, my teachers would be appalled). You don't need to download form H39N3 or summat from a verified website and sign in triplicate. Juts have something, anything written down.
Speaking of lodgings, I love where I live but it can get lonely of an evening. I have good friends here, friends who I can go get beigels with (yes, that's how you spell the proper stuff and they're delicious and cheap and in the same shop on Brick Lane you get a jam doughnut for 30p) and who bring me banana bread made by a girl who could sell that stuff for thousands and I'd buy it. But in the evenings it's just me and George Alagiah on BBC News at 6pm. Last night we had chicken, pesto and pepper pizza with a Pinot Noir and spoke of harnessing the same reactions at the heart of the sun via copycat experiment in the South of France."
"...with his report on fusion there. And speaking of the power of the sun, what's the weather like?"
"Ahaha, oh George. Marry me."
Jon Snow and Channel Four are just an hour too late to take me out to dinner.
On a related note, the great and all knowing Mother has already asked if I've managed to meet any nice boys in London, sure you have to put yourself out there, don't hide away in your room, always have a bit of make up on to look your best..."
"You know Ma, in some cultures it is the responsibility of the parents to arrange compatible and lasting partners for their offspring."
"Pure laziness."
She just wants grandbabies to dote on. Not now mind. Not for a good decade. But still, someday...
And so on that note we depart, but I'll in all likelihood be on the wireless sooner than we think because someone's got a birthday this weekend!!
Just to clarify, that someone is indeed me.
I got some nice celebratory stuff arranged and might just go and see about a dress I've been eyeing up at Chapel Market. It won't fit me. They never do. The word "fit" in itself should point to how dresses and the like are calculated. You're supposed to look fit in them.
Shoes on the other hand. I'm a size five/four and a half. Shoes never let me down.
So a dress or shoes. I have £20 to spend given that I haven't even earned my first pay yet. But under the intermittently cloudy/blue sky of London on a gentle Thursday anything is possible.
Anything at all.
xo
Sunday, 4 August 2013
Clever girl...
I have no explanation for the title of this latest shortish blog post. None whatsoever apart from the tenuous link that I feel like a very clever girl. I did it. I got me a job in London and moved here.
I've got my chai latte from the great caffeinated power that won't pay its taxes. You know them, I used to write from them all the time in Alonso Martinez in Madrid. Remember? The friendliest Starbucks in the world? Drat...
There's always a very small part of me that is tugging my sleeve and saying "No! No! Don't mention people or places, you remember all that libel law and that one documentary on Channel Four!" but sod it, I can patronise in both senses at the same time!
Why am I writing from Starbucks I hear you ask? Certainly not because TalkTalk (named and shamed) has a list of network problems longer than the walk home last night when I realised I had never walked to my now home on my own after dark and was convinced thieves and murderers roamed the night freely and without hindrance. I went past an all night Sainsbury's and three quite nice pubs with flowers and scrubbed wood tables outside. It was hardly the projects Aileen....
Sorry I digress. Once again I am plagued by internet woes BUT I have a massive TV. Trade off.
So here I am living in London. Met my elusive co-lodger yesterday. And we have our villain of the piece. Well, she's no Captain Hook, but we shall endure!
I had just unpacked all my things into a lovely room at the top of the house. Light, airy and has been cleaned and neatened by the landlady who even left out bedclothes and towels. Bless Angela.
It is however a good and wonderful thing that landlady is away for the month of August as that leaves far more scope for nocturnal comings and goings. Not that I mean really loud sex, although I wouldn't object. Indeed would be hurt and offended if the idea of me in the next room put anyone off loud and passionate relations. I have been known to stick on some Barry White to facilitate the process...
A couple on Aer Lingus yesterday had NO difficulty with me being in the adjacent seat.
Yeah.
You read that right.
So we're on the plane and I'm reading my Kindle and the couple beside me (Irish boy, Scandinavian girl) are being all lovey dovey. I ALWAYS have to sit next to couples and they're always too cute. Until now.
It is out of the corner of my eye that I first become aware of things getting out of hand (pun). At first I was sure girlfriend was lending a hand (pun) to pull boyfriend's coat into a more comfortable position (pun) This was not the case. The case was that with very little cover and NO compunctions at all this couple was merrily attempting to join the Mile High club. BUT EVERYONE COULD SEE!! I ended up hunching over my Kindle to try and safeguard said couple from the three members of the blue rinse brigade in the next aisle who would have kicked off if this indiscretion was noticed.
And all the while I was thinking, "Not on Aer Lingus. Oh God, not here. Ryanair yes but you'd be charged pay as you come and go. Easyjet possibly. But all these planes are named after Catholic saints for God's sake. We're flying on St Ronan."
St Ronan. Bishop. Feast day, November 19th. Venerated at Coventry because his ARM is enshrined there. You can't make up this shit...
Lessee, I have very little else to tell y'all. Travel was very tiring but when is it not? Am super pleased with where I'm situated. Am super excited about starting work. Am super excited about living in London! Am super excited to stop talking like a twelve year old girl from Beverly Hills!
Next week then! I swear to have more wonderful stories from a week exploring London. Exciting adventures and such. But now? Now I'm off to Regent Street to have lunch. We getting cosmopolitan up in h'yah!
And still the crumpled bit of paper lies forlornly at the bottom of my bag.
Don't worry.
I haven't forgotten The List.
xo
I've got my chai latte from the great caffeinated power that won't pay its taxes. You know them, I used to write from them all the time in Alonso Martinez in Madrid. Remember? The friendliest Starbucks in the world? Drat...
There's always a very small part of me that is tugging my sleeve and saying "No! No! Don't mention people or places, you remember all that libel law and that one documentary on Channel Four!" but sod it, I can patronise in both senses at the same time!
Why am I writing from Starbucks I hear you ask? Certainly not because TalkTalk (named and shamed) has a list of network problems longer than the walk home last night when I realised I had never walked to my now home on my own after dark and was convinced thieves and murderers roamed the night freely and without hindrance. I went past an all night Sainsbury's and three quite nice pubs with flowers and scrubbed wood tables outside. It was hardly the projects Aileen....
Sorry I digress. Once again I am plagued by internet woes BUT I have a massive TV. Trade off.
So here I am living in London. Met my elusive co-lodger yesterday. And we have our villain of the piece. Well, she's no Captain Hook, but we shall endure!
I had just unpacked all my things into a lovely room at the top of the house. Light, airy and has been cleaned and neatened by the landlady who even left out bedclothes and towels. Bless Angela.
It is however a good and wonderful thing that landlady is away for the month of August as that leaves far more scope for nocturnal comings and goings. Not that I mean really loud sex, although I wouldn't object. Indeed would be hurt and offended if the idea of me in the next room put anyone off loud and passionate relations. I have been known to stick on some Barry White to facilitate the process...
A couple on Aer Lingus yesterday had NO difficulty with me being in the adjacent seat.
Yeah.
You read that right.
So we're on the plane and I'm reading my Kindle and the couple beside me (Irish boy, Scandinavian girl) are being all lovey dovey. I ALWAYS have to sit next to couples and they're always too cute. Until now.
It is out of the corner of my eye that I first become aware of things getting out of hand (pun). At first I was sure girlfriend was lending a hand (pun) to pull boyfriend's coat into a more comfortable position (pun) This was not the case. The case was that with very little cover and NO compunctions at all this couple was merrily attempting to join the Mile High club. BUT EVERYONE COULD SEE!! I ended up hunching over my Kindle to try and safeguard said couple from the three members of the blue rinse brigade in the next aisle who would have kicked off if this indiscretion was noticed.
And all the while I was thinking, "Not on Aer Lingus. Oh God, not here. Ryanair yes but you'd be charged pay as you come and go. Easyjet possibly. But all these planes are named after Catholic saints for God's sake. We're flying on St Ronan."
St Ronan. Bishop. Feast day, November 19th. Venerated at Coventry because his ARM is enshrined there. You can't make up this shit...
Lessee, I have very little else to tell y'all. Travel was very tiring but when is it not? Am super pleased with where I'm situated. Am super excited about starting work. Am super excited about living in London! Am super excited to stop talking like a twelve year old girl from Beverly Hills!
Next week then! I swear to have more wonderful stories from a week exploring London. Exciting adventures and such. But now? Now I'm off to Regent Street to have lunch. We getting cosmopolitan up in h'yah!
