Well the redundancy was a month ago now, and since then I’ve applied for something like seventy jobs. We’ll see what comes of it. I’ve also been tutoring English online and considering whether it would be good to go and teach English in a school in Asia. A lot of jobs over there, apparently. Good money, good lifestyle, good weather. And yet I find myself curiously loath to leave.
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Announcement: I’m Going to Serialise A Book I Wrote A Long Time Ago (For Fun!)
Listen you, I’ve been making decisions. Big decisions! Too big sometimes – I keep nearly moving to Vietnam. But here are two things I have decided upon which are of a reasonable size.
Continue readingLondon | Money
Things that are not ideal but we must persevere:
One: it’s been cloudy in London for a long time.
Two: I am redundant – I am without job. This happened seven days ago, on a Tuesday, at about 4pm.
Continue readingLondon | Don’t Give Up! Submit!
New things:
I am reading Beloved by Toni Morrison. I avoided reading this book for several years, despite it being at the top of so many must-read lists, because of the title. I assumed it would be something dewy-eyed and soft, and on impulse I usually swerve those kinds of books (not that I know why, because whenever I’ve read dewy-eyed and soft novels I’ve invariably loved them). But Beloved is not in the least soft. It’s gorgeous and lyrical and absolutely fucking brutal. I can feel parts of me getting rearranged as I read it, shifting around like complex hydraulics on the door of a bank vault.
Continue readingLondon | Serious Writer
I’ve been consuming a lot of media recently about the 1960s. It wasn’t on purpose – it just sort of happened. It started a few weeks ago when I went to visit Vic in Bristol for a summery nostalgic weekend and on the way there on the three-hour bus I listened to a song in my headphones – I forget what it was exactly, maybe She’s So Heavy or Her Majesty or something – but it was a Beatles song, and I decided to look it up on Wikipedia.
Continue readingLondon | A Walk To Brixton Station
Open the door. Look down: see the ginger cat with sky-blue blue collar who makes a bed of the planter by the front step. She flees, hissing, down the garden path – follow her but watch your hair; the thorny arms of the rose bush are overgrown and reach overhead in a long arch. The postman caught his forehead on one last week and gave me a telling off, which I was determined not to feel guilty about because A) it’s not my fault that plants grow and B) he should watch where he’s going.
Continue readingLondon | Darth Vader Freaking Out in Hawaii
Thought I’d switch it up a bit – something new. I tutor a nine-year-old boy from China, now living in Melbourne, Australia. Every week we read a few pages of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, because he is really into magical adventure stories and he’d never heard of Narnia. He speaks English at a level that’s close to native but his parents want me to help him with his writing.
Continue readingLondon | Philosophy Class
I must write something or I’ll explode. I have written articles yesterday and the day before and deleted them – rather uncinematic, I admit, if I had a typewriter I’d at least have had the satisfaction of ripping out the shite I’d typed, scrunching it up and hurling it into a little iron basket – and I’d determined to make something today, right now, even if it’s shit and meandering, whatever, whatever, fuck you, fuck me.
Continue readingLondon | Crimped
I do not remember the last thing I wrote about on here. And I will not check! There doesn’t have to be any narrative consistency to these dairies. That’s not life! This is life! This! LOOK AT IT.
Alright I regret starting this article that way but I’m not going to delete it because that would mean I have to think of another intro and I just… don’t want to do that right now.
Continue readingLondon | Birthday Man
It was my birthday two days ago and I took the day off work to do nothing. It is not particularly rare that I do nothing, however it is exceedingly rare that I do nothing without suffering from monstrous guilt. The rules are different on birthdays, however: you can do whatever you want.
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