Day 38-40: London

Highlights:

• Getting drunk with my sister on Lidl Prosecco, and learning about Morwenna's medieval re-enactment parents
• Kindle Fire, imdb scene actors recognition
• Baby Charge and Saturday morning Coffee Club
• Reunion drinks with a few friends in the White Hart pub near Waterloo
• Learning that The Hour is coming back to BBC next week (starring Ben Wishaw, Romola Garai and Dominic West)

Lowlights:

• Fern’s bag getting stolen in the White Hart pub near Waterloo
• Kindle Fire not able to charge whilst in use

So, I considered keeping a daily blog on returning to London. It would force me to make the most of the city, right? Make sure I don’t just sit around watching back series of Diagnosis Murder? But after three days and only having a gym trip, window cleaning session (A THREE HOUR WINDOW CLEANING SESSION) and a nice nut roast Sunday Dinner to talk about, it occurred to me that my home life may not be interesting enough to write about on a daily basis. So instead, I’m going to make it every few days, or once a week, in the hope that I’ve done something more entertaining than cook beans on toast in that period. I’ve had a great few days though being back in London. After all that moaning I saw on Facebook about weather, London’s been brilliant. What are you guys talking about? Check out those blue skies and that mild weather*! Those autumn leaves and all that.  

THURSDAY

So on my first day back I ended up waking really early (well, 8am). I had a restless sleep on my memory foam. I think the problem is that it really is almost too comfy. Falling asleep means you miss out on some good comfort awareness, and that dilemma plays on your mind during the night. Anyway, despite being 8am I decided to just get up and make the most of my first day back in London. I went to suss out the kitchen food situation, but it was pretty poorly stocked. We had one egg. No milk or bread, and just one egg. 

Still, it made me get dressed and head to the shops rather than slum about. It took me a while to get ready. I was so excited about the idea of being able to wear different clothes, I tried on about three outfits before settling on a different pair of jeans and a SoundCloud t-shirt. With sleeves! That felt particularly luxurious after 5 weeks of only cutoffs. BACK STORY ALERT (BSA) START: I had sent a unsolicited job application to SoundCloud in Berlin, sending along a book of gig tickets I’d put together over the years to prove my love of music. I figured I had nothing to lose. I received an email from HR saying they had nothing relevant but to keep an eye on the post as they’d sent me a gift. More badges than you can shake a stick at, a few stickers (I might plaster one of the cars on the estate) and a SoundCloud T-Shirt. Not bad, eh? END

I did relatively little for the rest of the day, though I did start exploring my Kindle Fire. It’s a really decent product. Compared to an expensive iPad, it does the same thing, including letting you access music and books from the Amazon Cloud, or storing them on the device, but for a much lower value. You obviously lose a few things in the price drop, but given that you can browse the web, read books, download email and facebook apps, I think it’s worth spending less if you’re not massively in demand of the extra iPad features. The coolest function is when watching videos (you have to have a lovefilm subscription, though you can stream an adequate library with their £4.99/month deal), if you tap the screen, without stopping the video an imdb box pops up giving you links to the actors in the exact scene you’re watching. So if you ever have that ‘Shit! I know that actor. Where are they from? Lemme think, lemme think. Mmmmmmmmmmhhhh’ moment, you can just click on the link and a pop up will appear from imdb showing you their history, briefly pausing the video. You can close the pop-up and resume the video in a second. So after a nice day paying my bills, tidying my room, going to the gym and playing with my Kindle Fire, I came over all helpful and felt the urge to cook dinner (which was a version of this here) and then wash up. Great first day back.

FRIDAY

This was the day I decided not to write a daily blog, because I realised Thursday and Friday’s activities really couldn’t warrant two whole posts. I've given it my best, excessively-detailed shot though. Guys, you've in for an excruciating treat.

So despite the length of this post, Friday was actually a relatively un-eventful day, despite my best plans to make it at least productive (if not interesting) by going through my photos and loading the appropriate ones onto this blog and checking the old posts for spelling and grammatical errors. However I was spurned by some appallingly slow Sky internet and the new Everything Everywhere network on my phone (please watch this amazing Kevin Bacon advert here) which didn’t give me Anything, Anywhere. I had evening plans with my sister though; her boyfriend Jeff was moving back to New Zealand after his Visa had run out, and so I figured she probably needed a little comfort. I was killing time with Tony and Lewis when I received a call from my Dad saying he was in town for work drinks, and wondered if I wanted to meet beforehand. That beat watching Tony try to reload his online Call of Duty game for the billionth time. 

