The World Sleeps Until You Wake

You once wrote to me, “the world sleeps until you wake up,” as we lived our separate, parallel, lives, but we were somehow already joined by that gossamer thread that unites every couple. I’m a romantic, yes, but I know that what I feel about you is more than just some whizzing endorphins doing their thing when I feel your touch on my skin last thing at night and your eyes on me first thing in the morning even when we’re 10,000km apart. You’re a part of my consciousness, someone I think of involuntarily now throughout my day. Wondering about how you are is like taking a breath.

And then, the clock chimes 7, or 8pm, and it’s my turn to be without you. You’re usually going to sleep first, unless I’m awake into the wee hours of the next morning. So in my evenings I get to luxuriate in you. I get to wonder about you, and I’m well aware that in these spaces between seeing one another, touching one another and talking, we could be inventing false narratives, but then I look back at the words we’ve written to one another, and I think about the feeling I get when I listen to your voice, how my feet feel more solid on the earth, how I feel like I’m more inside my body and how my shoulders drop into their correct posture.

I feel warm when I think about you. And I’m usually a person with cold hands and feet, who needs an extra layer with her just in case.

***

As I read this back I know I have been GIDDY and drunk on you all summer, and I realise that I still am, but that it’s maturing into something deeper than “oh look how compatible the internet says we are”. I think of all of the combined hours we have now spent talking on the phone, each wrapped up in the thoughts of the other, and I find myself wondering if this time spent living thousands upon thousands of kilometres apart will be the thing that we look back on as the making and cementing of our bond. I wonder if it’s a blessing, because most other couples living in the same place might get lots more physical time together, but I wonder if they know one another's brains in the same way as we do after four months.

I suppose it’s not the comparison, anyway, that is important. What is important is that the world still sleeps until you wake, that as I write this I’m fully conscious of how much I desire you, and that although sometimes frustrating to not be able to reach out and touch your arm, lace my fingers with yours, look into your eyes, or stroke your head, noticing how much those moments are missed is as crucial to understanding what this – us – we – means to me. I’m very much enjoying letting that flow over me, and through me, today as I write at my kitchen table, waiting for you to wake up in the tomorrow that you’re already in.

Dinosaur Bones

We found
swatches of sea glass -
glitteringly littered near a half-broken, salt-eaten
backbone of a whale
or a dinosaur
large, antique, resilient bones
hugging the rocks
on a coastline
proudly facing a daily battle
with the ever-changing, ever-eroding, ever-exposing surf.

Three New Fledgling Poems

They're just tryouts, you understand. Feel free to give me feedback, I can take it. I think.

Concordance

Sky and Sea meet, 
in a concordance of colour
a string of understanding connecting them.
They know one another's needs and they move together,
finding in one another
a perfect lovers' kind of peace.

Wave-Walker

I watched her walk into the waves
slowly heading for the horizon
her back was straight, her hair
long and untamed,
her eyes fixed on everything 
and nothing.
She walked until her feet 
were lifted from the earth
and the waves took her
back to the place where she
was born.

Whittle

Whittle Me Away; just try!
Like driftwood, 
I'll often move with the tide
But I'll always have
My Own Form.

Om Shanti

a sound we make
to make us whole;
a terrifying prospect.
that all of us are merely halves
and shadows of our former selves

we twist this way and that
hold poses strong and fast
breathe deep, look in, not out
and let it go, they say

but only one half of me believes
in the wholeness of the self
without shadows of you.

Harvest Moon + Lunar Eclipse = Songwriting

I woke up this morning from a dream crying, and had to catch my breath upon waking.

I have one or two of these a year. Usually they're anxiety dreams about not having spoken to my mum enough, and I dream something has happened to her, and it makes me pick up the phone immediately. to check on her. They're my brain's way of telling me that I've been too self-absorbed and that I need to connect with the people that matter most to me. Because my mum and I only have one another, I think this is mild only-child-of-a-single-parent woe. 

This dream was different. It was about my ex, and it told me very clearly that the door to our connection was closing, and that my mind and body are re-assessing his influence in my life. I've been inside that process for nearly a year and a half,  more "officially" for a year, but after seeing a photo I hadn't meant to see, making it very clear that he had moved on and is in another relationship,  my brain started doing calculations in the background about what that meant for me. Maybe this weekend's full moon just made sure I'd caught myself up.

