No sex but a hell of a lot of city…
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join us…
My day
7:25 wake up, growl at alarm, push snooze button on phone, cuddle girlfriend.
7:35 wake up, growl at alarm, push snooze button on phone, cuddle girlfriend.
7:45 wake up, growl at alarm, push snooze button on phone, cuddle girlfriend.
7:55 wake up, growl at alarm, push snooze button on phone, cuddle girlfriend.
8:00 crawl out of bed, think better of it, go back to bed, cuddle girlfriend
8:15 girlfriend grumbles over irritating repetition of alarm
8:20 finally manage to get out of bed, have shower, walk out and stare into contents of closet. What does one wear on a day where you have to work at desk job, meet dad for lunch, leave early to meet events management company, go on to meeting with film festival team and then head to women only club night with theme: dress to seduce….????????
Answer? All black, tight jeans, heels
and a secret stash of mac’s Russian red lipstick…
8:40 walk to bus stop
9:15 wake up on bus to realise you are comfortably sleeping on random guy shoulder who gratefully finds it amusing/cute
9:30 stumble out of Italian café, guzzling triple shot latte’.
9:45 begin to watch entire series of boys action adventure animation cartoon in effort to make script match final edit. And they pay me for this.. really
1:00 meet father for lunch and ramble about state of labour party and abundance of 9-11 docs.
2:15 before getting back into the wonderful world of animation work, fire off frustrated email to manager of French hip hop band for not being terribly communicative with regards to film music festival.
2:20 fag break to get head around frustrated letter
2:25 more script conforming
4:45 juggle phone call between sound studio for animation company with phone call for events management company for festival.
5:10 leave work early for film festival meeting, desperately hope no one notices.
5:25 arrive at station near meeting with just enough time to walk there, manage to finish cigarette in said walk. Arrive at alice in wonderland essque tiny door to get into ultra fab period conversion
7:30 take phone call with LA film festival listings site, more or less hanging out the window of commercial tavern. Tavern’s speakers are suddenly exponentially louder than they ever have been. Similarly traffic on commercial street reaches record decibels in volume. Do best to seem professional and in professional context.
8:00 buy drinks for one of the festival team (a soda water for me, aren’t I straight laced for the moment) bartender comments I’m the best dressed regular he has. I accept compliment demurely. Take drinks back to meeting.
8:10 said bar tender asks if anyone is missing the sole of their shoes. Of course because I am couldn’t’ be cool for more than ten minutes, and the heels are vintage, its me..
8:40 deliberate with festival team over whether my heeless shoe can make it to Brixton.
9:00 walk into wh smith at Liverpool street station. Buy a pack of ten Marlboros (damd why didn’t leave the house with two packs of duty free??) and super glue. Clerk raises his eyebrows but says nothing.
9:05 try to seem completely normal glueing shoe back together.
9:10 notice line on pack that says “ leave to set for an hour”
yeah whatever.,. walk off to the train.
9:45 arrive at new girls night “queen bee” try best not to look awkward on my own.
10:00 saved by friend arriving
10:20 crazy but wonderful peformance art by host stav b.
11:30 sneak off to tube station.
12:00 arrive at old street, relieved to be nearer home despite bus trip ahead.
12:05 run into ex girlfriend. Try best to look less than exhausted.
Somehow invite to birthday party. ..
12:10 call girlfriend, freak out about her plans to walk home until I realise she is walking distance from home.
12:11 run for bus and catch it.
12:50 write this to get the day out of my head and gratefully.. go to bed…
the first brit colloquialism i picked up when moving here must have been
"burning the candle at both ends"
i’ve been going and going and going and going lately, working the day job, the side project (that is so much more full time than i ever anticipated it to be) trying to do my best to see all my friends and have quality time with the girlfriend, and try to be on top of the news and music and pop culture and art, and i’ve given up even trying to be on top of film or theatre or actually regularly going out to exhibitons.
but instead of ever feeling like i get up to a lot, regardless of how busy i feel or am told i am, i still can never shake this feeling that i should can do more and am not doing enough and am behind in one area or another, because yeah there are a lot of friends i’ve failed to meet up with for what seems like a ridiculous ammount of time, and the last film i saw didn’t quite leave me satiated
and when did i last go to a club, play or art exhibition any way?
and the day job is kind of calm but then maybe this should be the time i am strategizing to improve or streamline somehow.
i want to go on holiday. i’m actually starting to have this desperate need, a deep distracting craving for new york, which strikes me as kind of funny because maybe i should be thinking of somewhere where i”m forced by the pace and surroundings to do less. rather than somewhere where i’ll just be reminded by the city and my friends there that actually i could no should, no really could be far more tapped into… everything… whenever i’m in new york i’m on such a constant high.
i can happily exhaust myself wandering for hours and hours up blocks and blocks taking in the arichtecture, visiting cafes i used to spend hours in and stopping in on private galleries and boutiques and bookstores . then my friends get off work and there is all this conversation about the latest book, bar, restaraunt, party, band and current events all in one fantastic artsy hipster intellegentsia fireball of all that is now now now.
i always told myself that london won out over new york for me, precisely because new york would play to the soul of my inner media glutton, keen to get her restless hands on anything new and fresh the city would give to her.
you can do that in london but in general, you do tend to focus on one or two neighborhoods, on one or two artforms, on a small sprinklling of music genres, and its OK.
For weeks i keep hearing people say to me how busy i am and i never seem to understand why, nor understand how everyone else seems to manage more than one quiet night in, in a week. .
i think another thing i learned when i first moved here is that we londoners (particularly the non native and inherently transient kind) can be freakishly flakey. i discovered that when you became on of those rare people who always turned up when you said you would, you became an admired commodity and felt great about it besides.
but now i’ve reached a point in my life where i need to invoke the flake from time to time as i just can’t keep up with all i’m meant to do.
so what i wonder is, am i losing my edge?
and if so…
am i forgiven?