So I went to meet Dad for an early dinner/drink near Covent Garden; we were supposed to meet at Covent Garden station itself but he heard the overhead announcement declare that there were no escalators at Covent Garden, so thought it better to get off at Leicester Square instead because he has a bad leg. That’s all well and good, but a little misleading of the voice lady perhaps as instead of escalators, Covent Garden is equipped with lifts which  would presumably have actually been a better option for his leg...We faffed a bit (Dad - “I’m by the Singing in the Rain theatre”. Me - “Well, I’m by the big Steakhouse at our actual meeting point and haven’t yet managed to learn all theatres and their current productions by heart, so have no idea where Singing in the Rain is showing at the moment”**), but eventually caught up. He wanted dinner so we went to - wait for it - Pizza Hut. Hut. Not Express, but Hut. What a blast from the past. He ordered a Pizza and I ordered the quite tasty House Malbec (bit of a nice grape choice for PH, isn’t it?). His pizza came with a salad bowl, so I spent a good five minutes trying to cram as much in it as possible, being careful not to waste space with lettuce or unstackable tortilla crisps. Dad gave me some family updates and then told me about my their slightly bemusing/concerning 5th November experience. 

BSA START: Billericay holds a HUGE firework night every year on the Saturday closest to 5th November, so we’ve all paid our increasing ticket fare to go most years since I was born (Mum’s got a great anecdote/horror story about how she brought me as a baby to Lake Meadows and I started screaming my head off at the sound of the first firework. She was left stranded without my Dad, trying to push a huge old-fashioned pram with a screaming baby inside through huge crowds and muddy walkways, almost crying herself. In my defence, probably not a good move on my parents’ part to bring a baby whose default noise was to scream until its throat was sore, and then scream a little more after that, to a firework night). There’s an early bonfire and burning of Guy Fawkes (which I’ve only bothered to go to one year when my brother, a Beaver at the time, helped carry the dummy Guy Fawkes to burn horrifically onto the fire. Definitely an appropriate activity for 6 year olds), some funfair rides and a stage hosted by Martin and Sue (and the Morning Crew) from Essex FM, featuring such pop-acts as the Cheeky Girls and a lot of X Factor failures. This is all followed by a 20-30 minute mega-display where the fireworks go off in time to songs like Live and Let Die, a few standard classical pieces, and then last year a playlist with titles that included the word fire (Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’, the Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ and Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’) END. 

On the actual Guy Fawkes Night (for international readers see here), for about the past 10 years, we’ve alternated with the Wild family (they used to live four houses from us, and their eldest son is my brother’s friend) hosting a mini-firework display in our gardens. This year it was at the Wilds’ new house in Billericay. 

It’s always been a relatively unsafe affair; one year a firework fell over just after it was lit and it bounced around the garden, off the wall and fences and only just missing us as we scrambled out of the way. Like all potentially-mutilating firework accidents (we’ve all seen the public service warning posters), we didn’t even take it that seriously at the time, and sort of shrieked happily as it whooshed a few centimetres past our little kiddy legs. Mum might have been the only one screaming with sensible parental fear. So for 2012 both families bought a box and headed out into the garden to start their display at a reasonable 9pm. After a few fireworks, they suddenly hear yelling from over the fence down the end of the garden; the Wilds’ new neighbour is shouting “What do you think you’re doing? Stop those f****ing fireworks”. My Dad said this guy yelled and swore a few more times before they started defending themselves, explaining (possibly using a few choice swearwords of their own) that it was 5th November, and they just had a mini display that wouldn’t last much longer. The guy continued yelling, so the Wilds asked if they could perhaps come over and talk about it sensibly. The guy then said: You want to f****ing come over here? Do you? Come the f*** on then. Come f****ing talk to me”. After a bit more confrontational argument, the Wild/Pearson party decided to just carry on regardless (there weren’t many more fireworks to light and it was still only about 9.45pm) when suddenly the neighbour next door turned his sprinkler system on and directed it towards the Wilds’ garden. Comically, it fell so short that it didn’t even reach the firework area, let alone the people, and I’m sure everyone’s victorious laughter antagonised this guy even further. He then slumped off back to his house defeated (or to plot a revenge strategy). For the finale they had a nice Roman Candle from one of the sets. A nice, gentle ending at around 10pm. They lit it and stood back in anticipation of some nice, soft firework fizzle. Only, turns out it wasn’t a Roman Candle after all. No, it was in fact the loudest firework of the night and let off tremendous BOOMs every five seconds for the next three minutes. Whoopsy. Way to stick it to the F-word Neighbour. Keep an eye out for a future post about the Wilds being letter bombed or the victims of egging. 