The truth is that I've also moved on, and moved very far away from our life together. I've dated others this year, sure, but mostly I've been working on making personal choices I know my older self will look back on and be proud of, after a heartbreaking rupture last spring made me question so many of the choices I had made over the past six years.

Apparently we're all feeling the effects this weekend of a giant harvest moon timed, unusually, with a lunar eclipse.  Our watery bodies are supposedly affected by the push and pull of the moon and this is a time of re-setting the emotional dial.  Here's the forecast for all of us from foreverconscious.com

This Eclipse may stir up some painful moments or some fears, but know that this is all so you can grow and flourish in the direction that you need to.  

While this Eclipse is helping to release the truth, it may also release any angers or frustrations that have been simmering beneath the surface. Emotions will be very high around this Eclipse and it may be difficult to see clearly at first.  

Know that the best way to channel this energy is into something creative. Writing, art and music are all excellent ways to channel any anger, frustration or heightened emotions that appear. 

 So I wrote a song about it (It's pretty terrible, but it'll be good to sing, in a somewhat PJ Harvey sermonising-style). My co-band member even wrote music for it already. Here goes.

Harvest Moon

You got me looking like a fool

Harvest Moon

I wake crying salty tears

Big rushing tidal fears

All alone in a stolid room

Emotion pushing through the gloom

All out of sorts, in my bed

I can't seem to find my head

My soul as heavy as deadened lead

I miss all the things you never said

Oh, Harvest Moon, you got me looking like a fool

Findings

On a recent, fleeting trip to the US (to Idaho, no less, a place of which I had zero expectations, and left more than pleasantly surprised), I honoured what has now become a travelling-through-the-US-custom, and bought myself some twizzlers and a copy of New York magazine. During the 50-odd hour roundtrip journey from Barcelona to Boise, I devoured both, along with a book gifted to me by my friend Lo-Sal called Findings, by Kathleen Jamie.

Jamie is first and foremost a poet, who writes about observations in the natural world; in this case the collected essays published are all about Scotland. Her poetic prose is easy to read, loose-fitting, casual, comforting - but no less affecting for it. She said in an interview once that Findings was notoriously difficult to classify - both for her publisher to take it on, and for bookstores to try to decide which section to put it in, but that her readers don’t seem to mind. And I didn’t. It’s like someone pulling a big chunky cable-knit woollen blanket over you and while you’re starting to fall asleep, telling you stories about what they can see from the window. Whilst stroking your hair.

Her style is so natural - of course, for someone who chooses to write about the natural world, this is essential - but her ease with words also makes for comfortable reading.

“Fancy - day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we all spend so much time outdoors. It’s unseasonal, but all weather is unseasonal nowadays. The plum blossom is coming and next door’s old pear tree is a perfect triangle of greenish-white froth. They do this like a conjuring trick, the old trees. They’re brittle and cronish all winter, then blossom issues out of them and fills the tree slowly, like a dancehall filling on a Saturday night.”  Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes, [Jamie, K. Findings: (Penguin, 2005) p.32 ]

Findings is all about looking for things, and what I’ve been looking for is a way to focus my writing, and find the time and dedication needed to finish things. I think that’s why Lo-Sal chose this book to gift to me. He said that my writing reminded him of Jamie's, a huge compliment, but of course my style doesn’t hold a candle to hers, all unbalanced and gawky and newborn as it is. However, immersing myself in someone else’s writing style inevitably gets me thinking about my own, if indeed such a voice exists.

Happily for me, and my fledgling written voice, an article in New York magazine, my other long-haul reading material, introduced me to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. Cameron is a screenwriter, poet, playwright and general all-round creativity guru whose seminal aforementioned work has helped to “unblock” the creativity of countless artists around the world. (She was also briefly married to Martin Scorsese in the late 70s, a factoid which to this day seems to define the poor woman; not that in our fair, equal society a woman is the sum of whoever she happens to have been married to, but it does seem to captivate her audiences).

It’s billed as a self-help book, which does make me shudder a little, and the full title : The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity may support some of its detractors’ claims, which is namely that there is a little bit too much God in it. Having said all of that, two main ideas have caught my interest: Morning Pages (every morning without fail, upon waking, writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness-flow by hand) and the Artist’s Date: a once-per week time set aside, and guarded fiercely, to do something that gives you inspiration, not necessarily an artistic pursuit per se, but perhaps time in a food market, a library, a bookstore or the cinema, the idea being that it’s a safe space for creative thoughts to come to you with a relaxed brain. 

