The problem with the 365 is that occasionally my life is too busy to find the time to write about it; and this makes it too easy to feel negative about those endless days when the time is too plentiful.
I started to write my ideas for this blog catch up as I wasted a day in Heathrow, and I realised that my writing fears, first verbalised to Belle Fierce some time ago, had come to fruition. I have lost my mojo. Who wants to read a minute by minute account of someone else’s weekend away?
Do I want to write the pithy, witty, tongue in cheek account of my half term in London? Or do I want to share the self indulgent, no doubt, flawed psychoanalysis such trips seem to force me into?
I guess I try to capture my moments and my thoughts to help my understanding of them; some how my day has worth, if I value it enough to capture its essence in print: but I question it’s value to any reader that’s not me. And yet a small band of followers do read…maybe with perseverance and time; confidence and inspiration.
Until then, I will make do with some half hearted account of the highlights and low lights of the last few days.
#46
Despite the high production values and the strengths of the direction of the performance itself: a very stressful theatre trip set the wrong tone for what was always going to be a fraught few days away.
#47
I was the asshole in central London during Thursday morning’s rush hour with the oversized luggage.Walking the itinerary for the school trip in April is a necessary evil: complicated further by my poor, poor sense of direction, the money I was spending that I can’t actually spare, and the feeling that I was yet again sacrificing myself at the altar of work and no one gives a damn.
Made it till the lunch on Thursday: day one of the trip was in place, I hadn’t paid too much for my West End matinee ticket and I was already for the reclaiming of my afternoon.
I couldn’t find the theatre. I lunched on what was essentially a traffic island with a statue: it was that or faint.
The Novello was footsteps away from where I’d first started looking and Crazy for You deserves its many accolades. A musical with a vintage charm and talent to spare.
My phone died before the standing O and I now needed to be in a very different part of London, having collected my case at Charing Cross, checked in to the hotel and reached Angel for dinner with my bro all within the hour.
Instead I had a meltdown. Got the case but couldn’t find the hotel; I circled the streets of Covent Garden reminding myself how to breath. Found it eventually (hostel is more apt phrase) to be told I was in the wrong building and was first given a room that had neither lights nor bed linen. Back to reception: apologies were made, keys were given, I rang my bro in tears; he ignored my commotion and changed the reservation.
I realised that my pipe dream, of taking on London on a permanent basis, Ms Independence, in a city she loves would be a disaster. Mum and T are right: the stress, the loneliness, the sheer force of that place would kill me within the first fortnight. I would fail where T and B had so excelled: I felt weak and provincial and trapped by my reality.
Dinner, when we got there, was the perfect anti-dote to my crazy afternoon. London most definitely agrees with B and his part of the city was calm with an enigmatic sense of style.
We enjoyed food I’d never tried before, good wine, great and easy conversation. I glimpsed his new place and London began to make sense to me again.
#48
Less tired and with a greater sense of calm and poise I spent Friday morning ‘walking’ days two and three of the school trip itinerary. I was pleased to have face the little hell that is Oxford Street and to have found, with the help of a charged phone, the much sought Abercrombie&Fitch. I lunched in a park and headed back to the hotel to consider my options.
I spent the next two hours making notes about the trip and chilling in the rather vacant hotel room. My feet were aching and I just didn’t have the energy to use my afternoon in a more fruitful way.
I met B at Bank, after a bedlam tube journey. I’d never been in ‘The City’ part of London before. Never had I seen so many purposeful looking twenty and thirty somethings in such obviously expensive suits. I was shocked by the electronic display boards in the streets, to allow the prices of shares to be forever any instantaneously accessible.
Our getting lost in the myriad of streets, phased the ‘now in London’ lad not even a little. B followed his map, stayed calm and I questioned again how we could both belong to the same gene pool.
Dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s BreadStreet Kitchenwas divine: low key but elegant, good food without the need of pretension.
While I awaited the arrival of an old friend, B kept me company in the type of bar he typically avoids. He was my knight in stylish armour this weekend; a familiar port in the storm of an unknown city and my means of decoding the city’s confusion.
EC and I go back a long way: all the way to Washington DC and our intern summer. And without sounding sentimental, we’re kindred spirits. I tell this accomplished girl, who I see so very infrequently, the things I never tell those that populate my every day.
Strangers in the city, we couldn’t find the type of bar we so seeked and instead drank bad wine in the cheap hotel I couldn’t quite believe I’d thought would in any way meet E’s standards.
But it was so very good to see her: both soothing and unsettling to share hidden truths.
#49
There was no hot water for a shower I didn’t make breakfast. E looking a million dollars, my feeling around 99p and looking worse, had time for a rushed coffee before she headed of to meet her friend J and the luxury of a spa, shopping and dinner in Chelsea.
The hangover and the exhaustion made melancholy, I headed to Heathrow rather than drag a suitcase through a busy London Saturday.
I was too, too early for my flight and felt I’d wasted yet another Opportunity in a city demanding I take it on, even though it continued to whip my ass.
The flight was delayed and it was to a sleeting Belfast that I returned. My beloved coastal town seemed to mock me with its provinciality.
London: frustrating and fabulous, tempting and terrifying both lonely and love filled, has left me feeling discontent with life as it is and intimidated by the life if offers: I occupy an uncomfortable restless, purgatory in the frustration that lies between.