After leaving Dad and having a little wander around the back of Covent Garden to see the Christmas Lights, I went to my sister’s. I stopped off at the Finsbury Park Lidl for a £3 bouquet of Autumn Sunset flowers and a £5.99 bottle of Prosecco. Not my first time in that store. I know exactly where to locate those bargains. Janine, a bit tearful in her heartbreak, appreciated the expense and we spent the evening showing each other photos and chatting with her housemates (my old housemates too, actually. Before moving to Bermondsey, I lived with Fleur, Jo and Janine, before letting my room out to Morwenna). 

Having only shown housemate Morwenna around the flat before I moved out and having only seen her once since, I hadn’t actually get to know her that well. Turns out she’s really cool and interesting. She explained about bad Obama’s Guantanamo continuation plans and later when I mentioned Ljubljana and asked if anyone had been to Slovenia (I can guarantee that about 99.2% of people I ever ask this to will say no), it turned out she had been there a few times! Her family had taken her and her sisters on holiday there when they were younger, and she’d been back with friends since. Morwenna’s parents are Celtic Irish, hence her being named Morwenna (she has a lot of problems with other people’s pronunciations, despite the name being completely phonetic. More-when-ah. She gets a lot of Morweeeeenas, and in her current temp job they’ve actually spelt her name Morweena on her temp badge to accommodate their version. Being called Nicola 50% of the time, I can sympathise). Her siblings are called Aisling (Ash-lin) and Angharrad (Ang-harod), so they have it a little worse I think, and one of them even has the middle name Attracta. Sure, it looks nice written down, but it is actually pronounced ‘a tractor’...Unsurprisingly she didn’t tell the priest about this name when she got married. Morwenna’s parents (Mary and Gerry (which in an Irish accent, this sounds like Jairrrh)) used to take the kids to North Poland for their holidays, accompanying donated goods from their Church to needy families in communist Poland. They drove all the way, stopping off every night to camp out and consequently seeing a lot of mainland Western Europe. They stayed with a nice Polish family the first year, and every year after that they went back to join them. The Slovenian holiday was a result of flooding in Poland and the 1980/90s equivalent of googling to find another suitable location to drive to. Morwenna describes her family as being ‘quite weird’, and I think they sound really cool (her parents play in a Medieval band and go to re-enactments in full court attire; her Dad is a tailor and so they even made the Medieval outfits themselves). 

Morwenna went to bed, and then Fleur hung with us for a bit. She surprised me by telling me she’d been reading my blog every day***, and telling me interesting stories about the time she was forced to go on an French Exchange (whilst still in Junior School!!!) and then for a year during university when she lived in Pigalle. The quality red light district area of Paris. The most interesting/creepy story she told was about a time she was waiting for a cab after a night out, and a car with four men rolled past, calling “Taxi!”. They called her 'poupee' (which I think means ‘doll’), a few other endearments and then on her sensible lack of response started calling her ‘salop’ (bastard?) and 'bitch' (erm...bitch). That French charm.

SATURDAY

I stayed the night at my sister’s, and we 100% confirmed between us that the other didn’t snore, just in case other bed partners had been too polite to tell us. We were woken up early by the check-in calls Janine receives from her colleagues in Liberia. Her company is working on a mining project out there (Liberia sounded like it could be a made up country before I heard about it from her) and as it’s at the planning stage with local tribes, it’s a little risky. A few quick facts for you about Liberia:

• Situated in West Africa next to snazzy Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast (and Guinea!)
• Capital city is called Monrovia
• Population of 4m, of which only 15% are employed. And we think we have it tough...
• It has lots of delicious iron ore for the West to mine

Janine had put her name down to receive the daily check-in calls from two of the engineers/planners out there. Presumably, if they don’t check-in they’ve been kidnapped by the local tribes (a genuine risk) and my sister has to start some sort of international rescue mission. Fortunately, both guys called so as of Saturday, they’re still alive. It’s been interesting learning from her about the whole mining process beyond the general negative impression we all have of greedy Western mining in poor nations. For a country with little money, economy or infrastructure, mining can actually have some benefits for the local people. If I’ve understood it correctly, in establishing the mine they will create jobs for locals and will also build a town around it, providing schools and general infrastructure for the people. And my sister’s role as a town planner/environmental impact assessor is to make sure this is designed and set up to meet international environmental regulations. So it’s not all bad. As long as the money the country receives from selling their iron ore goes to the people and not corrupt government officials....

