If I Could Turn Back Time

I know in theory every year elapses at the same rate, of a day at a time for 365 days, unless it’s a leap year. But this year seems to have shot by with Usain Bolt-like speed. Thus it’s nearly eight months since I moved back down from the wind and rain-lashed streets of Edinburgh to the wind and rain-lashed streets of London. The weather has given me a sense of continuity, but pretty much everything else has changed.


Viz:

Employment – I’m now officially referring to myself as a freelancer again, as, praise be! I’ve managed to get a couple of contracts under my belt, after a very shaky start. Having not been unemployed for a very long time, I can confirm that being without a job, in a recession, is a dispiriting business. I found myself wandering the supermarket aisles, looking for produce with yellow ‘reduced price’ stickers on them and scrutinising the price of everything in order to shave off a few pennies here and there. It’s like being a pensioner, but with a smaller cardigan collection and fewer pairs of sensible shoes. Despite this, the minute I had an office to go to every day and a monthly wage packet, I was once again frittering cash on fancy Finest pasta, spending crazy amounts of money getting my hair dyed at the hairdresser instead of doing it myself and drinking horribly overpriced cocktails with my friends. How is it that you can charge up to £12 a go for just mixing together a couple of spirits and some fruit juice and sticking on a bit of ‘garnish’? People will look back in years to come and say, ‘No wonder entire economies fell apart, when they merrily spent a tenner a go on a perfectly ordinary drink’.

Cocktails are the new designer handbags: we buy them because everyone else is. I think, after years of finding them glamorous, I might finally be finding them unconscionably profligate. It may be time to just congregate round the telly at different friends’ houses each week with a bottle of Merlot and a DVD.

I’m hoping the contract work keeps appearing, as I’m enjoying doing a Littlest Hobo routine round different publishers, dipping in and out of things and catching up with lots of friends in the process.

Fitness – once I had the luxury of an ongoing cashflow, I decided to get myself a new Personal Trainer. I kidded myself that I was doing sterling work in the gym, whilst knowing that my natural tendency is still to give up the minute I get bored or tired and that any workout I undertake is generally at about 1/3 of the effort of a PT session. A sentence I never thought I’d be writing two years ago: I missed being turned into a sweaty, exhausted wreck once a week through the medium of exercise. And also, when you’ve had what amounts to an ersatz boyfriend for a year and a half, you kind of miss that too.

So I requested a new trainer (from my favourite receptionist at Regents Park Virgin Active, who knows my name and greets me merrily every time I see her. Again, I say, the receptionist at the gym knows my name. That would never have happened pre-Edinburgh). She suggested Geezerboy Mikey (that’s not how she referred to him, of course). I have now got over the feeling that I’m cheating on Cheerful James (much like when you change hairdressers, you feel guilty for ages afterwards), as I huff and puff my way around the gym, even into the ‘weights room’ where I am surrounded by grunting men with necks as wide as my thighs. I have done boxing, I have done skipping. I have done biking, rowing, running on a treadmill and throwing a variety of weighted balls at Geezerboy. He calls me ‘darling’, ‘love’ and sometimes even ‘sweetie’. We have progressed from a formal handshake at the end of each session to a formal handshake and a kiss on the cheek. I bloody love him.

The other week I attempted a PUNCH class (gym’s capitals, not mine), as it turns out I really like hitting things. I wouldn’t say my technique is in any way good, but I’m certainly enthusiastic about it. I got paired up with a really tall German girl, who’d never done it before. I ended up feeling like David Haye when he had to fight that 7’ 6” Russian bloke, whilst she ended up punching pads that were roughly level with her waist. My shoulders were killing me for three days straight. I can’t imagine she felt any benefit whatsoever.

I really miss all the walking I did in Edinburgh, but have been trying to force myself to leave the house early enough each day to get in at least half an hour’s walk to work. The diet is faring a lot less well, given that the return of my social life has also meant a return to drinking too much wine and an over-reliance on chips as a food group. I knew it was too good to last.

Home – I have moved house three times since December. I am fucking sick to death of moving house. All my stuff is now in storage, apart from six pairs of jeans, a few dresses, a huge number of stripey tops, five pairs of shoes (two of them trainers), a DAB radio and a laptop. Plus a really random assortment of books.

There has been a lot of faffing about with my Streatham flat. My tenants wanted to move out. Then they didn’t. Then they were applying for a visa for Australia and would definitely move out. Then they got turned down, so they wanted to stay put again. It’s been like the hokey fucking cokey all year. Annoyingly, they can ask to be let out of the (18-month) contract early, but I can’t give them notice till the end of the year.