And still the crumpled bit of paper lies forlornly at the bottom of my bag.
Don't worry.
I haven't forgotten The List.
xo
Monday, 29 July 2013
Failte go Norlin Airlan (Welcome to Northern Ireland)
"So here lad, will I get a number off him or what's the craic?"
"Jays, ye needn't be asking them boys for a mobile number, sure they were lookin' into the microwave for years thinkin' it was a television..."
This is what drifts across the forecourt of a petrol station close to home and is indeed typical of exchanges in petrol stations the length and breadth of Northern Ireland. For the more we have our differences the more we stay the same.
I thought we'd do a little montage of home as I'm soon to be leaving it behind, not forever and ever amen like the emigrants of old, but it has just about sunk in that life, barring accidents and emergencies, will now be across the water. I'm sure someone relatively famous once had the right of it when they said "Ireland's greatest export is its people."
The land in question has been drenched in glorious sunshine for the past couple of weeks which is most unseasonal. People are now becoming suspicious and long for the good old days of not having a clue what the weather was going to do next. There's talk of droughts. In Ireland. Madness.
To grab the bull by the horns we begin with acknowledging that home is a place with a troubled history and it's only now, with experience of England, Spain, France and a weekend in Germany that I'm able to see just how much damage that past has done, and not just in the cost of queuing up police Landrovers to hold back the seething mass of rioters that is the Ardoyne interface come marching season or scrubbing paint and worse from Orange halls and churches. There's a huge political, social and financial gap that will take time to close. Rends in communities that only time and fading of memory will heal.
I don't mean forget, for if we forgot how could we learn? But talking to my mother about the times that there were and the fear and the tit-for-tat and bloodshed that was part of life and living back in those days makes you realise that though we moan about "the stop-and-start of the peace process" NI has never had it so good. It's getting better. But what happened was so terrible that we need to dull the memory, because if we remembered every atrocity in glorious Technicolor I'm not sure anyone could ever forget nor forgive.
But enough of that, NI is full of lovely things and lovely people and lovely idiosyncrasies. And I shall share a few that I shall sorely miss.
Did you know that we technically have three official languages. They're all in the post title; English, Gaelic and Ulster Scots. English is fine, we all speak English. Not identifiably mind you, and a few of us should come with subtitle options, but it's definitely the unifier.
But Ulster Scots and Gaelic? Well, each to his own, and I mean that because every sodding things that's in the public domain has to be translated into each to appease each side. We'll start with Ulster Scots I went to an online translator to be sure I had the "Norlin Airlan" part right. It was called "Scots Online; Pittin the Mither Tongue on the Wab."
Now, far be it from me to offend anyone and may I just make clear that I love linguistic diversity, I love "Kist o' Words" on BBC Radio Ulster, I love the accents giving life to the "mither tongue" from mellifluous DerryLondonDerry to the Antrim coast's glottal-stop-fest. It's a lovely dialect.
It is not a f**king language.
Did anyone have any great difficulty reading Trainspotting? Aye (or in English, yes) it was Irvine Welsh's first novel before Danny Boyle got his hands on the film rights. But the point is it is all written in phonetically accurate Edinburghian. Or Ulster Scots. I would joke here that a more accurate name would be Ulster Sots because it does sound like an eighty-five year old called Jackie is halfway through his fifth shandy sitting down by the fire in a pub in the glens of Antrim lamenting "them there daysh when ye coulda lit yer smokes wi'out thon EEEE YOU pokin' their noses where their not a wantin'." I shall translate. He wants a cigarette indoors.
Don't get me wrong, the freak out about having everything from Stormont info leaflets to public urinals double signposted in English and Irish is just as sinful. Where in the name of God is that one eejit from the Gaeltacht complaining, "An bhfuil Gaeilge cad agat?" He doesn't exist. Let us stop wasting Executive time and money on the language one-upmanship. Please.
What that whole ramble meant was that I'll miss how we speak and how we phrase what we say. There's a reason for the saying "gift of the gab." Eskimos have a thousand words for snow. Irish have a thousand for hello and how are you? How's the form? How's she cutting? S'craic? Bout ye? Are you well? Favourite chat up line is to follow this with a "cos you're looking well." Classy.
I will miss driving through country roads. The type that you actually can't meet another car on without one of you having to back up three miles to someone's tarmacked front gate. And the type you take at sixty mile an hour. Paradox? Never.
I shall miss Graham's ice cream. God, the only reason I want to become an acclaimed and famous blogger of wit and wisdom is that so one day someone in that wee shop in Rathfriland will see this shout out and make it so that I have free baby cones (vanilla, Graham's own, secret recipe) with chocolate dip for life. You think I'm joking. I am emphatically not.
I shall miss nights out at home. Drinking wine at a friend's house (she knows who she is...) where the tunes be blasting and the night is going so well you never actually make it out. But when you do you go somewhere where Usher and Sean Paul be blasting but every soul in there knows the words to "Rock me Mama like a Wagon Wheel" when it is requested. And the whole country's looking "the court (pronounced "curt") or "the shift." Go and find someone from the province (preferably a good culchie lad, jesus I'll have to explain that too, a good lad from the country) to explain it to you if you're not from round 'ere. It's perfectly innocent, no Sex and the City antics here. But the last time I tried to explain "the court" it was to a middle aged barrister while quite drunk. Me not him. I think he got it in the end...
I'll miss my dog. He's a cutie. Words cannot sufficiently convey the feeling of having a bad day and this wee scruffy collie dog wandering up to you at the end of the day with a sock in his mouth only looking to play. I heard that's how one five year old described love. "When you leave your doggie alone all day but he still wants to play with you when you get home." Cute.
I will miss Tayto. Jesus, but I'll miss Tayto. Maybe there'll be an expat shop for the Irish, hidden in among the "Polanski" and "Taste of African" there'll be an O'Hagan's with Tayto and southern Dairy Milk. A girl can dream.
I will miss the family. Very much so. We're a close bunch of bananas.
But here I am yapping on like I've spent the last five years saving for a one way ticket to Darwin, Australia and don't know when I'll be back. In the words of the Dubliners "those big airplanes go both ways" and I am a Ryanair flight from home at all times. An hour. There and back. Sure it's not like I'm moving to John O'Groats!
There are bigger, brighter things ahead and I'm flying out of the nest with Aer Lingus. Luxury! By gods, what if they can smell the budget airline on me, I'll have to get the Febreeze on the old suitcases...
So next time I'll be typing from London. From a new life. I could be a real writer and socialite! I don't have the legs for it, but the wit I got in spades! I might start narrating everything in my head Carrie Bradshaw style. Become neurotic and hopelessly romantic.
Except no, because you know in that one episode where she puts on her "fuck-me" dress and heads to Big's unannounced, but he's loving watching the big fight alone with popcorn and he's still all like "Come in, come in" and gets her a drink and then she starts pulling the moves (like a baby gazelle learning how to walk but all concentrated in his lap) and he's like "Woah, darling, just a minute, this is the end of the fight" and she throws this huge hissy fit and storms out in her dinky Manolos (which how does she afford?). I never understood that. LET THE MAN WATCH HIS SPORT! Phone rings when I'm halfway through a Mad Men season finale, you better be sick or dead, I shit you not...
Whoops. Carried away. I italicised to be sure you'd get the joke. Maybe a bit like Bradshaw. But more like me. Young professional excited me. I can't wait to get started.
Great expectations, here we come.
xo
"Jays, ye needn't be asking them boys for a mobile number, sure they were lookin' into the microwave for years thinkin' it was a television..."
This is what drifts across the forecourt of a petrol station close to home and is indeed typical of exchanges in petrol stations the length and breadth of Northern Ireland. For the more we have our differences the more we stay the same.
I thought we'd do a little montage of home as I'm soon to be leaving it behind, not forever and ever amen like the emigrants of old, but it has just about sunk in that life, barring accidents and emergencies, will now be across the water. I'm sure someone relatively famous once had the right of it when they said "Ireland's greatest export is its people."
The land in question has been drenched in glorious sunshine for the past couple of weeks which is most unseasonal. People are now becoming suspicious and long for the good old days of not having a clue what the weather was going to do next. There's talk of droughts. In Ireland. Madness.
