Happy February. I’ll be turning 31 this month, which feels somehow more momentous than when I turned 30, because I did that in India and I had plenty of other stuff going on to distract me. There was that, and the fact that now I’m home, what happens in the next year is uncertain, so being 31 is going to be the start of an interesting time – the change of direction I’m hoping for, work, a place to live, all of this is up in the air at the moment. My friends are almost without exception preoccupied with houses and babies – that all seems as far away now as it ever has.
I just got back from a weekend in London, my first in over a year, the first since getting back from the trip, and the first since spending the last month hidden in Suffolk. You could say I’d washed London out of my hair. Now I need to wash my hair again. Walking between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, old buildings covered in dirt and falling apart at the seams look like a condemned theme park. It feels like a fine film of grease is on everything, and just being out and about in London is enough to make you wish you had a giant fresh wipe or portable shower with you. It’s not just the dirt. When you come back to London as an outsider, you’re distinctly aware of an undercurrent of stress that kicks in as soon as you get inside the M25, which on a good day could be called excitement, on any other day just stress. There’s that and the diet – it’s ridiculously easy to drink too much and eat too much crap. I drank too much quite a bit in London, ended up waking up on a train in Reading when I was only supposed to be going to Clapham, or having teenagers throw peanuts at my head as I slept drunkenly on the night bus from Trafalgar Square.
When I was living in London, I spent most of my time alternating between loving it and hating it – a common reaction, as you discover when enough of you are sat around a table in a pub talking about what a pain in the neck London is. You can stroll from a gallery or a cinema to a Wagamama, then to one of a plethora of bustling pubs full of all types of interesting people, full of noodle soup and the feeling of being in a modern, cosmopolitan place where anything goes – then reality kicks in and you’re on a tube train that smells like a hamster cage, stuck with your nostrils embedded in the moist armpit of an obese man, drinks cans rolling down the aisles, and paralytic Aussies swinging from the hand rails while you try not to spill your ludicrously overpriced coffee or get yourself tied in knots with your iPod headphones.
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