Both of these ideas, I like. And with the next two months of relative freedom from work constraints rolling out ahead of me, and a close friend’s insistence that I really ought to try and finish some proper fiction, and set myself some solid writing goals (quite right, MF, you’ve always been a super editor), I’m very tempted to skip reading the book, take on these two main tenets as experiments in upping my creative output, and set the timer on myself (t-minus 2.5 months) to see what comes forth.  

Flutter (A Short Story, Not At All Autobiographical)

The days were long in June, and the evenings barely blushed and fluttered their eyelids, with a sunset of a little over two hours. He felt that day had lasted forever, as he waited for her to arrive. He idled. The long glass corridors made him uneasy: the ringing out of his heels on the polished wooden floors troubled him somehow, as if he were pacing a hospital corridor. Here he was, in the site chosen to mark the occasion of their long overdue meeting.  

The idea had come to her in a Williamsburg bookshop. She had picked up a series of travel essays about Iceland, and she’d fallen in love with the photos; her glacial eyes gleaming at finding such serene blues on the book jacket. They had picked the Harpa concert hall as their meeting point. “We can pick up our own symphony where we left off,” she had said.

Their lives had been abruptly separated when she had accepted a new job in a New York publishing house.  He had remained in London, unwilling to give up the work he loved as an editor, but also the townhouse, the dog, and his usual weekend stroll to collect the paper, followed with precise regularity by a flat white and some Ottolenghi sourdough toast. It wasn’t that he was stuck in his ways. Just comfortable. It had been four months since their last physical meeting, and an intercontinental ache had set in. He despised the digital. He couldn’t get used to their instant messaging – it just seemed so banal, the information they would exchange: the photos of their lunches, their desks, their walks to work. In the early days, he thought, they might have met at the museum of penises instead. They would have snickered in complicit unison, as they had on their first trip to Amsterdam. The sex museum had hardly been highbrow, but they had wandered about in a dazed glow, giggling as they took in exhibits of Monroe and Mata Hari. That first year had seemed like one long Sunday morning spent entangled in his high threadcount sheets. Now? They whatsapped their salads to one another.

He sighed, his heartbeat quickening. He missed her nape, her scent, her often-fuzzy legs. He fought his impending erection, scandalous in the airy confines of a concert hall with endless windows. He strode, then slowed, then sat, then stood and dialled. A robotic voice asked for his message, but he found he had none.The sun was dipping, lazily, like a cat stretching. There was no sign of her. He tried her phone again, fruitlessly. An icy thought gripped him: panic that her plane hadn’t arrived. As he arrived at the next possible conclusion, he felt nauseous. 

She hadn’t boarded in the first place. 

Light danced on the glass panels, honeycomb glittering in the soft evening sunshine. Final flurries of activity at the concert hall doors were taking place. Attendants collected wayward tickets, wives snapped their handbags shut and husbands downed the last of their drinks. He put his dinner jacket over his shoulder, and hurried down the glossy hallway, towards the briefest of dusks.

Violets, Books and Old Friends

A new way of friends keeping in touch, meaningfully and off facebook: http://fiveviolets.tumblr.com/

This is a lovely idea.

It’s going to be a novel way to start a conversation, keep it going, hear news and updates, and through a friend’s eyes, see a film, read a new book, or try out a recipe, and connect in a different way – a more meaningful way - than email or facebook. It means we can see the world through one another’s eyes every now and again. We can dip in or out; reading about friends’ lives in London, or on the road, wherever they happen to be. I am glad that we thought of it together, in an East London café on a sunny Sunday in early April of 2013.  I’m especially glad for the chance to stay connected in a new way, because soon the luxury of hopping on the tube and meeting up with friends for coffee and cake will be absent from my life.

That’s because this June, in my 31st year, I’m finally taking the leap of faith that I have wanted to since I was 17, and moving to Barcelona with my partner, E – a city I fell in love with even before we met; strangely enough, a city that my girlfriends took me to when I was getting over the breakup of the relationship that ended before E and I got together.