To grab the bull by the horns we begin with acknowledging that home is a place with a troubled history and it's only now, with experience of England, Spain, France and a weekend in Germany that I'm able to see just how much damage that past has done, and not just in the cost of queuing up police Landrovers to hold back the seething mass of rioters that is the Ardoyne interface come marching season or scrubbing paint and worse from Orange halls and churches. There's a huge political, social and financial gap that will take time to close. Rends in communities that only time and fading of memory will heal.
I don't mean forget, for if we forgot how could we learn? But talking to my mother about the times that there were and the fear and the tit-for-tat and bloodshed that was part of life and living back in those days makes you realise that though we moan about "the stop-and-start of the peace process" NI has never had it so good. It's getting better. But what happened was so terrible that we need to dull the memory, because if we remembered every atrocity in glorious Technicolor I'm not sure anyone could ever forget nor forgive.
But enough of that, NI is full of lovely things and lovely people and lovely idiosyncrasies. And I shall share a few that I shall sorely miss.
Did you know that we technically have three official languages. They're all in the post title; English, Gaelic and Ulster Scots. English is fine, we all speak English. Not identifiably mind you, and a few of us should come with subtitle options, but it's definitely the unifier.
But Ulster Scots and Gaelic? Well, each to his own, and I mean that because every sodding things that's in the public domain has to be translated into each to appease each side. We'll start with Ulster Scots I went to an online translator to be sure I had the "Norlin Airlan" part right. It was called "Scots Online; Pittin the Mither Tongue on the Wab."
Now, far be it from me to offend anyone and may I just make clear that I love linguistic diversity, I love "Kist o' Words" on BBC Radio Ulster, I love the accents giving life to the "mither tongue" from mellifluous DerryLondonDerry to the Antrim coast's glottal-stop-fest. It's a lovely dialect.
It is not a f**king language.
Did anyone have any great difficulty reading Trainspotting? Aye (or in English, yes) it was Irvine Welsh's first novel before Danny Boyle got his hands on the film rights. But the point is it is all written in phonetically accurate Edinburghian. Or Ulster Scots. I would joke here that a more accurate name would be Ulster Sots because it does sound like an eighty-five year old called Jackie is halfway through his fifth shandy sitting down by the fire in a pub in the glens of Antrim lamenting "them there daysh when ye coulda lit yer smokes wi'out thon EEEE YOU pokin' their noses where their not a wantin'." I shall translate. He wants a cigarette indoors.
Don't get me wrong, the freak out about having everything from Stormont info leaflets to public urinals double signposted in English and Irish is just as sinful. Where in the name of God is that one eejit from the Gaeltacht complaining, "An bhfuil Gaeilge cad agat?" He doesn't exist. Let us stop wasting Executive time and money on the language one-upmanship. Please.
What that whole ramble meant was that I'll miss how we speak and how we phrase what we say. There's a reason for the saying "gift of the gab." Eskimos have a thousand words for snow. Irish have a thousand for hello and how are you? How's the form? How's she cutting? S'craic? Bout ye? Are you well? Favourite chat up line is to follow this with a "cos you're looking well." Classy.
I will miss driving through country roads. The type that you actually can't meet another car on without one of you having to back up three miles to someone's tarmacked front gate. And the type you take at sixty mile an hour. Paradox? Never.
I shall miss Graham's ice cream. God, the only reason I want to become an acclaimed and famous blogger of wit and wisdom is that so one day someone in that wee shop in Rathfriland will see this shout out and make it so that I have free baby cones (vanilla, Graham's own, secret recipe) with chocolate dip for life. You think I'm joking. I am emphatically not.
I shall miss nights out at home. Drinking wine at a friend's house (she knows who she is...) where the tunes be blasting and the night is going so well you never actually make it out. But when you do you go somewhere where Usher and Sean Paul be blasting but every soul in there knows the words to "Rock me Mama like a Wagon Wheel" when it is requested. And the whole country's looking "the court (pronounced "curt") or "the shift." Go and find someone from the province (preferably a good culchie lad, jesus I'll have to explain that too, a good lad from the country) to explain it to you if you're not from round 'ere. It's perfectly innocent, no Sex and the City antics here. But the last time I tried to explain "the court" it was to a middle aged barrister while quite drunk. Me not him. I think he got it in the end...
I'll miss my dog. He's a cutie. Words cannot sufficiently convey the feeling of having a bad day and this wee scruffy collie dog wandering up to you at the end of the day with a sock in his mouth only looking to play. I heard that's how one five year old described love. "When you leave your doggie alone all day but he still wants to play with you when you get home." Cute.
I will miss Tayto. Jesus, but I'll miss Tayto. Maybe there'll be an expat shop for the Irish, hidden in among the "Polanski" and "Taste of African" there'll be an O'Hagan's with Tayto and southern Dairy Milk. A girl can dream.
I will miss the family. Very much so. We're a close bunch of bananas.
But here I am yapping on like I've spent the last five years saving for a one way ticket to Darwin, Australia and don't know when I'll be back. In the words of the Dubliners "those big airplanes go both ways" and I am a Ryanair flight from home at all times. An hour. There and back. Sure it's not like I'm moving to John O'Groats!
There are bigger, brighter things ahead and I'm flying out of the nest with Aer Lingus. Luxury! By gods, what if they can smell the budget airline on me, I'll have to get the Febreeze on the old suitcases...
So next time I'll be typing from London. From a new life. I could be a real writer and socialite! I don't have the legs for it, but the wit I got in spades! I might start narrating everything in my head Carrie Bradshaw style. Become neurotic and hopelessly romantic.
Except no, because you know in that one episode where she puts on her "fuck-me" dress and heads to Big's unannounced, but he's loving watching the big fight alone with popcorn and he's still all like "Come in, come in" and gets her a drink and then she starts pulling the moves (like a baby gazelle learning how to walk but all concentrated in his lap) and he's like "Woah, darling, just a minute, this is the end of the fight" and she throws this huge hissy fit and storms out in her dinky Manolos (which how does she afford?). I never understood that. LET THE MAN WATCH HIS SPORT! Phone rings when I'm halfway through a Mad Men season finale, you better be sick or dead, I shit you not...
Whoops. Carried away. I italicised to be sure you'd get the joke. Maybe a bit like Bradshaw. But more like me. Young professional excited me. I can't wait to get started.
Great expectations, here we come.
xo
Thursday, 18 July 2013
Hello, this is London calling...
3 am in the vast, humming silence of Stansted is a grim time and place in which to be. The fluorescent light are switched off and for that we are grateful and the great expanse is dimly lit by the light of the signs of various food stands, most closed and shuttered except inexplicably the hot do counter.
In the dark corner where the Bureau De Change meets check-in desks 110-120 there is a figure curled up on the floor, a little wheely suitcase trying its best to act as a pillow. Gareth shrugs his high viz jacket on, straightens his lanyard and approaches the figure. The check-in for Prague is opening on desks 115 through 120. It is his unhappy task at this hour of the morning to makes sure everything is ship-shape. There is a grubby and much handled piece of paper lying off to one side and Gareth stoops to retrieve it.
The still figure shoots out one hand, opens one eye and squints up at him,
"Leave that!"
Gareth leaves that well enough alone.
The figure sits up, unfolds the grubby scrap and digs a pen from the recesses of a pocket. Gareth can just about make out a few bullet points. The figure, more wearily than gleefully but the glee will come later, puts a line through two of them:
2. SECURE GRADUATE JOB
3. MOVE TO LONDON
and squints up at Gareth again.
"I am here for the 6.50am, yes you heard right, 6.50am flight to Belfast because I wouldn't pay the £125 to have it at a civilised hour. I was supposed to be home three days ago. I haven't really slept since then because of this unseasonal heat in which I had to trek around London flat hunting in kitten heels because I didn't think I'd need sensible shoes. Can I snooze here?"
"To be honest love, yer can do what yer like..."
What a whirlwind of a week. In seven days I have managed to cross off two off the, what, five life goals on my list? That was comparatively easy. Don't get me wrong, there were three days of condensed stress as I tried valiantly to find lodgings in London, the shock at actually finding a job, the guilt at imposing on friends who went to the ends of the earth to make things so comparatively easy for me. The girl in me is chuffed to pieces. But the writer, she suffers...
