The Power of the Mundane

As I lay awake at 4:30am the other morning, staring at the ceiling and hoping the soothing sounds of the planes roaring overhead would shortly lull me back to sleep, I found myself frantically making list after list in my head. All advice in that situation is to sit up, switch on a light and write those lists down, so your mind will be clear and you can fall back asleep, but I share my bed with H1*, or as he is also known, The Worst Sleeper In The World, and if I did that he would wake up and throttle me, in an incoherent, sleep deprived rage.

I never did get back to sleep, but then again, I'm still alive, so it wasn't so bad really. And once I had pulled my reluctant body out of bed, fed it, showered it, and made my usual commute to the living room, I was rather excited at the idea of putting those lists to paper (those I could remember, that is - no doubt some are gone, not to resurface again until the next time insomnia randomly attacks). I love a good list. I'm one of those incredibly sad people who will sometimes write things on a list that I've already done, just to derive the satisfaction of crossing it out again. I'm only so okay and upfront about this because I know that I'm not alone.

My life is changing, you see. I don't want to be all James Bond about it, but there is a limit as to what I'm going to share right now - suffice to say that there is a lot to think about, and without my lists I could well completely lose it. I certainly wouldn't be getting any sleep. But with my lists - well, I'm just like Superwoman, really. Charging through my days, getting things done, dealing with the mundane, crossing items off with a smooth, artistic sweep of my pen. I'm looking at today's list right now, and am happy to report that, at 6:20pm, everything is done, except one thing, but that can always be neatly delegated to tomorrow's list.

Such is the beauty and power of a list. You write it down, you tick it off, and if you don't, there is always another list. I feel like there's a metaphor for life somewhere in there, but I'm happy for you all to work that one out yourselves.**

By the way, not a lot has happened this last week, mainly because the weather has been stupendously horrendous. Hence why I'm raving about lists. Usually, when it rains in London, it doesn't really rain at all, but just surrounds you with a gentle yet persistent drizzly mist, which is annoying but is not enough cause to get out the umbrella, until suddenly you realise you're soaking wet, and you stay that way for the rest of the day. Over the last week, however, we have had full on rain of the sort that will keep you inside, watching repeat episodes of The Hills and eating weird concoctions of food because you don't want to go out to get anything. A break in the weather allowed me an incredibly pleasant Sunday afternoon in Marylebone, which comes highly recommended, but really, that's about it - so I'm sorry for the current boring state of affairs. I'm off to Meribel to go snowboarding this weekend, so am bound to get some good, solidly amusing stories out of that. In fact, I can leave you with something that will make you laugh - me on a snowboard. Argh.

Happy Easter, everyone!

*Unless you are my grandma, in which case I share my bed with NOBODY AT ALL, EVER.

**If you do work it out, feel free to tell me about it! Not that I don't know what it is, of course.

It's a Playground Out There

There's a great quote from the movie 'Knocked Up', when Pete's looking at his kids running round with bubbles, and he says "I wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles." As with most things in life, it's funny because it's true. It's hard, perhaps even impossible, to retain the same level of joy and excitement in the everyday when you're an adult, as the everyday mutates from something of novelty and wonder into - well - the everyday. A grind. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Getting that feeling back requires a lot of work, and if you have to work for it, surely that takes away the point of it? I've experienced it several times over the last week, but then again, I don't have a real job. Working for anything has got to be good for me right now. And I'm on medication that has the hilarious side effect of giving me a sense of euphoria (yes, really, and believe it or not, the NHS pays for most of it. Unfortunately, I'm only on it for about another week - must get out there and make the most of it while it lasts).

That quote ran through my head the other day as I looked out the window of a coffee shop chain on the Fulham Road, the name of which I will not mention as they have not started paying me yet, despite my near-constant frequentation. On the footpath outside, a small boy tugged on his mother/nanny's arm, pointing eagerly to a double decker red bus that had pulled up at a stop. Now you and I both know that public transport is ghastly, and London buses have got to be the lowest form of public transport ever, but this kid was so so excited. Absolutely over the moon at seeing the bus.

Conicidentally, it was the number 14, which winds its way down the Fulham Road every five to seven minutes (well, supposedly, unless you want to catch one - then it's another schedule entirely). This kid was in a local school uniform, so we can assume he had seen many, many number 14 buses in his short life. So - why the excitement? Is he just too young for the everyday to have turned into the grind? And when will it happen?

I hope, for his sake, not for a long time. Because if all the things that excited me and my brothers when we were growing up still excite children today, then it's not so bad. We were thrilled to bits to see buses and planes, and a train could throw us into an apoplectic fit. We grew up on Auckland's North Shore, you see, where families and suburbia rule, and as a result, all of the above are exceedingly rare. Although, it would seem, the rarity is not a pre-requisite for the enjoyment garnered. Which makes me happy, and gives me hope for those darling little stabby children of London.