He has always loved Spain, and starting learning Spanish long before I did. On subsequent visits together, we did what everyone does in a city like Barcelona - we immediately imagined ourselves in a top-floor flat in the Barrio Gotico, looking out over the city’s pink rooftops, the sea air ruffling our hair. We could see ourselves eating tapas, suntanned and relaxed, shopping in the Mercat Santa Caterina, feeling plump tomatoes and sampling juicy olives. We stayed with some friends of friends who were sub-letting studio apartments to tourists using airbnb, a site we had no prior experience with, but have since grown to love and become passionate advocates of. We asked them how they enjoyed living there, and how their business was going. They told us that it had been the best decision of their lives. They had 95% occupancy in their 3 apartments year-round. They were doing well. And they said they thought anyone could do the same.

And like that, over a couple of bottles of Estrella Damm in the sunshine in August, it was decided. We were going to give it a go. Work-wise, we had to try to sort out other sources of income, because we know we’re not cut out to run a small empire of sublet apartments (it’s highly illegal, by the way). But then we thought: fuck it. Why not have at least a room that guests can stay in? Barcelona is a city that captivates all who visit her. It should be a good way to cover our costs and meet an assortment of interesting visitors. We’ve decided to try it out now because it feels like the right time for adventure, before we are tied to a city with a mortgage, or kids, or both. Right now, we can still choose.

The concept is to try out a few new things; namely, being self-employed, growing a new business, adapting to a different city and learning how to exist in a place other than London, and most crucially, moving towards some semblance of fluency in another language. It’s either going to be the best thing we ever do, or the most stupid. It means giving up full-time jobs, despite my mother’s worries and continual questions about how we’ll survive, given the current state of the Spanish economy. It means packing up our belongings, items that we have accumulated over the past four years; saved up for, even, and putting some up for sale, putting some in parents’ lofts, and throwing many away. It means we’ve been saving up and trying to live frugally, which in London is night-on impossible, but we’ve certainly been making a concerted effort to make packed lunches everyday, and deny ourselves the usual fripperies – coffees, magazines, takeaways; that expensive showergel has been used up; the Lovefilm subscription cancelled.

And it’s been good. It feels like we’re streamlining, picking away layers of needless expenditure, making things count more, last more, last longer. I’m actually enjoying eating up old tins of things in our food cupboard. Even if it does look like only quinoa, lentils, and risotto will be on the menu for the final few weeks. Actually – and this is a dark secret - I’ve always had a hankering to try to get my possessions down to a suitcase and a potted plant, à la Jean Reno in Léon. This is sadly impossible in reality as I struggle daily with a bona-fide addiction to buying shoes, and have a pathological aversion to throwing away old magazines and newspapers from momentous events - I still have a Newsweek from Obama’s first election victory. 

It’s the same with books.

As we packed up our possessions last week, I realised that between us we have a shitload of them. We must have had at least 300 or 400 of the little buggers in our small flat.  It’s been a busy few months and I’ve been reading less than I ought to, so in the last few weeks I’ve been playing catch-up, reading things that have been on the ‘to read’ shelf for years and I have been meaning to get around to opening. This is a crucial activity, as I need to know whether they will come with me on the journey.

Books that I love are like old friends to me and can never be thrown away. They sit on shelves gathering dust, occasionally opened to flirt with a favourite chapter, or passage, sometimes re-read on holiday, when they are usually left open and face-down, spine cracked, splashed with water from the pool or gathering fine grains of sand in between the pages. The best ones, the most loved ones, have faded in the sunlight and if you hold them in your hand, they open slowly to reveal the most well-thumbed pages. They smell reassuringly, comfortingly old. They are the ones that will never leave my bookshelves.

I just finished the last book on the ‘to read’ shelf.  It’s called Almost French and tells the story of an Australian writer coming to live with a Frenchman in Paris. She struggles with the move, to fit in, and to understand French society. The story itself is nothing special; it won’t make the cut and won’t join the beloved pile of faded, faithful old friends. But the final sentence in it struck a chord. It made me hopeful, and excited, and strengthened my resolve to keep searching for adventure.

I am happy I finally found an excuse to work my way through that shelf of unread books. Let no stone remained unturned, I say. I’ll just keep reading.

This post was originally written for Five Violets, re-posted here for your reading pleasure!

The Cautionary Tale of the Fat Grey Seal

I've been quiet for the last month, but that's a good thing, because any posts would have been fantastically dull. I spent much of March applying for a new job (I didn't get it, sadly), working my arse off and earning myself a holiday.