Writer: <click clack of keys, a slosh of Sauvignon, purse of lips á la Anna Wintour> "The sun scorched down upon the streets of London and upon one lone room hunter as she fends tourists of with one hand and swigs from a bottle of water with another...GOD DAMN IT!"
Actual Human Being: What in the name of God is wrong?
Writer: How am I supposed to work with this dross! Interview, offer, job hunt, lols with friends! Subtract the stress and it's disgustingly easy! You remember Madrid?
Girl: We still wake up screaming at night, yes...
Writer: Juan Carlos and his dodgy building sites he promised would be done by August? The uncertainty of the Spanish? The putas and mala suerte and the vino? And the job hunt! The months we spent since November this year opening our inbox to a rejection every day? By God it wasn't perfect but it was drama!!
Girl: Despair and distress make for funnier stories, I agree. But I think it'll be good to let people know that things generally turn out right in the end and there are happy endings. I'm sure we'll have all the time in the world for things to go horrifically wrong. We'll let everyone have a glimpse at them going stupendously right...
And stupendously right they did go, but I wouldn't be me and there wouldn't be a blog if we hadn't accrued some anecdotal urges. A few vignettes then from the week end the world actually said yes yo our ever present prayer: "Giz a job and giz London..."
The interview! I wanted this job, a job where I would I could write and publish content, where I could have the best experience ever that would provide the key to the locked halls of true authorship. My job title is WRITER. It's going to be in Italicised letters on my very own business card soon. And I couldn't be happier. But first, the interview!
The company is beautiful, a cream brick building in Covent Garden and I already know the receptionists. We had all the chats on the day of my first interview...
"Hi Claire! Like Terminator II, I'm back!"
Oh that's wonderful, I'll just let Jamie know, best of best of luck, I'm sure you'll be fabulous!"
And everyone who passed me when I was waiting asked if I was there for interview, told me to just be myself and wished me luck. Fate was dangling working for this place in front of me, tantalisingly. And the interview started,
"So where did you grow up?"
"Well, do you know the song Mountains of Mourne?" (in the certain knowledge that every resident of the British Isles over 50 knows this song)
"I don't actually, will you sing it for me?"
"<the carefully cultivated professional cool and polished accent falls away at this request> What, d'ye really want me to sing to ye in a job interview?"
"Yes please, if you'd like to,"
I considered how much I wanted this job. And I came to a decision. And I opened my mouth and sang the (oddly appropriate) song of my people..."
"Oh Mary this London's a wonderful sight,
With the people here working by day and by night
They don't sow potatoes, nor barley nor wheat,
But there's gangs of them digging for gold in the street,
At least when I asked them that's what I was told
So I just took a hand in the digging for gold,
But for all this dear Mary I might as well be,
In the place where the dark Mournes sweep down to the sea..."
He applauded. And then we spoke of many things. And then we two parted. And the next morning he gave me a job. Rang me while we were on the train. And I whooped and cheered. And I rang everyone I could think of. And when some ill-bred wanker who had probably just been made redundant had the nerve to tut I looked him full in the eye and raised an eyebrow. That's as far as you're able to go on a train/the Tube without being arrested...
And we were on our way to the Tower of London! And of course when our guide asked if anyone was from Ireland we stuck up our hands and when he asked why we were in London I replied,
"I just got a job! They rang half an hour ago!"
And Dicky, elated and exuberant raised his arms and cried in the accent of every cheeky butler since the original Jeeves, "Ladies and gentlemen, this young lady has just become gainfully employed in the greatest city in the world. A hip hip hooray for the young lady! Now that'll be a nice interval before the husband hunt..."
And all was well with the world. We saw the Crown Jewels (Dicky: "The two foremost questions posed to me in the enactment of my office as tour guide. "WHERE are the Crown Jewels! And WHERE...are the toilets?") and we had chips and we had wine and good food and this was all wonderful until my mother, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, know of all things, Her Magnificent Omnipotnce and the origin of the phrase "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" rang and proposed a question:
"Would it not be better to stay and get some accommodation sorted for the autumn?"
Of course it would! I mean it eventually involved eight hours straight glued to Spareroom.co.uk, a full day trekking around London on one of the hottest days of the year and that ever residual panic you will all know. It's an awful lot of money and trust to spend in one go, finding somewhere to live, especially on your own. You don't know the area, don't know who you're dealing with and by the time you give over a deposit you feel every single mile between yourself and home. I imagine like a relationship. The first one I got into was a flat in Madrid and no sooner were we back in the UK after spending money, time and tears that the landlady rang up, changed her mind, was giving back the deposit and wished us the best.
And then people will say, "Why didn't you lawyer the shit out of her??" But that isn't how it works in real life. Drag her to court, demand she put us up, spend what could easily be six months and a lot of money embroiled in legal proceedings when we needed somewhere to live? No. In real life we took back the money and had to arrange to do it all again.
So, as life as in love, I was once bitten, forever shy. And that might explain my reaction when my mother filled me in on everything that could go horribly wrong (flaky landlord to internet scams) that I had to do all these complicated things to avoid (sign everything...EVERYTHING) Forgetting my friends were enjoying Angel Delight in the next room, I snapped and quasi-sobbed in an almost Italo-American accent in my panic:
"MA!! GAWD!! PLEASE!! I'M NOT GOING TO END UP SQUATTING IN SOME HOVEL COVERED IN MY OWN SHIT!!
Now she did find it funny, but at that stage she and shocked friends were the only ones in good humour. I was uncharacteristically worried sick...
We shall fast forward past the two days of intense hunting, because that's how fast things come and go in London. And eventually I found a room in Islington, ten minutes from The Angel, which filled me with delight because my knowledge of London is squarely based on the Monopoly board. And my landlady Angela is the salt of the earth. So that's were I am for the first two months of life in London and I couldn't be happier.
Of course the city itself gave me signs. Now I may not be the "spiritual sort interested in the healing arts and power of the earth" that some 42 year old Malaysian man wanted to share his flat with but every time I worried if I was doing the right thing I would see a penny on the street, turn a corner and find a Benet's of Cambridge (an ice cream shop that I know well in Cambridge itself), see an ad for Dame Edna at the Palladium or run into a Starbucks to surf Spareroom and hear my song playing. Frank Sinatra "That's Life" for those of you curious. And seeing all of these familiar things I loved, well, I'd have a heart of stone if I didn't take them as a sign...
But there you have it! That is the story of how one week saw me from crawling up the walls at home, wracked with existential uncertainty to excitement at the prospect of moving the London to start a proper job. But there'll be some homesickness as well.
I found a postcard in Spitalfields Market. A one hundred year old postcard sent from that place I sang of, where the dark Mournes sweep down to the sea to a place called Downpatrick which nowadays is fifteen minutes up the road by car. My daddy, (and believe me if you all met him you would love him, one of the sweetest men in the world, think of him as Dahl's character Grandpa Joe and my Mummy as a 1st class degree holding Hyacinth Bouquet, not Bucket darling and you're there), Anywho my daddy adores history and read this postcard in delight, glasses perched on the end of his nose. And in the car on the way back from the airport we pulled in at a Spar and I asked jokingly, "Daddy, daddy, can you get me a Porky Pig (a 60p ice lolly we devoured as children) please?" And he replied solemnly, "Of course I will! Be you five or fifty, unemployed or the editor of the Times you'll always be my child and I shall always get you ice lollies."
Oh Dad...
But enough, C S Lewis said that if we are brave and patient the things to come are infinitely better than the things we leave behind, though you can be your bum (can't say "ass" so close to a mention of my Daddy...) I'll be home as often as possible for the family.
And in the spirit of that advice from the man who wrote my childhood though he didn't know it, I take you back to where I am sitting in light of the approaching dawn (symbolism see, new day imagery, I really am a well good writer) looking speculatively at the list Gareth of Stansted almost did away with and tap the next two items thoughtfully...
4. FALL IN LOVE
5. BE READ
And they may be the last things on my list but I have a feeling they'll be the hardest.
The search of a twenty-something for love and literature in the city of London then! But surely there will be the occasional obstacles and impositions that every twenty-something will know only too well. We can but hope that from now on the blog does not descend into whiny mediocrity, spouting rubbish about real life and romance like a two-bit Bridget Jones wannabe. It shall not be so!
Thus next week, the gearing up to leave; the loose ends tied, the friends good byed, last Ulster fried, and all implied in the move from the Dark Mournes to London Town.