So just those short thoughts for today. There is a bus parked outside our house. I'm going to go look out the window at it.

That's Not a City...THIS Is a City

Tuesday, and the Central Line found itself graced with my presence as it hurtled me right across the other side of London, to Liverpool Street Station. Further east than I had been in a very long time, I stumbled off like a newborn foal, shook my head, found my balance, and as I impatiently strode up the escalator, realised I had never really left.

I have always lived west, but for the first year of my life in London, I worked east. For at least an hour, every morning and every night, I would sit, stand, crouch, or faint on the District line as it worked its way along the Thames, depositing me at the edge of the City, where I spent my days eking out a living in the shadow of the Tower of London. The commute was horrendous, the action was frenetic, and Pret always sold out of my favourite sandwich before I got there. But I loved it anyway.

For this was not just any city, this was The City (or, if you like, an M&S City). That one little capital makes all the difference here. A city could be anywhere, could do anything. The City could only be that of London, and it does myriad things.

The City of London does architecture, it does crazy, it does beauty, it does impatience, it does history, it does money. Actually, that should be, it does Money. Even in this post-recession wonderland, it does MONEY.

There is nowhere quite like it, and I missed it. When you don't work in the City, there is no need to go into the City. But you should, anyway. I definitely should. A lovely lunch was followed by a walk in the warm spring sunshine through the streets I know so well, yet are still such a mystery - ancient streets and winding alleys featuring names like St Swithin's Lane, Eastcheap, and Bishopsgate cosy up to the complex statements of the Lloyds Building and the Gherkin, which gaze over the rooftops of countless office buildings and faceless blocks, interspersed with the suddenness of snowy white churches, hidden under a layer of light grime. These roads make no sense, twisting and turning you in their medieval deception, before firmly picking you up and throwing you out at the domes of St Pauls, the proud symbol that keeps standing guard over its City.

The buzz of people and life all around you is constant, but as you turn left and head towards the Millennium Bridge, the suits are replaced by jeans and the frenetic mobile phone chatter fades to the excited chirrup of the tourist. Tourists are still annoying, even in the City. Some things are constant. So you cut right again and remain on the north side of the river, slowly allowing your feet to bring you under the mess of Blackfriars, over the smooth, new pavement, until the surprising bend of the river throws up the London Eye in front of you. Crane your neck and Westminster will appear, or cross the road, make your way past Temple, and hit that magic point where E becomes W, and the City lies behind you for another day.

Tuesday, and my walk through the City left me dazed, blinking in the new sunlight like a Care in the Community patient, knowing only that I was happy, but not sure why. Maybe it was the history. My knowledge is limited, but my desire to know is no less for it. Maybe it was the money, Money, MONEY (that too is limited, but the same goes for the desire). Maybe it was the architecture. My dreams of being an architect came to an abrupt end at the age of 13, when I realised I would never be able to sharpen my pencil* at the rate required, and decided to pursue less restrictive forms of self-expression. I still appreciate it though, in a highly uninformed, uneducated, blunt pencil kind of way.

Go to the City. Any day. Feel the life all around you, and feel the ancient life under you, and breathe it in. Not too deeply though, or you will choke on pollution. Also, don't go when it's raining. And whatever you do, don't go on a weekend, when all the life and soul is sucked out and displaced into the suburbs, when tumbleweeds blow along the streets, when the City resembles nothing more than a remote corner of Texas or the prairie country of Canada**.

So that's any sunny weekday. We get about three of those a year in London. Make the most of it.

Tuesday, I walked through the City, and I lived.

*Honestly not a euphemism, but actual fact.

**Not that I've ever been to either of those places, but I have a good imagination.

Is Gravy a Condiment?

I’ll tell you what gravy is not. Gravy is not a dish. Dish = the main basis of a meal. Condiment = whatever you put on top.

It’s a pretty basic concept, but one that the catering staff haven’t quite grasped at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, sadly. They came round and asked what I would like for my dinner on Thursday night, to which I replied that I would like the cheese flan (a lie, I would have liked chocolate biscuits, but that option wasn’t offered). They said they were all out, to which I replied that that would be a problem, as I was a vegetarian (another lie, I just don’t eat red meat, but when in any dodgy dining situation – airplane, sketchy restaurant, hospital – I say I am to simplify matters and hopefully get the safest meal I can). They said there was another vegetarian option. I ran my eyes down the menu to encounter it – gravy.

Gravy is not a meal, I protested, and compromised with them. They brought me a delicious (ok, third lie and I’m only three paragraphs in – clearly I have a problem here) jacket potato with cheese.

