While I’ve been to the UK before, I’ve not ‘lived’ there in the resident sense. Tooling around in a country’s biggest city for a couple of weeks is different from living there.
Now I’m living here. It’s a real trip, man. Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon are both from the area; exciting, right?
First impressions: this place is fucking packed with corpses. You might be thinking ‘duh, so is everywhere’, but what I mean is, you might be walking through an outdoor mall with a bunch of bullshit stationary, magazine, coffee and clothes shops and in the middle of all this is a small square of grass with a tree and a tombstone/tombstones. Like, you have to walk around a grave when walking from the Hallmark store to the Starbucks. This is a 7 second process. I really want to make sure that you, reader, understand how many corpses are directly below the surface of even a bustling mall center here in the UK. It’s fucked off.
Still first impressions: pick a fucking side of the sidewalk to walk on. You are likely aware that one drives on the left in the UK. It isn’t some left field sucker punch to come to find one is also supposed to walk on the left here. There are literally arrows painted on the ground indicating that you’re supposed to walk on the left hand side. This is awkward for me, particularly because no one else seems to understand the significance of the arrows. Even people who are obviously British- and I mean people dressed like Victorian swimmers, wearing monocles or sporting crowns/tiaras- walk on the right hand side more often than not. There are enough people on the left that I am heartened and motivated to do the ‘right’ thing. Then I wonder if cognitive flexibility here is a matter of being able to adapt to what everyone else is doing or being able to do the ‘best’ thing, even when it’s a matter of going against the current. I could understand either.
That said, there are awesome footpaths which bisect private properties and allow pedestrians to get to where they’re going via the shortest route- this is something we don’t have in the states (at least not to any similar degree). They’re all these weird, abandoned-seeming tunnels boxed in by trees, shrubs or menacing fences or brick walls.
I initially stayed with Stu and Pulkit for a span of days. It was most excellent to hang out with Stu again. I also got to spend time with Kaya and Buddy. That is to say I got to have kids sneezing directly into my mouth, which, all things considered, is the direction I’ve always wanted my life to go in. In the end I lost my voice, developed a slight cough, got to be called ‘Uncle Charlie’, and got to be a human jungle gym for two weeks. Buddy and Kaya were super rad and I’ll be babysitting them more in the future.
Stu and I were able to re-tile his kitchen, which looked great when we were done! I only have mostly done images, but I’ve been told finished pictures are on their way.
Anyway, the remaining pictures in the gallery below should be labelled. Kaya did some editing on a couple of them and took a couple of them. They’ll be clearly captioned.
On an unrelated note, I keep getting spam email entitled ‘Time-Share Exit Strategies’. In case you were considering getting a time-share, I wanted you to know. You’re welcome.
That’s a blog. I’ll be republishing old photos from the prior blog more regularly going forward. In case you were interested. I’m going to guess ‘no’, but you never know.