Anyway, I rushed back to Bermondsey after a quick crumpet to get to Coffee Club. On the bus from Blackstock Road to Highbury station, I encountered my first London Transport Crazy (LTC)* since being back. European transport seems to be full of drunks, whereas London transport is full of CRAZY people. As four pensioners got on at Highbury Grove, this quite hefty and unwashed version of Emma Thompson’s Professor Trelawny got off the back seat, shouting “ ‘urry up! I’ve only got a minute” a bit of muttering and then “I can’t breathe on here! ‘urry up, you’re wasting my time!”. Whilst aggressive and directed towards a sweet looking 80something old man and his equally aged lady companions, that can’t necessarily be considered crazy until combined with the following lines (bearing in mind I had my iPod on loud for a while, and only caught the following lines three minutes later after seeing other passengers repeatedly glance round at her AND bearing in mind she was by herself and not on the phone): “Oh stop rain. You’ve been raining all morning and I’m fed up!” and then later, after some other jibbering, the creepier line “You would say that!”. Talking to the rain is something, but talking to a voice in your head? Certifiable. 

Anyway, after the bus and train, I just about made it in time for Coffee Club, with a quick stop off to collect my gift for Charge Gridley Stickland. BSA: START Before I moved in with them in February, Abbie, and Tony had established a routine of a Saturday morning coffee session with their network of Bermondsey/South London friends (colloquially known as Coffee Club among us). You used to be able to guarantee it would happen every week, so you could just turn up and find people there without checking first. Or, after everyone in the group (apart from me) bought iPhones, you could use the stalkers-delight app ‘Find Friends’, to check the GPS coordinates of your friends and see if they were still at home or on Maltby Street. That app aside, it was quite a nice community event, and felt particularly un-Londony. For a brief bit of background on the location, every Saturday from about 9am-2pm, Maltby Street (a pedestrianised, warehousy street which runs just behind the bridge in Bermondsey, which runs on to London Bridge) hosts food and drinks stalls and a Saturday-only Monmouth coffee house, and the arches under the bridge open up to sell groceries, cheese (Neal’s Yard and others) and fresh baked pastries and bread (I think a lot of London’s cafe bakery products are made in this area, as when I used to go for 6am runs on weekdays I would be taunted by the smell of freshly baked croissants as I dragged myself past). In the main grocery which we usually go to, you can get a huge bag of fruit and veg which will last most of the week between three people, and it generally only comes to about £10 (you can spend that on one meal’s worth in T*sco. It really opened my eyes to the actual costs of these products if they’re grown locally, and the mark-ups supermarket chains put on things when in their Metro stores). So over the summer, Coffee Club fell a bit slack, and fell off entirely when the Monmouth coffee grinding house shut. This was an archway where Monmouth ground and stored their coffee to supply to London, and unlike Borough Market’s shop, it was only open on Saturday mornings. I think they still own that space, but it ceased it’s Saturday morning selling when a development across the small street started going up and blocked all the sunlight for the people who sat out on the chairs they provided in the street. It always had a huge queue and presumably made them a heap of money, so they reopened further along down the bridge away from Maltby Street (which has been reviewed a ridiculous amount in Time Out and London Guides recently so has got increasingly busy) alongside a few other weekend warehouses-turned-shops. As a side note within a side note, on my first visit to Maltby Street I bumped into my sister’s friend Anne****, and then when I first took my parents, we saw Andrew from Masterchef (little guy with curly hair, who used to be a banker*), and later that day saw Gok Wan walking his dog END.

So I’m hoping this Coffee Club revival was really set up as an excuse to allow me to meet the new baby I’ve been writing about/making famous on this blog, Charge Gridley-Stickland. Since coming home, I’ve been taken aside a few times to confirm that I understood that the baby wasn’t ACTUALLY called Charge G-S, and had been given the name Edison Stickland. Charge was just the nickname before birth, when the parents (Ian and Ellen) didn’t know the gender but needed to call it something. I like it though. I think it’s a strong name, so I’m going to stick with it. So after a quick introduction to Charge (we didn’t shake hands as he was swathed inside Ellen’s coat, but I touched his cheek in what I presume is some form of Eskimo greeting a few levels of intimacy before rubbing noses) everyone grabbed a coffee and some cake. Abbie presented Charge with his own toy versions:

We grabbed some groceries and then everyone came back to ours, and I got to properly hold my first baby. I mean, I’m pretty sure it’s my first baby hold beyond adult guided, pretend holding of babies when I was under 10. I couldn’t help but develop a bop as I held it. Without any control, my body sort of dropped into some sort of self-guided hip-hop bounce. I just couldn’t stop. Charge seemed to like it though, and made some weird non-standard baby noises of delight. As well as Abbie’s gift, I’m pretty sure Ian and Ellen were impressed with my Monoprix outfit for the baby, combining a sort of Lederhosen and a T-Shirt with bikes on (Ian loves all that Tour De France/Professional cycling rubbish as well).