Friday night I made H1 bring me in a pizza. We had a picnic on my bed, and it was awesome.

So….Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. That's right. There is an explanation, and it's not that I’m submitting myself to the food there as a money-saving measure, although as a lowly freelance it may not be a bad idea. It's not a drastic pre-wedding diet either, although again, that would probably work quite well.

I was very much in two minds as to whether to write this piece or not. ‘Hospital’ doesn’t exactly fit with my image of a glamazon dashing round the hot spots of London, flitting from party to party. Then again, neither does the rest of this blog. My other concern was privacy, and the general sharing of personal information, and then I realised I’ve been forgoing anonymity for a long time now. About the same time as I rang everyone I know, five minutes after publishing the first post, telling them all excitedly that I was finally putting my writing out there for the general world to admire, revile, or mock, as they chose (oh God, please choose admire). And now with the photo and the name and the constant references to my neighbourhood, I’ve pretty much established this blog as an open invitation to steal my identity.

Honesty, then. If my life in the city is the main meal, a chronic illness is one of those condiments that lends it added flavour. Gravy, if you like (ah-ha, see what I did there, catering staff of Chelsea and Westminster?)

This particular gravy is a chronic illness called ulcerative colitis, and I was diagnosed with it five years ago. Most of those five years I have been fine and in remission, successfully graduating university, travelling a good amount, settling in a new country, finding myself a new career, new friends, and a new fiancé (well, a fiancé – H1 is the first and last). However, sometimes the medication stops working and I relapse, as happened last May.

Yes, last May is a long time ago. Various short term treatments led me to where I am today, getting me through into remission but refusing to hold me there. So today I recklessly spent about £1500 of the NHS’s money on an infusion of Infliximab, which will hopefully show my body what’s what. They wouldn’t give me a Prada handbag instead, but for good measure threw a few blood transfusions in there.

So that’s that – why for three days and two nights I was calling home bed 5 on a ward at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Only three days, thankfully. I may have been residing in a more chi-chi area than usual, but the food really let it down.

Oh, and the company too. In a generally grumpy mood on Wednesday morning, I decided that the biggest problem with London is not that you’re never more than ten feet from a rat. It’s that you’re never more than two feet from an absolute nutter. Well, I can now firmly establish that that would be more like one foot if it weren’t for the regular rounding up and trapping of said nutters in hospitals (um, present company excluded, of course).

There were six beds in my room, featuring an assortment of characters including Day Nutter and Night Nutter. Day Nutter would wander round trying to fob off her rubbish on others, losing her bed with alarming regularity, making weird hoicking noises, and being generally annoying, although mostly harmless. She’d fall asleep in the early evening, after dinner, and Night Nutter would pick up the baton, yelling obscenities at the nurses and other patients. Myself included. Yes, I can be a bitch, especially when someone is roaring that I am at 4am. It’s very much a chicken and egg scenario at that point. Earlier in the night she dropped the C-bomb, and I virtually went into cardiac arrest. She was 90 if she was a day. Guess Tourettes doesn’t discriminate on basis of age.

After her 4am tantrum, and repeated moans for both ‘John’ and ‘Warren’ (hussy), Night Nutter fell peacefully asleep, followed by me. An hour and a half later I was awake again, thanks to Day Nutter arising in full style, standing at the side of my bed drinking my water – before spitting it back into my grapes.

Best alarm clock ever. I was awake. And alarmed. And not prepared to go back to sleep any time soon.

And this was one night.

Thankfully, night two was considerably calmer, and I was awoken only by the nurses doing their usual observations (I should be very thankful for that, but am actually wondering whether it's now safe for me to fall asleep at home without anyone checking my blood pressure, pulse, or temperature every hour on the hour) and a man down the hall, who kept intermittently crying out 'Noooooooo' and 'C'mooooon' for a period of about two hours. He had a guttural, low voice full of drear, and sounded like Frankenstein's Monster cheering on the most terribly longwinded, boring football match ever (oh wait - that would be all football matches everywhere). However, he quietened down and I slept peacefully until 6:50am, at which time I called a nurse to remove my canula, got up, packed, and texted H1. By 7:30am I was sitting in the middle of my bed, fully dressed, waiting for him to come and pick me up, desperate to return to the everyday normality of the crazy homeless in the park, the crazy woman who runs the sex shop, and the crazy ladybug infestation in my home. Ah, home!

Home is where I now am, full of pleasure at the tranquillity of it all. My brief stay in hospital got me thinking many things - things such as I'm so glad I don't often find it necessary to go there, I hope I don't have to go back for a long time, and how best to handle it if I did? This last led to a short-lived but serious discussion between H1 and me about switching our focus from buying a private plane (I don’t like flying with others) to buying a private hospital (clearly, I don’t like convalescing with others either. Safe to say I’m just not so keen on others).