The holiday part is quite good, though. We went to the beautiful West Highlands of Scotland, bathed in sunshine upon our arrival and with temperatures in the high teens (on the first day, anyway). I wore waterproofs and hiking-type shoes almost nonstop, and actually enjoyed it, despite looking frightful in all our holiday snaps.

We walked. A lot. We sailed (well, someone else drove and parked the boat. I know I'm using the wrong words, and I don't care - I know nothing of boats). We watched birds! We saw enormous grey seals! They looked ridiculous! I wouldn't mess with them, though. Those blubbery blighters. Look at that one there, giving us stinkeye. He knew. We would have been happier on his turf. No wonder it was being guarded so carefully.

What?

There was a lot of whisky and cullen skink and Lorne sausages. There was no TV aerial in the flat where we stayed and so we watched some Hitchcock films and - fittingly - the DVD extras on Braveheart. There was also no phone reception to speak of, so it was pretty darned relaxing. I managed to read a lot and the days seemed longer, something I often long for in a normal working week.

It made me think very hard about city living. Without exception, every local we met in the sleepy little Argyll village we stayed in seemed to pity us for living in London. Some had lived and worked here themselves, and had great stories to tell, but none missed it. One couple in their sixties had come back for a holiday and enjoyed themselves, but for the most part the men hated cities and the women got their cultural fixes in Glasgow or from holidays in other places.

I don't think I'm quite ready to live in a place where no shops are open past 6pm (or indeed on Sundays) but it did make me consider what one really needs from the place they live. Something I seem to do regularly each time I leave the city, whether for a couple of days or a couple of weeks. I keep hearing that little voice beckoning me away. And I do wonder if I'd be more productive; maybe writing more, maybe spending more time talking to friends, less time exhausted on the sofa, less time travelling, less time worrying about money.

I know, I know. It's been two years of this love/hate shit with London. Even I'm bored of it now. I'm like a woman scorned who keeps telling her friends he'll change. 


So, definitely time for a new record. This is the last time I say this. Promise. 

The Bittersweet Beginning

1. Crossroads

When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to be a novelist. At university I started a novel, which apparently showed promise, but I could never bring myself to finish it, or even go so far as to identify an ending. In the end I submitted a half-finished rough draft of four chapters as a novella, and I got away with it. I was awarded my MA (with Merit - what does that even mean?) for writing a fairly liberally fictionalised account of how my parents met. The real version is good too, but at the time I wasn’t sure enough of my writing to give the truth a go.

I still write, but a terminal laziness and a busy day job keeps me from tackling that particular story. I have ideas that won’t go away, but won’t quite come closer to completion, either. I’ve only ever finished three short stories in the past three years. One was published in a friend’s magazine, but I think it might have been out of kindness. My poetry is for shit. I keep the flightiest of diaries, the kind that only flourish when I’m on holiday or have had my heart broken and I’m flailing around, flaccidly self-pitying. (See? I'd make a horrible poet.)

But there is one kind of thing I can write, with heady abandon. Maybe even two or three in an evening, if I’m feeling flowery and full of beans.

Reviews.

I'm really keen on these bite-sized snippets of information, and because I like reading them, I love writing them. It could be somewhere I’ve recently had a cupcake, downed a cocktail, watched the latest Woody Allen, or laid my head in a new city. I’ve reviewed all kinds of things. Every time a place has made an impression on me in the last year or so, good or bad, I’ve reviewed it on one of these two sites: welovelocal.com or trustedplaces.com. I’ve sadly abandoned the former of late in favour of its flashier counterpart, and because I was getting more feedback (i.e. readers) on TP.

As soon as I realised that people were reading my reviews - and that the time I put into ensuring that they were accurate, contained no spelling errors, and were informative and hopefully entertaining - was being appreciated, I began writing about everywhere I went, in earnest. And I still do.You can read them here.

I haven't even started on my love of cooking and good food shared with good people yet - one of life's greatest pleasures. That will take a few other posts to really do justice to. It's safe to say, I can eat. And I'll always happily sport the slightest of muffin-tops rather than leave the last forkful of something divinely tasty.




Mmmm...
muffins.







But possibly even more than food, I love London. I really enjoy living here. I didn’t want to come here at all; I was forced into moving here, my mother’s place of birth, when I was 10 years old. I guess we can go into that story in more detail some other time. But when we moved to the UK from the US, back in 1993, we didn’t really live in London. We came to reside in the town my mum had grown up in, to be near to her mum - in Orpington.