All that remains is to thank so many who were rooting for me and didn't hesitate to make congratulations known. I must remember that short as a week was, this dream has been alive since 2009 and the job hunt was in full swing since November. And now I shall pour some white wine, drag a chair out the back under unseasonal blue sky, surrounded by leafy trees, green fields and the purple haze of the mountains in the not-so-distance. I shall turn up Olly Murs "Right place, right time," let the apt lyrics wash over me and lie back to contemplate my happy beginning...
xo
In the dark corner where the Bureau De Change meets check-in desks 110-120 there is a figure curled up on the floor, a little wheely suitcase trying its best to act as a pillow. Gareth shrugs his high viz jacket on, straightens his lanyard and approaches the figure. The check-in for Prague is opening on desks 115 through 120. It is his unhappy task at this hour of the morning to makes sure everything is ship-shape. There is a grubby and much handled piece of paper lying off to one side and Gareth stoops to retrieve it.
The still figure shoots out one hand, opens one eye and squints up at him,
"Leave that!"
Gareth leaves that well enough alone.
The figure sits up, unfolds the grubby scrap and digs a pen from the recesses of a pocket. Gareth can just about make out a few bullet points. The figure, more wearily than gleefully but the glee will come later, puts a line through two of them:
2. SECURE GRADUATE JOB
3. MOVE TO LONDON
and squints up at Gareth again.
"I am here for the 6.50am, yes you heard right, 6.50am flight to Belfast because I wouldn't pay the £125 to have it at a civilised hour. I was supposed to be home three days ago. I haven't really slept since then because of this unseasonal heat in which I had to trek around London flat hunting in kitten heels because I didn't think I'd need sensible shoes. Can I snooze here?"
"To be honest love, yer can do what yer like..."
What a whirlwind of a week. In seven days I have managed to cross off two off the, what, five life goals on my list? That was comparatively easy. Don't get me wrong, there were three days of condensed stress as I tried valiantly to find lodgings in London, the shock at actually finding a job, the guilt at imposing on friends who went to the ends of the earth to make things so comparatively easy for me. The girl in me is chuffed to pieces. But the writer, she suffers...
Writer: <click clack of keys, a slosh of Sauvignon, purse of lips á la Anna Wintour> "The sun scorched down upon the streets of London and upon one lone room hunter as she fends tourists of with one hand and swigs from a bottle of water with another...GOD DAMN IT!"
Actual Human Being: What in the name of God is wrong?
Writer: How am I supposed to work with this dross! Interview, offer, job hunt, lols with friends! Subtract the stress and it's disgustingly easy! You remember Madrid?
Girl: We still wake up screaming at night, yes...
Writer: Juan Carlos and his dodgy building sites he promised would be done by August? The uncertainty of the Spanish? The putas and mala suerte and the vino? And the job hunt! The months we spent since November this year opening our inbox to a rejection every day? By God it wasn't perfect but it was drama!!
Girl: Despair and distress make for funnier stories, I agree. But I think it'll be good to let people know that things generally turn out right in the end and there are happy endings. I'm sure we'll have all the time in the world for things to go horrifically wrong. We'll let everyone have a glimpse at them going stupendously right...
And stupendously right they did go, but I wouldn't be me and there wouldn't be a blog if we hadn't accrued some anecdotal urges. A few vignettes then from the week end the world actually said yes yo our ever present prayer: "Giz a job and giz London..."
The interview! I wanted this job, a job where I would I could write and publish content, where I could have the best experience ever that would provide the key to the locked halls of true authorship. My job title is WRITER. It's going to be in Italicised letters on my very own business card soon. And I couldn't be happier. But first, the interview!
The company is beautiful, a cream brick building in Covent Garden and I already know the receptionists. We had all the chats on the day of my first interview...
"Hi Claire! Like Terminator II, I'm back!"
Oh that's wonderful, I'll just let Jamie know, best of best of luck, I'm sure you'll be fabulous!"
And everyone who passed me when I was waiting asked if I was there for interview, told me to just be myself and wished me luck. Fate was dangling working for this place in front of me, tantalisingly. And the interview started,
"So where did you grow up?"
"Well, do you know the song Mountains of Mourne?" (in the certain knowledge that every resident of the British Isles over 50 knows this song)
"I don't actually, will you sing it for me?"
"<the carefully cultivated professional cool and polished accent falls away at this request> What, d'ye really want me to sing to ye in a job interview?"
"Yes please, if you'd like to,"
I considered how much I wanted this job. And I came to a decision. And I opened my mouth and sang the (oddly appropriate) song of my people..."
"Oh Mary this London's a wonderful sight,
With the people here working by day and by night
They don't sow potatoes, nor barley nor wheat,
But there's gangs of them digging for gold in the street,
At least when I asked them that's what I was told
So I just took a hand in the digging for gold,
But for all this dear Mary I might as well be,
In the place where the dark Mournes sweep down to the sea..."
He applauded. And then we spoke of many things. And then we two parted. And the next morning he gave me a job. Rang me while we were on the train. And I whooped and cheered. And I rang everyone I could think of. And when some ill-bred wanker who had probably just been made redundant had the nerve to tut I looked him full in the eye and raised an eyebrow. That's as far as you're able to go on a train/the Tube without being arrested...
And we were on our way to the Tower of London! And of course when our guide asked if anyone was from Ireland we stuck up our hands and when he asked why we were in London I replied,
"I just got a job! They rang half an hour ago!"
And Dicky, elated and exuberant raised his arms and cried in the accent of every cheeky butler since the original Jeeves, "Ladies and gentlemen, this young lady has just become gainfully employed in the greatest city in the world. A hip hip hooray for the young lady! Now that'll be a nice interval before the husband hunt..."
And all was well with the world. We saw the Crown Jewels (Dicky: "The two foremost questions posed to me in the enactment of my office as tour guide. "WHERE are the Crown Jewels! And WHERE...are the toilets?") and we had chips and we had wine and good food and this was all wonderful until my mother, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, know of all things, Her Magnificent Omnipotnce and the origin of the phrase "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" rang and proposed a question:
"Would it not be better to stay and get some accommodation sorted for the autumn?"
Of course it would! I mean it eventually involved eight hours straight glued to Spareroom.co.uk, a full day trekking around London on one of the hottest days of the year and that ever residual panic you will all know. It's an awful lot of money and trust to spend in one go, finding somewhere to live, especially on your own. You don't know the area, don't know who you're dealing with and by the time you give over a deposit you feel every single mile between yourself and home. I imagine like a relationship. The first one I got into was a flat in Madrid and no sooner were we back in the UK after spending money, time and tears that the landlady rang up, changed her mind, was giving back the deposit and wished us the best.
And then people will say, "Why didn't you lawyer the shit out of her??" But that isn't how it works in real life. Drag her to court, demand she put us up, spend what could easily be six months and a lot of money embroiled in legal proceedings when we needed somewhere to live? No. In real life we took back the money and had to arrange to do it all again.
So, as life as in love, I was once bitten, forever shy. And that might explain my reaction when my mother filled me in on everything that could go horribly wrong (flaky landlord to internet scams) that I had to do all these complicated things to avoid (sign everything...EVERYTHING) Forgetting my friends were enjoying Angel Delight in the next room, I snapped and quasi-sobbed in an almost Italo-American accent in my panic:
"MA!! GAWD!! PLEASE!! I'M NOT GOING TO END UP SQUATTING IN SOME HOVEL COVERED IN MY OWN SHIT!!
Now she did find it funny, but at that stage she and shocked friends were the only ones in good humour. I was uncharacteristically worried sick...
We shall fast forward past the two days of intense hunting, because that's how fast things come and go in London. And eventually I found a room in Islington, ten minutes from The Angel, which filled me with delight because my knowledge of London is squarely based on the Monopoly board. And my landlady Angela is the salt of the earth. So that's were I am for the first two months of life in London and I couldn't be happier.
Of course the city itself gave me signs. Now I may not be the "spiritual sort interested in the healing arts and power of the earth" that some 42 year old Malaysian man wanted to share his flat with but every time I worried if I was doing the right thing I would see a penny on the street, turn a corner and find a Benet's of Cambridge (an ice cream shop that I know well in Cambridge itself), see an ad for Dame Edna at the Palladium or run into a Starbucks to surf Spareroom and hear my song playing. Frank Sinatra "That's Life" for those of you curious. And seeing all of these familiar things I loved, well, I'd have a heart of stone if I didn't take them as a sign...
