London

On Halloween we had a party. It was also my friend Alex’s birthday, so everyone came over to ours and we dressed up and ate cake and got drunk. I dressed as Hunter S Thompson – floral shirt, sheepherder jacket, blue shorts, bucket hat, tinted shades, cigarette holder, fly swatter – because I like writing and don’t have any money for a costume. Alex dressed as Poseidon – toga, trident – because he likes fish.

Before the party I’d carved two pumpkins and put them outside the house with candles in them; we got no trick or treaters last year and I wanted to attract them. And they came! So many of them! Again and again the doorbell rang, and each time I answered the door to find the three-foot forms of vampire children and tiny werewolves and zombies. They said please and thank you as we held out a great bowl of Haribo for them to rifle through. It was unbearably sweet; if I had ovaries, they would have ached. It was my first time ever – in my whole life, I’m pretty sure – answering the door to trick or treaters.

It unlocked a memory, in fact. I remember when I was a kid – around 4 years old maybe – my parents wouldn’t let me see the trick or treaters who came to our door. I suppose my mum thought it would be too scary for a small child to see older kids dressed up all spooky. Of course, this sent my imagination wild. Sitting inside on Halloween night, out of sight in the living room, I remember wondering what horrors were occurring beyond the closed curtains of the window. The doorbell would ring, and my mum would tell my brothers and I to stay put while she greeted the older children of the neighbourhood with chocolates and ‘Oh my, you look so scary!’ I remember picturing the horrors she must have been sparing us from: blood and bile and strips of flesh, animatronic monster limbs and great bodily gashes with guts all over. I never stuck my head out to see, afraid of locking eyes with a gang of livid corpses bleeding and frothing all over my doorstep.

So it was very funny to realise that my mum had been protecting us from… eight-year-olds in devil horns and face paint. Maybe she just thought I was a bit of a scaredy cat.

Towards the end of the house party I got into a long conversation with a friend of a friend, a girl from New Delhi visiting England for two weeks. She was a journalist for Al Jazeera and France24, and when she asked what I did I told her I didn’t have a job anymore but I was a writer too – in spirit if not in employment. I told her India was one of my favourite countries, and that I was in a movie with Amitabh Bachchan and that he slew me in a battle scene. Later on we spoke for an hour about the British Museum; she had been there that morning and her awe had slowly turned to sadness and anger in the ‘India’ wing, wishing the artefacts there would be returned. I didn’t contribute much to this conversation; there wasn’t much I felt I could add and I thought it better to be quiet and listen.

The party wasn’t as boisterous as I would have liked – my housemates are not prone to debauchery – and groups didn’t mingle as much as I had hoped, but it was a fine enough evening and interesting to chat to a new person. I don’t know what it is – unconscious biases, maybe – but I find immediate kinship with anybody living in another country. I suppose I just like all foreign people on impulse because it reminds me of happy memories in hostels and fond years spent adventuring. I don’t know – but when I hear a foreign accent it warms me up inside.

The next day I went with a few friends to a bonfire at the Herne Hill velodrome. I’d never been to a velodrome before: it’s where bikes go round. We drank beers in the cold and looked at the bonfire. Wherever you go for Bonfire Night it seems the fire is cordoned off further and further from the crowd every year. When I was a kid you could stand and feel the warmth, see the embers pulse. The Herne Hill velodrome bonfire was more of a distant glow on the horizon.

There were fire-eaters and fire-spinners, and I watched a man toss a baton of fire and drop it into a puddle by accident. People were eating burgers and hot dogs, and children were dressed as ghouls and princesses. I myself was dressed as Henry VIII, because my friends bought me the costume two years ago for my birthday and I wear it at every opportunity. My friends were also in fancy dress: a skeleton, a cow, and a member of the coastguard.

We whooped and hollered at the firework show, the beer confusing me to the point where I wasn’t sure if I was doing it ironically or not. After we went to a few pubs in the area, forgetting that, outside the bonfire event – where there was a fancy dress competition (technically just for kids but whatever) – nobody out in town would be dressed up. London being London, however, nobody seemed to even register us – with exception of one Irish barman who looked furious as he poured the pint of a man dressed as an English king. Bit unfair, I thought. I could been Robert Baratheon, for all he knew.

During the week I did nothing: more job applications.