So I decided that I’d take the radical step, after five years of living on my own, of moving back into a house share, as I can’t afford to live alone. My criteria were: Streatham; about £700 a month – the irony that I used to have an enormous 2-bed flat all to myself for that amount of money was not lost on me – and a bathroom of my own. With bills preferably thrown in, and definitely a dishwasher. I hit up Spareroom.com and found a likely place which had a nice tiled hallway, a bay windowed sitting room, a garden, and… six housemates. Six! That’s practically a sports team! (Well, it is if you’re playing five-a-side). I emailed the landlord, and fixed up a visit for that night. A chap showed me round and I said hello to three housemates (there was another chap, and a couple, moving in the week after me). The house was massive, my room was fine (up in the eaves, so apart from the potential for a lot of non-rock headbanging, quite atmospheric, and quiet) and my en-suite shower looked perfectly presentable. Dishwasher? Tick. Cleaner once a week? Tick. All bills, including cleaner, Sky and Wi-fi? Tick. ‘I’ll take it’, I said. Job done, moved in five days later. Moving this time consisting of putting all my remaining possessions into a variety of plastic and canvas bags, throwing them in the back of my friend’s car and then throwing them on the floor of the new room, where 85% of them remain unpacked.

Living with six other people feels kind of like being in an episode of Fresh Meat, crossed with an episode of This Life. My house mates are:

Chris – a very tall and affable Northern Irish man, who is keen on most sports, but especially cycling. Thus, I am now fairly au fait with the Tour de France, and why Chris Hoy is built like a tank, whilst Bradley Wiggins is built like a pencil with all the wood shaved off.

Asha – a petite South African girl who is keen on Holby City and cooking very elaborate meals for her boyfriend.

Kim ‘n’ David – an insanely good looking couple. Kim luckily leaves for work at 6.30am, meaning that I don’t have to feel spectacularly ugly when faced with her in the kitchen of a morning. Which is a relief. David is Canadian and has the best tan I have ever seen. Kim is a fan of Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model, which means that I can forgive her for her beauty, in favour of bonding over shit telly.

Ben – goes to the gym a lot, and is very well turned out (but has an annoying habit of going to the gym without taking his keys, meaning I have to let him back in the house. Take your keys! I am not your mum!) Although, as he only left uni two years ago, I am, indeed, old enough to be his mum. He is the slowest eater I have ever encountered. And it was, of course, Ben who I had to beg for help when my bedroom door locked itself yesterday morning when I went for a shower. Thank God I go to the bathroom in my PJs, not just a towel. He very kindly phoned the landlord for me, who turned up with a spare key half an hour later. It was all mortifying.

David. David is, I think, my current favourite, for his all-out weirdness (he does coding for some IT company, and plays a lot of computer games. Enough said). Conversations we have had so far:

David: Hi. I think there are masses of mosquito larvae in a load of stagnant water in the wheelbarrow in the garden. Do you want to see?
Me [spluttering slightly]: Um, OK.
[After we have gazed at about a million wriggly black things in the wheelbarrow and discussed whether we should use bleach or petrol to get rid of them. PETROL?!]
David: Do you want to kill them?
Me: No! You spotted them! Also, you're a man! That's your job!
[David potters off with the most toxic bleach we can find in the kitchen cupboard]

I return to the house and am about to put my key in the door. The door magically opens. Behind it is David, looking a bit lurksome.

Me: Oh, hi! Er, thanks!
David: Well, I was on my way to bed, and saw you coming up the drive, so I thought I'd open the door for you.
[It was, at this stage, 8.30pm, so I’m not sure if 'going to bed' is a euphemism].

I had nicked a bit of mirror from the utility room that looked as though it'd come off a wardrobe that David had dismantled, as I had no full-length mirror in my room. It'd been there for a few days, so I assumed it was surplus to requirements.
David: What are you going to use that mirror for?
Me: Umm, looking at myself?

David: I'm going on holiday tonight.
Me: Oh! How nice. Where?
David: Ibiza.
Me [goggling at idea of David in Ibiza]: Really? Who with?
David: On my own. I'm going to a yoga retreat.
Me: Wow! What kind of yoga do you do?
David: Well, the bendy, stretchy kind.

This then offered up my favourite exchange in a long while, in the week when David was away between Chris and Ben.
Ben: Have you heard from David?
Chris: No. Which means he's either having fun, or he's dead. I honestly have no idea which.

This morning:
David: Heard you got locked out of your room yesterday. In a towel. Hur-hur-hur
Me: Um, yes. Luckily the landlord came round quite quickly, otherwise I’d have had to spend all day in the house, like an invalid, in my pajamas.
David: You could have kicked the door down!
Me: That’s a rather expensive way of solving the problem. And I think I’d have broken an ankle.

It's kind of like being back at uni, but with a TV that's three times the size, and better quality booze. Well, also I have my own bathroom and am listening to Xfm and Radio 2 instead of Radio 1, but otherwise little has changed. I might start writing essays on a Sunday night for the full effect.