But there you have it! That is the story of how one week saw me from crawling up the walls at home, wracked with existential uncertainty to excitement at the prospect of moving the London to start a proper job. But there'll be some homesickness as well.
I found a postcard in Spitalfields Market. A one hundred year old postcard sent from that place I sang of, where the dark Mournes sweep down to the sea to a place called Downpatrick which nowadays is fifteen minutes up the road by car. My daddy, (and believe me if you all met him you would love him, one of the sweetest men in the world, think of him as Dahl's character Grandpa Joe and my Mummy as a 1st class degree holding Hyacinth Bouquet, not Bucket darling and you're there), Anywho my daddy adores history and read this postcard in delight, glasses perched on the end of his nose. And in the car on the way back from the airport we pulled in at a Spar and I asked jokingly, "Daddy, daddy, can you get me a Porky Pig (a 60p ice lolly we devoured as children) please?" And he replied solemnly, "Of course I will! Be you five or fifty, unemployed or the editor of the Times you'll always be my child and I shall always get you ice lollies."
Oh Dad...
But enough, C S Lewis said that if we are brave and patient the things to come are infinitely better than the things we leave behind, though you can be your bum (can't say "ass" so close to a mention of my Daddy...) I'll be home as often as possible for the family.
And in the spirit of that advice from the man who wrote my childhood though he didn't know it, I take you back to where I am sitting in light of the approaching dawn (symbolism see, new day imagery, I really am a well good writer) looking speculatively at the list Gareth of Stansted almost did away with and tap the next two items thoughtfully...
4. FALL IN LOVE
5. BE READ
And they may be the last things on my list but I have a feeling they'll be the hardest.
The search of a twenty-something for love and literature in the city of London then! But surely there will be the occasional obstacles and impositions that every twenty-something will know only too well. We can but hope that from now on the blog does not descend into whiny mediocrity, spouting rubbish about real life and romance like a two-bit Bridget Jones wannabe. It shall not be so!
Thus next week, the gearing up to leave; the loose ends tied, the friends good byed, last Ulster fried, and all implied in the move from the Dark Mournes to London Town.
All that remains is to thank so many who were rooting for me and didn't hesitate to make congratulations known. I must remember that short as a week was, this dream has been alive since 2009 and the job hunt was in full swing since November. And now I shall pour some white wine, drag a chair out the back under unseasonal blue sky, surrounded by leafy trees, green fields and the purple haze of the mountains in the not-so-distance. I shall turn up Olly Murs "Right place, right time," let the apt lyrics wash over me and lie back to contemplate my happy beginning...
xo
Monday, 8 July 2013
Those small, sweet, serendipitous days
"You're over thirty, speed limit's there for a reason"
"What are you, my mother?"
"Nope, but if Mammy was here she'd say exactly the same thing."
<sudden burst of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" as yours truly's mobile sounds>
"Buggery, buggery, buggery. Get that, it's probably the job centre about my National Insurance number <continues to ramble as sister answers phone> but if they try and spell aloud one more word that a primary school child could make out of alphabetty spaghetti tell them to stick their jobseekers JSA 1 forms up their...
..."It's London company, I told them to call again in fifteen minutes so we'll just about have time to get ho...THIRTY MILE AN HOUR, IT'S THIRTY MILES AN HOUR, STICK TO THE F**KING SPEED LIMIT!!"
As I write this I am remembering the events of Tuesday last. I have used a free narrative construction of time. Because I am a well good writer. At the moment Ireland is drenched in 25 degree heat and everyone is naked. I approve. Of everyone. Nothing wrong with any of that. I am slathered in factor fifty, iced Shloer (drink of Christmas and champions) in hand and reclining out the back, a view of lush rolling farmland and the green, green hills of home. La vita é bella. Murray got his groove on and I have a final stage interview with lovely London company on Thursday. Aplausos.
Mind you, trouble and strife make for better writing but we shall endure.
That Tuesday we were driving home from making my initial claim for Job Seeker's Allowance. I am officially on the dole. There's about the same level of Jeremy Kyle, Sixteen and Pregnant repeats and Keeping up with the Kardashians but I have yet to succumb to any urges to drink Buckfast in Superdry gear while betting on the horses. Who knew stereotypes were a load of old rubbish?
Some hold true though. Closest home town's social security office must be Dante's fifth circle of hell, dedicated to the wrathful and the sullen. Populated by irate, keening women who were wrathful because "my Shane's EMA was taken off him and sure he only didn't go for a week because he had a wee job on a site there, do you not want people to support themselves?" and dull eyed, weary civil servants.
Mind you within five seconds of filling out forms I was keen to send Marty (all names changed for reasons of anonymity and fear of legal challenges) to the eighth part of the eighth circle of fraudulent advisors and evil counsellors. Well, not so much evil. More robotic and vague, as if all joy had been stolen from long ago. Observe;
"Now you're for Job Seeker's Allowance, that's with two e's in Seeker and then ah-el-el-eau-double.ye-ah-en-see-eeee. And you're an initial claim, that's eye-en..."
"Stahp. Just stahp. Stop this nonsense. Your embarrassing me and yourself. Now usually I don't do this because I don't think a person's university or lack of one tells you what they are like, just what they themselves like, but THIS. This is a degree from prestigious university. I can spell res ipsa loquitur and volenti non fit inuruia. I once got through twenty cards in a minute during a game of Articulate. I think I can just about manage to spell allowance..."
Then there was a bit of a debacle because I didn't have my national insurance number card/letter on me. I know it. I know it off by heart, like my PIN and my passwords and all the words to Remix to Ignition. But they just wouldn't let me give it to them!
(That sounded a bit rude, apologies, been watching a bit too much Carry On and when I read my last sentence over, Kenneth Williams just popped into my head to say "Don't be disgusting!" Funny, same reaction when auntie was wondering where she'd parked her car and innocently stated "I should be up against a wall somewhere...")
Anyway, thus spake the jobcentre lady, "Now it has to be a hundred per cent so I'd really like you to go home and get it right. You can always come back another day."
And this jobsworth-ness was the reason for snarling and gnashing of teeth and blatant disregard for the speed limit when lovely London company called me on the way home. And with that one sweet, small, serendipitous phone call (open beside computer, "How to Write like Twain, Chapter One, repetition of title in main body of work...) I was set for London this coming Wednesday and a final stage interview with a company I dearly want to be a part of. Dangling preposition there, Twain is spinning in his grave. Or simply doesn't care, he did go hard at the bourbon...
And with that suddenly all questions from aunties and uncles at our family shindig this Sunday were fielded well. I must just add for the Catholics that this was in fact Cemetery Sunday. For the non-believers among you (which will include some Norn Irish Catholics, we're really more of a culture than a religious affiliation) this is where you say Mass in the graveyard as we all stand around our dearly departed, sprinkle on the Holy Water and ask intercession for forgiveness of sins and the glory of the life everlasting, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Then we all go back to our house for wee triangular sandwiches and a lot of cake. And there was even some Ferrero Rocher this year. Classy.
But I understand this trying time for graduates when they go home. Or those made redundant and recently out of a job. Or those who have decided to take a career break. There will always be the question "what now?" There was a marvellous quote from The Iron Lady, I don't know if it was from She Who Must Be Obeyed, Thatcher herself, but it was "It used to be about doing something, now it's about being someone."
I think we can go one step further, that now and maybe as in the past, what we do is who we are. I once read an obituary of a young solicitor who had died at the age of thirty-six and the entirety of that piece, as long as this post, could be summed up as so. “She was a solicitor, a very good solicitor, she worked here, she could have gone on working here, her colleagues will miss her.” It made me so sad for her for reasons that had nothing to do with her death and everything to do with her life. She shouldn’t have ended her days a lawyer and nothing more. And I know that isn't the whole story but it's what was newsworthy. And 'tis sad.
But not knowing what we want to do or where we want to go is not sad. This is a great and wonderful world of choice. Let me tell something to you in the voice of that Latino penguin from Happy Feet. Chou are taking the time to think, ho'kay? Es nothing wrong with this. Es good. You work, you work for forty, maybe fifty years. You maybe marry, make babies, have homes, have the worries. Now, today, you have only decisions. And now today no worries about what you have become. The worries tomorrow or never at all. And I like the fifty-fifty odds...