Fortunately, I’ve determined that this will be unnecessary, as I’m convinced the Infliximab will work wonders (you'd hope so at that designer handbag price), and I shall smoothly pick up my uber-glamorous existence where I’ve temporarily dumped it, and never feel the need to refer to the gravy on my life again.

Songs of London

I've been listening to a lot of music recently. I've also been in a very reflective state of mind as of late. Both these things point to one obvious fact - I am not doing enough - but they make for some fun memories and inner monologues (I'm a massive fan of the inner monologue. I'm also a big fan of the outer monologue, but I think most who know me would agree I should probably stick to the inner more often).

The music has been a pretty typical line up for this time of year, and for me. I have a tendency to fall in love with a song/band/album and listen to it repetitively until I never want to hear it again, move on, then re-discover it at a later date and repeat the whole pattern. And this tends to work on a yearly cycle, because certain times of year call for certain music. Every year my line up grows a little, as new artists are introduced to me, although I do keep returning to the same ones over and over - I'm pretty sure this will continue happening for a couple of years max, then I will hit that age whereby I have no interest in new music whatsoever, am happy (and indeed prefer) to stick to what I know, and condemn everything else as 'that dreadful noise'. Various sociological studies* put this occurrence at around the same time as one has children, so maybe I have a few more years in me yet. I'll let you know when I don't want to know.

So as I wander the cold lonely streets of London these days (ahem, or sit in my warm, lovely house) I find myself listening to the mildly-quirky-but-not-challenging strains of the likes of Regina Spektor, Noah and the Whale, the album for 500 Days of Summer, a little Ray LaMontagne, and...um...well, that's about it. How embarrassing. Had I realised how little has been filling my ears these last couple of weeks I wouldn't have started this, but I have, and I'm not prepared to stop now. There's been a little more, but not enough to make it leap out in my memory, and I don't want to lie just to save face (although, this is a very good reason to lie, in my book. I'm embarrassed enough without being entirely truthful all of the time). You see, this music is ideal for this time of year - melancholy enough to reflect the still frosty ground, the still bare trees, the still predominantly low, grey skies, but cheery enough to remind you that spring is on the way, and to make the leap off Putney Bridge look a little less tempting (total jokes, please don't call any hotlines about me. I would never jump from Putney Bridge. How tragically unglamorous).

As the days grow longer and the flowers start coming through, I'll be hauling out some more upbeat music to get me through, probably a bit of Devendra Banhart, some Newton Faulkner, The Shins for sure. Summer will approach, and with it a desire to bounce rather than walk, twirl rather than turn, and those acts will be performed to the downright poppy strains of Vampire Weekend, The Beach Boys, The Dandy Warhols, and The Chris McCarty Band. I'll also probably** up my outdoor exercise, which will be soundtracked by The Black Eyed Peas, Mark Ronson, Daft Punk, and other fairly crappy songs that get me moving faster than my normal sloth-like speed. And then I will compare the English summer to the New Zealand one I recently experienced, and find it sorely lacking, and will try to resurrect the Kiwi within with vast amounts of Fat Freddy's Drop, Salmonella Dub, The Feelers, and Fly My Pretties. I'll also haul out The Bads and The Heavy Jones Trio, because experience indicates I'm one of three New Zealanders who actually likes those bands, so I kind of feel like I owe it to them. Oh, and I'll go hard on the classics - the Finns in all incarnations, the entire contents of all Nature's Best CDs, a sprinkling of Dave Dobbyn - because you have to, and nothing reminds you where you're from quite as quickly and succinctly. I also know I will hear some incidental Kiwi stuff in random places, which will raise a feeling of verging-on-the-ridiculous nationalistic pride (they've heard of us and they like us enough to be playing us in this actually-quite-average bar in Hammersmith!) that is totally undeserved (I can't take any credit for the musical talent of various New Zealanders - I can't sing, I can't play any instruments, and I've never been in a band. In one Christmas play at primary school I was a xylophone-playing angel with a tinsel halo - the high point of my musical leanings).

Anyway, off topic. After summer...I don't know. At this point my life changes rather dramatically, and I just don't know what will work for me, music-wise, from here on in - but I'm guessing it could well be more of the same. Just because my life is changing doesn't mean I will (I'm 26, I'm stuck in my ways). But I will be sure to let you know.

Oh and a little reader interaction would be greatly appreciated - if you think my current choices are a little sad please let me know of anything I should be listening to. But you don't have to tell me I'm sad, mmmkthanks!

*Pure bunk, by this I mean 'based on my own infrequent and casual observations'.

**Um...possibly, no promises made or inferred.