I spent the afternoon cleaning windows, in what I’m calling ‘professional training’ for an idea I have of setting up a window cleaning business on my estate. It’s got hundreds of properties, and if I charged a fiver for each flat, I could make a decent amount of money. All I need is a Squeegee and a bit of soap and soon I’m driving round the estate in one of those low cars with blue lighting, blaring out the best sexist-R’n’B I have in my collection. Then in the evening, having burned a severe amount of calories I’m sure with my wax-on/wax-off moves, I went to the pub to meet some friends for a sort of mini I-know-I-haven’t-been-away-that-long-but-let’s-have-reunion-drinks-anyway event. All was pretty upbeat; my school friend Fay came along who’d just passed her accountancy exams and was going to visit her parents (who now live in Hong Kong) for Christmas, Leo (from Paris, but who is interning for Total in Canary Wharf), Fern (work-friend Fern, who actually elevated to the ranks of genuine friendship through good effort on her part, and a friendship-cementing tent-sharing at a music festival the previous summer), Dom (who could only stay for one- wait, I can stay for another cheeky-half, before he had to shoot off to meet the foxy Dutch girl he was letting couch-surf...in his bed....), Sarah (school-friend who had just been to China with her MP employer Tim Yeo to talk about a green-future), Paddy (stayed for only a half before going to a dinner party in Hampstead. I don’t think I know you anymore, Paddy), and later Alex (Fern’s boyfriend, and blog reader, who identified with the struggle to find bottles of still water in mainland Europe). So after the upbeat start, it all got a bit shit when Fern’s bag got stolen. Having lived in London for about three or four years, I’ve seen virtually no crime. My Whitechapel housemate Joe told me about a relatively unsuccessful mugging in West London that he experienced, and then I saw a woman complain that her bag had been stolen in Leadenhall Market’s St*rbucks once. But this was the first I’d properly experienced it. It wasn’t even oversight on Fern’s part. Her bag was completely tucked away in all of our eyelines. But the robber must have been smart, and just nipped past her as he/she saw we were distracted. Sarah and I did separate scout outs of nearby bins/gardens/underneaths of cars as Fern cancelled all her cards and her phone. As I came back, I tried to cheer her up as she argued with Natwest by revealing the potato I’d just found in my bag. I emailed our old company to say her company blackberry had been stolen as Fern told me that she’d only had a replacement two weeks before after she dropped her last blackberry down a toilet in Morocco. Pretty sure these are signs that God doesn’t want you working there anymore, eh Fern? Despite this, we managed to have a good end to the evening as I tracked down Alex (despite Fern not knowing his phone number) and convinced him to leave his friends and help his girlfriend in need and distress. Saturday over. 

*I started writing this on Saturday, and so acknowledge that we’ve had a little rain and a few grey skies since

** Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue apparently. Where Spamalot and then Priscilla, Queen of the Desert used to show

***So the blogger site provides stats on the number of viewers I have on each entry, and where they view it from (so country and, somewhat non-importantly, operating system). I had on average about 25 viewers a day, with some posts having around 60 views and others only around 17. I presumed that the committed 25 would be my family (though Janine told me that her and mum skipped all the detailed arts stuff, Dad dipped in occasionally and Tom couldn’t give a stuff) and close friends. Seems the actual average viewers were from an unexpected mix of family, good friends, normal friends and acquaintances

****Great story about Anne and Janine’s friendship: They met at Reading University, became friends and then lived together in their third year. After graduating, Janine moved to London and Anne went to South Korea to teach for a while, before moving home for a bit. One day Janine was at home and started talking to Anne on Facebook Chat. Anne mentioned that she was in London for a week doing an internship with BBC, and was staying with a friend. The conversation that followed went a bit like this:

Janine: Ah cool, where are you staying?

Anne: In Finsbury Park

J: Haha, really? I live in Finsbury Park too! Where abouts?

A: On Hornsey Road

J: No way. I live on Hornsey Road! What number?

A: 203

J: I LIVE AT 203. WHAT BLOCK?

A: THE FIRST BLOCK BEHIND THE GATE

J: I LIVE IN THAT BLOCK!!!!!

A: WHAT? What flat do you live in?

J: Flat 7. Top floor, on the right

(10 seconds later)

Knock, knock. Janine opens door to find Anne with a massive grin on her face

A: Hi Janine