Orpington. Yes, you may have heard of it. It’s been immortalised as pretty much the most dangerously boring town in England in a TV advert for Honda.

See, Orpington is technically in London. It’s in zone 6. It has red London Transport signs on all the bus stops. It’s located within the London Borough of Bromley. Your oyster card will still (just about) function there. But it really isn’t London, in any humanly imaginable way. Many of the people there have lived there all their lives. (I think one of the Orpo-ites even proudly states as much in the comments on that YouTube clip.) It feels small, yet too large to navigate properly on foot, or on public transport. Have a look at the town Leisure Centre, and bear in mind that this is where people are expected to go to relax and have fun in their leisure time, and you have some idea of what I mean.














It has an unhealthy concentration of old people and Tory councillors and an unholy amount of foul-mouthed chavs. It’s really a horrible soul-sucking grey little cesspool, with a high street that looks like it threw up a bellyful of half-chewed, permanently damaged people onto the freshly laid carpet of a nightmarishly ugly 60s grey concrete shopping precinct. And precinct is the word. This place is an assault on the word precinct, which I’ve always thought is a horrible word associated with lawless expanses of dystopian metropolises.

Anyway. We can come back to Orpo later, but I think you get the point. It’s not at all like living in London, not even zone 3, which is where I currently live. No, no. My adolescence was spent yearning for things to do and the places to do them, which is why I went and did silly things like go and get inked at 16 down the local Orpington high street tattoo parlour, or lose my virginity to a hideously unsuitable older boy, who was mean and bad and –zut alors- had a flash car and a myriad of ugly-as-sin piercings, including a flesh tunnel that was a whopping 20mm wide open hole in his right earlobe, and smelled like the inside of your belly button if you’ve stuck your finger too far in.


No, Orpington’s not a pretty place, and this is truly reflected by its people. Don’t have a go at me – I did pretty well by Orpo boy standards to find him. Once again, I’m digressing.

The point is, I was bored. And so when, after university, and once I had a proper (ish) job, I could finally afford to move out from the confines of my mother’s charming, but nevertheless cooped-up cottage on the greener outskirts of Orpo, to the comparatively intoxicating melée of Balham (Gateway to the South), I leapt at the opportunity. From there I got out and I explored London.

I began with the central parts that I knew from temping in offices; making coffee, photocopying, and answering phones, zombie like, whilst I worked out in my head what my real job might be one day. Slowly I began to link streets together on my mental map of the city and began to see how it all fit together. I began to be able to walk more instead of taking the tube. I would ride always on the top decks of buses, piecing together the roads I knew with those I didn’t to improve my bearings.

I made sure I got out most nights, to do something, see someone, go somewhere. I was a Yes Woman. I turned no invite down, let no friend not include me in their plans. I saw countless unknown bands at the 12 Bar Club; I went to LSE lectures I knew nothing about; found arts and crafts make-and-do parties in Bethnal Green; went to the big galleries on late-night openings; saw young comedians in the basement of the Albany on Great Portland Street; joined Amnesty and went to their fundraiser club nights; and even joined a London social networking site and got steaming drunk with a room full of complete strangers.













I was hungry for the city, and the best part – London was hungry for me. ‘Where have you been?’, she seemed to say. London will keep taking from you if you let her – the temptress. She never tires of pocketing your money or enticing you with some new frippery – a new show in lights here; a trendy new fusion restaurant there; a life-changing exhibition; an irresistible patisserie; a Cuban bar; a Japanese boutique, a German cinema night – the possibilities, as they say, are seemingly endless.

This, I love. And when I'm feeling flush and full of life, it's a place that makes me feel blessed that I live here. But,like all London-dwellers, I've had my fair share of ups and downs here too. Certain places hold memories of breakups and breakdowns, and this city can be a lonely place. The same thing that appeals to me about London - the fact that you can be completely anonymous here - often also makes me a little sad.

Thanks to Natalie d'Arbeloff, the photographer of this picture, and to Dave and Dana at Postal Poetry, the fantasic site I found it on.

This blog will document my ups and downs in this dirty old town, in the form of quick capsule reviews of places I've been and things I've done. I'm hoping I can give you ideas on where to go and what to do in this fine city and am hoping you'll keep coming back for more. That's what London makes you do too. And I always will.

I'll start with a place that will remain important to me for many reasons. For that, dear reader, you'll have to make sure you return for the next post...