That got very Dr Phil very quickly! Elsewhere, beyond the advice giving, I need only tell you life goes on at home. That reminds me, we rescued a little baby bird. It can't fly yet, but it will. I have taken to him á la Brookes and Jake in Shawshank Redemption. Our little sheep dog is unable to understand why he has been usurped in the cuteness arena and has taken to whining and pawing at my feet in a blatant attempt to curry favour. It worked.
"Oh yers, oh yers, oh yers my little puppy! Who's a good doggie? Oh yes it is you, it is you!! Rolly over, rolly over...Good boy! Gawd, you have us all eating out of the palm of your...paw. Dinner handed to you, pets galore, snoozing in the sun. Talk about welfare and benefits. Dog's life. But here, how can you have a dog's life but the dog days at the same time?"
And there I think we must leave me, sprawling out on our front porch talking to a tongue-panting, tail-wagging cutie who looks like he is nodding sagely to every word I say. Later on I may take a spin down to the seaside and get me a baby cone with chocolate sprinkles and a flake in. I'll eat it in the car, looking out at the place where the dark mountains sweep down to the sea. And I'll have the windows down and Macklemore's Thrift Shop thrumming from the speakers. And I'll sing along as so; "Walk into the club like what's up, I got a big hello community support officer." And she will ask me to keep it down and think of the older residents. Rebel without a cause innit.
This has all already happened, I am using another narrative device. But it is a lovely ending.
And so next time I can hear London Calling just as surely as it called The Clash and I hear the streets are paved with gold. I shall set off, like Dick Whittington before me, and with the god's good graces I shall have a tale or two to tell when I get back.
xo
"What are you, my mother?"
"Nope, but if Mammy was here she'd say exactly the same thing."
<sudden burst of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" as yours truly's mobile sounds>
"Buggery, buggery, buggery. Get that, it's probably the job centre about my National Insurance number <continues to ramble as sister answers phone> but if they try and spell aloud one more word that a primary school child could make out of alphabetty spaghetti tell them to stick their jobseekers JSA 1 forms up their...
..."It's London company, I told them to call again in fifteen minutes so we'll just about have time to get ho...THIRTY MILE AN HOUR, IT'S THIRTY MILES AN HOUR, STICK TO THE F**KING SPEED LIMIT!!"
As I write this I am remembering the events of Tuesday last. I have used a free narrative construction of time. Because I am a well good writer. At the moment Ireland is drenched in 25 degree heat and everyone is naked. I approve. Of everyone. Nothing wrong with any of that. I am slathered in factor fifty, iced Shloer (drink of Christmas and champions) in hand and reclining out the back, a view of lush rolling farmland and the green, green hills of home. La vita é bella. Murray got his groove on and I have a final stage interview with lovely London company on Thursday. Aplausos.
Mind you, trouble and strife make for better writing but we shall endure.
That Tuesday we were driving home from making my initial claim for Job Seeker's Allowance. I am officially on the dole. There's about the same level of Jeremy Kyle, Sixteen and Pregnant repeats and Keeping up with the Kardashians but I have yet to succumb to any urges to drink Buckfast in Superdry gear while betting on the horses. Who knew stereotypes were a load of old rubbish?
Some hold true though. Closest home town's social security office must be Dante's fifth circle of hell, dedicated to the wrathful and the sullen. Populated by irate, keening women who were wrathful because "my Shane's EMA was taken off him and sure he only didn't go for a week because he had a wee job on a site there, do you not want people to support themselves?" and dull eyed, weary civil servants.
Mind you within five seconds of filling out forms I was keen to send Marty (all names changed for reasons of anonymity and fear of legal challenges) to the eighth part of the eighth circle of fraudulent advisors and evil counsellors. Well, not so much evil. More robotic and vague, as if all joy had been stolen from long ago. Observe;
"Now you're for Job Seeker's Allowance, that's with two e's in Seeker and then ah-el-el-eau-double.ye-ah-en-see-eeee. And you're an initial claim, that's eye-en..."
"Stahp. Just stahp. Stop this nonsense. Your embarrassing me and yourself. Now usually I don't do this because I don't think a person's university or lack of one tells you what they are like, just what they themselves like, but THIS. This is a degree from prestigious university. I can spell res ipsa loquitur and volenti non fit inuruia. I once got through twenty cards in a minute during a game of Articulate. I think I can just about manage to spell allowance..."
Then there was a bit of a debacle because I didn't have my national insurance number card/letter on me. I know it. I know it off by heart, like my PIN and my passwords and all the words to Remix to Ignition. But they just wouldn't let me give it to them!
(That sounded a bit rude, apologies, been watching a bit too much Carry On and when I read my last sentence over, Kenneth Williams just popped into my head to say "Don't be disgusting!" Funny, same reaction when auntie was wondering where she'd parked her car and innocently stated "I should be up against a wall somewhere...")
Anyway, thus spake the jobcentre lady, "Now it has to be a hundred per cent so I'd really like you to go home and get it right. You can always come back another day."
And this jobsworth-ness was the reason for snarling and gnashing of teeth and blatant disregard for the speed limit when lovely London company called me on the way home. And with that one sweet, small, serendipitous phone call (open beside computer, "How to Write like Twain, Chapter One, repetition of title in main body of work...) I was set for London this coming Wednesday and a final stage interview with a company I dearly want to be a part of. Dangling preposition there, Twain is spinning in his grave. Or simply doesn't care, he did go hard at the bourbon...
And with that suddenly all questions from aunties and uncles at our family shindig this Sunday were fielded well. I must just add for the Catholics that this was in fact Cemetery Sunday. For the non-believers among you (which will include some Norn Irish Catholics, we're really more of a culture than a religious affiliation) this is where you say Mass in the graveyard as we all stand around our dearly departed, sprinkle on the Holy Water and ask intercession for forgiveness of sins and the glory of the life everlasting, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Then we all go back to our house for wee triangular sandwiches and a lot of cake. And there was even some Ferrero Rocher this year. Classy.
But I understand this trying time for graduates when they go home. Or those made redundant and recently out of a job. Or those who have decided to take a career break. There will always be the question "what now?" There was a marvellous quote from The Iron Lady, I don't know if it was from She Who Must Be Obeyed, Thatcher herself, but it was "It used to be about doing something, now it's about being someone."
I think we can go one step further, that now and maybe as in the past, what we do is who we are. I once read an obituary of a young solicitor who had died at the age of thirty-six and the entirety of that piece, as long as this post, could be summed up as so. “She was a solicitor, a very good solicitor, she worked here, she could have gone on working here, her colleagues will miss her.” It made me so sad for her for reasons that had nothing to do with her death and everything to do with her life. She shouldn’t have ended her days a lawyer and nothing more. And I know that isn't the whole story but it's what was newsworthy. And 'tis sad.
But not knowing what we want to do or where we want to go is not sad. This is a great and wonderful world of choice. Let me tell something to you in the voice of that Latino penguin from Happy Feet. Chou are taking the time to think, ho'kay? Es nothing wrong with this. Es good. You work, you work for forty, maybe fifty years. You maybe marry, make babies, have homes, have the worries. Now, today, you have only decisions. And now today no worries about what you have become. The worries tomorrow or never at all. And I like the fifty-fifty odds...
That got very Dr Phil very quickly! Elsewhere, beyond the advice giving, I need only tell you life goes on at home. That reminds me, we rescued a little baby bird. It can't fly yet, but it will. I have taken to him á la Brookes and Jake in Shawshank Redemption. Our little sheep dog is unable to understand why he has been usurped in the cuteness arena and has taken to whining and pawing at my feet in a blatant attempt to curry favour. It worked.
"Oh yers, oh yers, oh yers my little puppy! Who's a good doggie? Oh yes it is you, it is you!! Rolly over, rolly over...Good boy! Gawd, you have us all eating out of the palm of your...paw. Dinner handed to you, pets galore, snoozing in the sun. Talk about welfare and benefits. Dog's life. But here, how can you have a dog's life but the dog days at the same time?"