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A few weeks back I had a horoscope that said something to the affect of
“You have a tendency to overload yourself with social obligations, you need to learn that all of these are not essential, and sometimes you must say no to some if you want any kind of rest”
Yeah yeah. I thought dismissively.
You try telling that to the friend who is playing her last gig for months, the second who was having her fortieth birthday and that’s not mentioning the wedding I had to attend in the north of the country the following day.
It wasn’t like last Friday was the end of a particularly relaxing week, and as is often the case with me, just thinking about everything I had committed myself to made me so exhausted I almost wanted to suddenly feign illness and miss out and all. But instead I summoned some Dutch courage with a swift after work drink, gave myself plenty of time to preen at home and headed back into the wild world of Dalston, ready to start my evening with a
midnight gig.
The gig was so great that half an hour later I had the energy to make it on to the birthday party and so with a bottle of rose and a cheap local mini cab I was off to phase two of the evening. I was expecting anything at this party. It was a double birthday with a masquerade theme and I know that the lady had been painting faces (in a chic grown up version of what was once done at children’s parties) for hours. I was a little distressed by being several hours more sober than the rest were likely to be, but I was ready to make the most of it.
Now the birthdays in question were both friends of my lady’s inner circle. One of this inner circle, has recently given birth to a baby boy. The mother is quite possibly one of the most glamorous and chic mums I have EVER come across. She is a brilliant photographer, and prior to the pregnancy she was nothing if not the coolest most outgoing kind of party girl. The father of this new life is a musician/web designer. This child already has hipster credentials in spades. So I was not all that surprised when I arrived at the party (definitely at its peak) to be told that baby and parent were in one of the rooms upstairs.
It was a strange but lovely thing. Downstairs throngs of people drank and chat in the kitchen, garden, living room and hallways. Slightly questionable music pumped from a stereo, as bottles were emptied and glasses filled and. filled again. Several floors up, above all the celebratory chaos, a quietish room contained a baby boy sleeping peacefully on the bed. His mother and father took turns to stay with him. My girlfriend and I found ourselves straying from the party to stay with them. Then one by one of this close circle, left the madness of the party, to marvel at this quiet beautiful baby boy who had been born to their friend.
Finally the mother wanted a bit of a wander, and my girlfriend went to give her some company. Meanwhile I stayed with the father, talking about the baby, music,
Portugal (where I had recently been and he is from). My girlfriend came back with her friend the mother, and a few others. We formed a small quiet chilled out group near the baby. Every so often someone would come in a bit confused, a bit drunk, looking for a bag or a lost friend, and no matter what state they were in, on seeing the baby they would grow reverent, apologize politely and softly close the door.
But it was getting late, and I had a wedding to go to the following morning….
We get back to the flat, just about garnering four hours of sleep before rising into a melee of zombie like showers, dressing up and make up application. Amazingly we make it to
Peterborough , on time and seeming somewhat fresh. I’m not a huge fan of weddings but the wedding is beautiful. Not in a massive church,acres and acres of satin way, more in a genuine, loved up, low key and gorgeous landscape way. Highlights were the bride and groom reciting relevant lines from the film this year’s love, the maid of honour accidentally dropping one of the rings, and the tongue and cheek references to the “future” family when all in the party were well aware the bride was four months pregnant. 
I saw my friend looking as all great brides do, absolutely princess like, and I saw how in love she was with her guy, and underneath this gorgeous dress was the unmistakable semblance of a belly. And as she did her radiating bride thing all I could think about was what an amazing mother my friend was going to become and what a loving family they would have.
The next day me and the girl were quite shattered from the previous days’ proceedings, so we opted for a session of afternoon lounging in a pub by
London fields. And everywhere there were babies and children. Literally
“Its’ the weekend of the family i guess? ”
I said. She considered this and answered.
“Well it is Sunday”
Yeah… fair point I guess…
So this morning its back to the grindstone, I sleep through my alarm, wake up in panic (all this is as usual) and the lady valiantly gets out of bed, turns on the shower for me, and then comes back to coax me out of the covers. My morning at work is steady enough, and I go through the usual ritual of what-did-you-do-on-the-weekend chatter with one of my co-workers.
And then after lunch time I return to my desk and my co-worker looks at me and says my name in that way that suggest she isn’t going to say something mundane like “would you like a tea”
I take in her look and raise my eyebrows as if to say “….?”
“I’ve handed in my notice. . “
She says.
This is a bit of a bombshell. I go into her office and she explains to me how recent holidays with her three kids, had made her really concerned about how much she was missing out on their lives. Having her mum be unwell not long ago also pushed the issue of being at home. But ultimately, she had finally reached a point, where it was more important for her to be at home with her kid, than have a career. This is a terrifically hard decision for many women to make. I congratulated her. She looked really happy.
And then as if on cue, another co-worker who has been on maternity leave, entered the office with her new born daughter. Both mother and baby glowed as the women in my corner of the office surrounded and marvelled and cooed. As she left I looked across my desk at the smiling face of my co-worker. She caught my gaze and we nodded eachother. She had made the right decision, there was nothing else to say.
we went back to our work.
And then all of the sudden, under the music of my ipod, the faint but unmistakable sound of one of those old fashioned alarm clocks (you know the kind, the sort of ones they had in Warner bros cartoons with the big bells on top) began ringing in my ears.
But then, that could also be the effect of working in a night club and spending so much time in gigs and raves over the years.
Maybe it’s safer to write it off as hearing loss…
who knows what my kids might be like???? 
