London 1999-2001

I arrived in the UK the second time, from Australia via a month or so in America visiting my best friend Braden in and around Seattle in October 1999 with the plan to head down to Cornwall and find work. I only got as far as Torquay where I discovered a really cool backbackers and spent a couple of nice weeks there idly looking for jobs.. it was run by a really friendly lady.. Jane .. it was on Melville street and i spent plenty of time gazing out the back window, hoping the girl over the way would come and look out of hers.. or walking around the town which had some gorgeous places like up around Cockington. I wonder what would have happened if i’d picked up work there.. probably still be there.. but what happened was a cool film troupe from London showed up for a few days and did some filming down by the sea and i got chatting to the young director who seemed he was on the up. Anyway they had that big city coolness about them and i got the buzz and as i was also running out of money and needed a job fast i high tailed it back on the Exeter bus to the London smoke.

I was still writing to a sweet girl i’d met in Seattle ..Piper.. was half thinking i could go back.. another path i nearly could have taken. But what i think was driving me back then was a need or desire to get to the source of things.. i’d been on the trail of the spiritual source for the past few years.. now i wanted to get to the cultural source. Growing up in Australia I was brought up on imported BBC stuff.  Plus i had an anglophile mother and grandmother (wrote about her family in a recent post). So London was the source of a lot of that. When i had first arrived back in 98 I came out of the underground at Blackfriars and saw St Paul’s dome looming under the dusk grey sky and just felt at home in a very deep way. And i also immediately thought of that scene in the tv hitch hikers guide to the galaxy when the vogon ships float over the dome.. which id probably first seen when i was 11 or 12 or something.

This time arriving in London i was so broke it was tough.. i had a friend in Acton i could stay with for a little bit. So i did that and got a waiter/bar job at a cafe Rouge in Kew and then a room in South Acton which i soon realised was really overpriced. My mate Nick arrived just around christmas and i didn’t even have enough money for a beer. It was the direst of times. Yet i imagined that i was going to make it somehow.. i had the dream.. i bought somehow a cheap but nice tanglewood guitar (can’t remember if that was in Kew or Torquay). Picked up a second slightly better waitering job at a cool wine bistro restaurant called Cafe Baroque on southampton street in Covent garden and i learnt a lot about wine from the brilliant list of the lady Hilary who ran that place who encouraged me to become a properly trained sommelier.. but i let that path go by me as well as i knew it felt like it was a path to addictions. Also let go a volunteer job at the Kew steam museum working on those amazing big engines.. there was an incredible functioning beam engine in that place and only one old guy who could run it safely.. i could have got trained up but let that slide by. I had a kind of goal though it was hard to say it out loud. It wasn’t about getting into any of my nerdy practical stuff though.. geology science engines.. i wanted to get a functioning cultural facility. I knew i didn’t have one then.

I was 21 years old and girl mad.. visited one of the film crew girls i’d met in her place in Farnham which was a nice town .. but she had just come out of a bad relationship and wasn’t ready for a crazy naive Australian like me.. there was a south african girl in my south acton flat who was extracting herself from a crazy relationship.. we talked a lot and kissed once.. she gave me a quartz crystal that i still have somewhere..  there was a sort of healing going on maybe between us. I didn’t want to push anything. Then i met Laura in Cafe Baroque.. and i’ve written another article about that which branches off here… anyway i did get close to the ‘source’ as i started working in the theatre scene for a few years and got to sort of see how that showbiz side of london works.

I needed a cheaper spot to rent and followed an ad in Timeout magazine to a cheap sounding room very central at 121 Gloucester Place near Baker Street, about £60 a week. This was perfect cause i could walk to work at Baroque and later the theatre. And it had the london Buzz! Busses stopped right at the front door and went past all night.. taxis ambulences.. and every now an then a huge parade of horses with cannons in carriages would head down from some barracks up near regents park to hyde park for various official gun salutes. The clop of the horses! I could watch sitting in bed which was right up against the window, the top right window. It was a funny old georgian building, the floors were sagging so much that the wardrobe had phone books under the front legs and nothing under the back legs just to get them to stand against the wall. I was crammed into that place along with about five girls. They all had normal jobs in hospitals and cleaning and so on and the bathroom in the morning was always busting. But I usually missed this as I could sleep in as i worked nights – first at the restaurants then as an usher/stage door person. I knew all the back routes between Marylebone and the West End walking them every night, often glistening with rain and empty.

It seemed like such a squalid and glamorous life at the same time. The other inhabitants of the flats in Gloucester place upstairs and down were well off and there was a solicitors office on the ground floor which seemed really grand. The stairs inside spiralled up getting steadily narrower and more tatty until they got to our (former servants) quarters which though once maybe in the 1980s had been nicely fitted out had since become completely dowdy from being crammed with so many people. The kitchen was freezing with the window always half open to let out the cigarette smoke. Lots of bottles of cheap belgian wine were drunk taking in a great view over the chimney pots and tv aerials towards the BT tower. Sprinkled in this post are some photos from around that time i took on my old ilford sportsman but they were developed by an online company that only sent back very low res digital images. I wonder if i have the negatives somewhere.. i know some got lost.. i loved that little place anyway and playing my guitar on the bed and hanging with Marie and Vanessa and Maya and Jana all the others.. when i first moved into that house there had been a bunch of guys there but they all dissappeared for some reason.. i think they had more of a nighclub life and the rent collector certainly did he was always high.. and he never passed on the rent he collected to the landlords we found out eventually and everyone got chucked out. So that was the end of that.

But I’d moved already to Ravenshaw Street in West Hampstead and i talked a bit about living in or near Hampstead in another old post.. by then i was really playing guitar a lot and building up to my first open mic night which i did eventually over in a pub in Islington. But also reading all the books in my new share house run by Jula who was a bellydancer and yoga instructor and she was fighting to hold onto her house after her husband had left.. and she was actually doing it good on her. I guess she was probably about the age I am now.. i used to listen to music on her hi-fi and when her husband took a bunch of his records away he took one of mine.. but then i took one of his books when i left so we are square. It was an old cook book but I wish I had taken not that but an edition of edgar allen poe with those amazing illustrations by Harry Clarke that i loved. What a great old book that was. I think i sort of wrecked it cause i cut apart two pages that were still joined at the edge cause they hadn’t been cut properly. I don’t think you’re supposed to do that (as a collector -as a reader you have to of couse and i was a reader after all). I mean really i shouldn’t have taken anything, sorry Jula. But then you rented my room to someone while i was away in America so there’s that.

I visited America in August 2001 just before 9/11 – and i visited that other cultural centre NYC. I have a great picture of the twin towers somewhere. I lay on the pavement between them and looked up at the towers against the sky.  A passer by asked me if i was ok. It was next to a memorial for a bombing that had happened there in the 90s some time. This was about four weeks before the disaster. It had a very heavy feeling around that part of town but i just took it to be the city itself which felt so intense, only matching London for that centre-of-the-world feeling. I miss New York i’d love to go back and live there a while. Then i spent a few weeks over in Seattle again with Braden and saw Portland and then visited mum and nana up in Vancouver and checked out Vancouver island. Great part of the world, beautiful forests and fresh ocean air, I could easily enjoy living around there. All the connexions with Elliott Smith and Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix too – some of which i have only made later in life. And Braden still one of the best friends i’ve ever had and always somehow inspiring me to be better than i am, as a human. I let him down too much! We had some great road trips.

Back in London i moved to Dulwich Road in Herne Hill and became a denizen of the south.. Brixton was fun.. maybe i’ll talk about that another time..