And there I think we must leave me, sprawling out on our front porch talking to a tongue-panting, tail-wagging cutie who looks like he is nodding sagely to every word I say. Later on I may take a spin down to the seaside and get me a baby cone with chocolate sprinkles and a flake in. I'll eat it in the car, looking out at the place where the dark mountains sweep down to the sea. And I'll have the windows down and Macklemore's Thrift Shop thrumming from the speakers. And I'll sing along as so; "Walk into the club like what's up, I got a big hello community support officer." And she will ask me to keep it down and think of the older residents. Rebel without a cause innit.
This has all already happened, I am using another narrative device. But it is a lovely ending.
And so next time I can hear London Calling just as surely as it called The Clash and I hear the streets are paved with gold. I shall set off, like Dick Whittington before me, and with the god's good graces I shall have a tale or two to tell when I get back.
xo
Monday, 1 July 2013
In Jobs We Trust
This is a blog about great expectations.
On this 27th June past I knelt to receive a BA Hons degree from prestigious university swathed in the black cotton of my gown, the (synthetic) white fur of my hood and the sure and certain knowledge the whole wide world and all its adventures awaited.
This is also a blog about change.
This 1st July past I pulled up to draughty parish hall in my darling father's Renault and climbed out to Zumba an hour away among a dozen forty-somethings. We danced to Pitbull and club remixes of Las Ketchup and Rocky. There was a lot of thrusting and unfortunate gyrations. Emmanuel, our tiny lithe instructor, camper than a row of pink tents with a thick, coarse, sandpapery Belfast accent, is the cause of this provocative display. We are the back-up dancers Jay Z ordered from SAGA. Except me. In the words of Macklemore, "I rocked that muthaf**ker."
And it is a blog about uncertainty.
Let me take you to the inbetween times. The times where I watched England slip away from beneath the wheels of my Easyjet flight to Belfast International and when a small, perhaps naïve voice said, "We were supposed to be in London..."
Too right we were. Me and small, naïve voice were supposed to have been gainfully employed by some, maybe small, London company. We were supposed to be finding a serviceable flat. We were supposed to be independent and cosmopolitan. We were not supposed to be flying back to our ancestral home.
This is also a blog about the times in which we live, staggering unemployment and all.
And I know this is what a vast and uncounted number of you are thinking in your heart of hearts. What do I do now? Where do I go? Will I get stuck? Where will I live? Who will I love? What is my life??? And I am here to tell you that it is perfectly alright to be thinking these thoughts and be a little bit depressed, yea verily, even unto wandering into the night at prestigious university town, finding a pub, ordering a cider, staring moodily into it and then exclaiming, "I could have been somebody Frank! I coulda been a contender. Instead of being a bum. Which is what I am." Patrons believed me to be an impromptu movie quote pub quiz... In a minute I will tell you to snap out of it and think positive, but so will so many and they won't understand the need, for at least a little while, to be melancholy.
But, this is also a blog about hope.
Enough! We have dreams! And I say unto you, I'm getting mine, better go and get yours. Keep up your hard work and don't lose your happy thoughts. I know many twenty-somethings are all in the same boat so I took it upon myself to write a bit of a ship's log.
There are very few words more depressing that "this year we received applications from a vast number of highly qualified and very able candidates. Unfortunately..." And it is there that the vast majority of us stop reading, maybe for good, maybe long enough to bang our heads against the keyboard before we have to pull ourselves together and reply with optimistic words and thanks.
I myself have read these words 72 times at the last count. I've been applying for jobs since November. So far, so poorly. But if you tickle us, do we not laugh? And if you try and try and try again, do not good things follow?
A very dear friend once said to me, "Darlin', if people read what you write you're a professional, but even if you write in obscurity forever, you'll still be a writer." I think he stole it from Wilde but I won't comment, it was a lovely thought, even second hand...
And at its heart this is a blog about not giving up.
So write I shall. I am the writer of Madrid: A Cautionary Tale which was a rip roaring success about my trials and triumphs in the capital city of Spain. And I am now the writer of "The Twenty-Somethings." And through this blog we'll go through that grubby and much handled piece of paper I hoked from my pocket as the trolley dollies of Easyjet unfastened the dining cart. The first few points read:
3. MOVE TO LONDON
4. FALL IN LOVE
5. BE READ
A line is drawn through number one. And I very much hope that the rest will follow in time. As I hope you will all follow me on my weekly perusals of life after university. It might be narcissistic prattle. It might be insanely useful. Who can say...
And so! Next week! Is the light at the end of the tunnel a train? How intimate can one get with Her Majesty's Department of Work and Pensions? And a beginners guide to fielding the "What now, young lady?" Q&A from extended family!
xo
On this 27th June past I knelt to receive a BA Hons degree from prestigious university swathed in the black cotton of my gown, the (synthetic) white fur of my hood and the sure and certain knowledge the whole wide world and all its adventures awaited.
This is also a blog about change.
This 1st July past I pulled up to draughty parish hall in my darling father's Renault and climbed out to Zumba an hour away among a dozen forty-somethings. We danced to Pitbull and club remixes of Las Ketchup and Rocky. There was a lot of thrusting and unfortunate gyrations. Emmanuel, our tiny lithe instructor, camper than a row of pink tents with a thick, coarse, sandpapery Belfast accent, is the cause of this provocative display. We are the back-up dancers Jay Z ordered from SAGA. Except me. In the words of Macklemore, "I rocked that muthaf**ker."
And it is a blog about uncertainty.
Let me take you to the inbetween times. The times where I watched England slip away from beneath the wheels of my Easyjet flight to Belfast International and when a small, perhaps naïve voice said, "We were supposed to be in London..."
Too right we were. Me and small, naïve voice were supposed to have been gainfully employed by some, maybe small, London company. We were supposed to be finding a serviceable flat. We were supposed to be independent and cosmopolitan. We were not supposed to be flying back to our ancestral home.
This is also a blog about the times in which we live, staggering unemployment and all.
And I know this is what a vast and uncounted number of you are thinking in your heart of hearts. What do I do now? Where do I go? Will I get stuck? Where will I live? Who will I love? What is my life??? And I am here to tell you that it is perfectly alright to be thinking these thoughts and be a little bit depressed, yea verily, even unto wandering into the night at prestigious university town, finding a pub, ordering a cider, staring moodily into it and then exclaiming, "I could have been somebody Frank! I coulda been a contender. Instead of being a bum. Which is what I am." Patrons believed me to be an impromptu movie quote pub quiz... In a minute I will tell you to snap out of it and think positive, but so will so many and they won't understand the need, for at least a little while, to be melancholy.
But, this is also a blog about hope.
Enough! We have dreams! And I say unto you, I'm getting mine, better go and get yours. Keep up your hard work and don't lose your happy thoughts. I know many twenty-somethings are all in the same boat so I took it upon myself to write a bit of a ship's log.
There are very few words more depressing that "this year we received applications from a vast number of highly qualified and very able candidates. Unfortunately..." And it is there that the vast majority of us stop reading, maybe for good, maybe long enough to bang our heads against the keyboard before we have to pull ourselves together and reply with optimistic words and thanks.
I myself have read these words 72 times at the last count. I've been applying for jobs since November. So far, so poorly. But if you tickle us, do we not laugh? And if you try and try and try again, do not good things follow?
A very dear friend once said to me, "Darlin', if people read what you write you're a professional, but even if you write in obscurity forever, you'll still be a writer." I think he stole it from Wilde but I won't comment, it was a lovely thought, even second hand...
And at its heart this is a blog about not giving up.
So write I shall. I am the writer of Madrid: A Cautionary Tale which was a rip roaring success about my trials and triumphs in the capital city of Spain. And I am now the writer of "The Twenty-Somethings." And through this blog we'll go through that grubby and much handled piece of paper I hoked from my pocket as the trolley dollies of Easyjet unfastened the dining cart. The first few points read:
- GRADUATE FROM PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITY
3. MOVE TO LONDON
4. FALL IN LOVE
5. BE READ
A line is drawn through number one. And I very much hope that the rest will follow in time. As I hope you will all follow me on my weekly perusals of life after university. It might be narcissistic prattle. It might be insanely useful. Who can say...
And so! Next week! Is the light at the end of the tunnel a train? How intimate can one get with Her Majesty's Department of Work and Pensions? And a beginners guide to fielding the "What now, young lady?" Q&A from extended family!
xo
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