My god, it's been a bloody long time since I dusted off this blog.
Fitingly it seems my last post was about 4 months after I arrived in London, and this one'll be about 4 months before I haul my arse back to the Antipodes. Kind of a lot happened in the meantime, as you might have guessed.
That boyfriend, huh. That job. That sweet flat in East London.
Take a deep breath, this could be a long post...
So the job was great. Rare turned out to be a real laid-back place to work, and I made a few cool friends. The studio was a tube-ride, train journey and lift by car out into the English Midlands out past Birmingham. Taking me from grey cobbled streets and looming tower-blocks out through miles of terraced-house suburbs and further out until there was nothing but rolling hills, trees and quaint English farms. When I started in January it was mid-winter and the snow was laying thick on the fields, the further I got out into the country the thicker it fell until the whole vista passing by the train window was painted in soft monochrome washes of grey mist and white fields.
The studio was some amazing japanese inspired complex created when Rare were originally owned by Nintendo. Frozen duck ponds were surrounded by long open-plan barns connected by covered wooden paths. Bonsai trees dotted the area and there was a fully-staffed cafeteria on the premises since the nearest town was 5 minutes away by car and inaccessable to walk, especially in the thick snow that blanketed the fields surrounding the studio complex.
Outside the window in my cubicle I looked out onto the frozen pond where ducks slid and squabbled over the ice and the leafless bushes hung heavy with frost. Out the opposite window the white-clad grounds stretched away, bordered by a blue line of bare trees. It was warm in the studio however, and frequent trips to the kitchenette at the end of the barn for hot, instant coffee weren't discouraged. The cleaning ladies who patrolled the studio worked like ninjas, and cups would disappear from your desk moments after you'd emptied the last drop. After working for some months in hospitality myself it always left me with an uncomfortable feeling having someone clear up after me and be so invisible.
A new thing to get used to was the short daylight hours that and English winter brings. When I left my flat in the mornings around 5:35 am to catch the night-bus to the nearest tube station it was pitch black and felt like it was still midnight. The sky hadn't lightened by the time I was on the train and I would often sleep fitfully all the way to my interchange at Rugby where I would shiver on the exposed platform until my connecting train arrived. The light had just begun to break through the heavy morning fog when I picked up my lift at Atherstone ( although I remember taking taxis a few times that first week ). By the time you could call it morning I was sitting inside at my desk, watching the lightening sky over the duck pond.
Cut to the afternoon, when I would get a lift from work around 5pm as the daylight started to leak from the grey sky again. By the time my train arrived it would be twighlight and I'd arrive back in London in darkness to a late dinner and straight to bed. I took that train journey in darkness for several months before I ever saw what the countryside looked like.
After a week of doing that journey daily I realised I'd bitten off not just more than I could chew but more than I could fit in my mouth at all. To complicate matters the tube-line that would have taken me almost directly to the station where I would pick up my train was out ( a christmas present from London Transport that would last till February ), hence the dawn busride to another line, the slowest on the whole Tube network and prone to unexpectedly breaking down for minutes at a time.
I'd bought a week's worth of advance tickets for my journey, which the ticket-seller had kindly stapled together with the ticket and reservation ( for unknown reasons you need both to travel ) for each day together. The problem with advance tickets is you need to catch the particular train you're booked on, and with the Hammersmith line so prone to random breakdowns it was 50/50 whether I would make it there on time. Several times that week I didn't, but after pleading with the barrier attendant about TFL's track problems I would be able to get them to transfer me to the next train. Problem was, that meant I would be an hour late and miss my car-share at Atherstone.
This is what I hysterically and tearfully tried to explain to the barrier attendant on the last day that week when I missed my train the final time. There is nothing worse than missing a train unless it's thinking you're going to miss it because your tube has been late again, running like the wind to the platform and seeing it still there but being unable to get through the barrier because your tickets have been stapled together in the wrong order and the attendent is being particularly dense that morning and won't let you through until you've sorted through all of them to prove you really have it and watched your train pull out of the platform without you. Which, of course, is what happened that morning.
At which point the exhaustion of the previous week and the frustration of dealing with an unsympathetic, insufferable jobsworth led to a huge public meltdown and I very nearly became the person those TFL 'please do not abuse our staff' posters are about.
So, the next week I booked myself into a B&B close to work for a couple of days to save my sanity and pocketbook, and began frantically searching for rooms in the neighbouring villages.
My first experience of an English B&B was something of a culture shock. The elderly couple who owned the large farm-house where I was staying had let out the spare bedrooms but the house, with all it's granny-fied, doily-covered charm was left untouched. It was rather like staying with elderly relatives and I experienced the awkwardness of having someone cook breakfast for you and acting like hotel staff after you've apparently just laid up in the spare room.
The permanent room in a local town which I managed to find couldn't have been better. A quaint 300 year old tudor-style, thatched-roof cottage which could have housed a family of hobbits. Or a family of short, friendly, midlanders with high-powered office jobs. The middle-aged couple were younger than their years and had been renting out the spare room their teenage daughter had vacated after moving to London for university and a singing career. A language school in the area meant that there was always a steady stream of young international teachers to fill the room, but after the last had left unexpectedly after 'health problems' the room was left vacant mid-term.
The teenage son of the family had the other room and I settled into life in a tiny English village, barely 2km wide with countryside surrounding it and 1 bus every hour as a way to escape. The staff at the studio were dotted around that area and I was able to pick up a lift with an exhuberant Scottish bloke who lived a short and pretty walk away on the other side of the village. Those early-morning walks down past little fields of horses and a beautiful rectory and graveyard filled me with an appreciation for the quiet, self-contained beauty of the countryside that English poets wax lyrical about and which is so divorced from the arid, sweeping grandure of Australia.
Still, the short English days meant that I didn't really see the village in daylight for the first few weeks. As the sun began to rise earlier and earlier I was slowly presented with a lovely, quaint country town set either 300 or 40 years in the past depending on whether you were looking at the buildings or the residents. The increasingly colourful hair I aquired later on meant that I became something of a well-known figure walking through the village each morning and afternoon. Still, it was the kind of small town where people nod to each other in the street and exchange "good morning"s.
The contrast from the East London towerblock where I spent my weekends couldn't have been greater. Every friday afternoon I would leave work at 5 on the dot to pick up a train back to the city, arriving tired but triumphant to a glass of red wine with Ruth, my flatmate. Her little flat ( I would always think of it as hers, since I spent so little time there that it never felt like mine ) was an oasis of frugal, bohemian clutter hanging 24 stories above the dirty streets of ( what I would later discover to be ) the 2nd most poverty stricken burough of London.
Still, my weekends in London were my life. I didn't care that I was paying two rents and extortionate train fares, I was able to go out to amazing markets, shop in vast thrift stores and explore the hidden corners of one of the most exciting cities in the world to my heart's content. During that time I spent a lot of money but aquired a lot of memories and learnt the byways and attractions of that city better than some people who have lived there their whole lives.
Portabello road, Burough, Brick Lane, Spittalfields; I was on a quest to see all the street markets, vintage markets and food markets that London had to offer. This was a world away from the sparsely populated Valley markets and Davies park was dwarfed by the monstrous Burough food markets. Slowly I discovered hidden jems of coffee houses, vintage stores and beautiful, narrow cobbled streets.
....