On Friday night just gone – the 7th of November – I found something interesting on the floor while walking back from the shop with my housemate. It was a rainy night and I glanced down and saw it: a scrap of newspaper, faded yellow, with an advert for Rolls Royce. The reason it caught my eye was because the ad – and this is going to sound odd – looked like a David Ogilvy advert from the 60s. I read his book a few years back and studied his work; I loved how long-form and wordy adverts used to be. None of that bright-colours-and-prices nonsense; back in the day adverts were beautiful: lovely literary pages filled with wit and cleverness. You could make bank as a copywriter back in the day – Mr Ogilvy lived in a chateau in France! – and he never had to apply for roles titled ‘Seeking Content Ninja!’ Sometimes I sit and ponder the fact that if I was born a century earlier I’d have been fucking loaded and highly regarded with the exact same skillset that ensures I must struggle today – but, ah. It doesn’t do to think that way.

Anyway – I saw this bit of paper on the ground and I picked it up, because it looked out of place and Ogilvy-esque. Unfolding it (my flatmate grimacing and recoiling at my having touched ‘floor paper’), I found it was a torn-out page from The Sun newspaper from – get this – the 17th of February, 1975.

Fifty year old paper! Somebody must have cleared out their attic; I couldn’t fathom how such a valuable thing had ended up in an alleyway in Loughborough Junction. I took it home and read the whole double-page spread of it; adverts for typists (‘Highly suitable for middle-aged women’) and oxtail soup (3 pence a can) and trainee police officers (minimum height for men, 5’8, for women, 5’4). The newspaper smelled musty, and the smell stirred strange emotions within me. I had discovered a time capsule: my parents were 11 years old when the paper was printed; my grandparents were 30. There was something magical about it – while the world around had changed, my parents and grandparents changing with it, this paper had been printed one day in a press somewhere and remained unchanged ever since. I felt as though I were peering through Dumbledore’s pensieve, silently viewing an unchangeable past.

Later that evening, after a movie night with friends, I decided to go back to the alley and see what else I could recover. Nearby – next to some bins, thankfully just out of the rain – I found another sheet from 1975 and a National Geographic from 1989. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them – but I obviously can’t throw something like that away. Maybe I’ll make them into some sort of weird wall decoration. Not sure.

Next day I met another friend, Alie, to go see the London wetlands. I had no idea what the wetlands really were, of course, but Alie is big into nature and invited me along – and, always seeking to embrace non-alcohol-centric activities, I said yes. She had a membership there and very, very kindly paid my entry, and we spent two hours roaming the marshes and swamps and bogs which are, quite bizarrely, situated only about a mile outside Central London, looking at animals: otters and geese and swans and jays and cranes and cormorants and about twenty increasingly madcap varieties of duck and my first-ever stork.

Alie had brought her giant camera (her bazooka, she calls it) to take photographs, and we sat inside these little wooden hides among the reeds and watched birds come and go. She gave me a pair of binoculars but I couldn’t see through them very well; perhaps my eyes are too far apart. I was more interested in watching the birders than the birds – men and women, usually elderly, who take their gigantic cameras out to the marsh to sit all day in stillness and silence, waiting for the perfect shot of a goose doing something unorthodox.

“It’s kind of impressive. I couldn’t do it,” I said to Alie as we walked back at sunset. “Sit there for eight hours and take photos of birds.”

“Yeah it’s probably not the best hobby for somebody wildly ADHD. You struggle to finish your own sentences without getting distracted.”

“Huh?” I said, looking up from my phone.

That evening I went out with friends to an Irish bar and met a portly man with a big belly and a white beard and hair who introduced himself as Father Christmas. Next day – Sunday – I met my friend Kate, or Katryna. We used to have deep chats for hours every week after improv class, and were long overdue a catch-up. We met at Kings Cross and walked along the canal, headed east.

“Are you hungover?” was the first thing she said to me.

“What– how did you know?”

“It’s a cloudy day and you’re wearing sunglasses.”

“I see.”

The canal path takes you through a real helter-skelter of vibes, from the paint-splattered grunge of Camden to the neo-classical mansions off Primrose Hill. At Regent’s park we slowed down to look at the monkeys in London Zoo; their enclosure backs onto the canal. We watched these weird giant lemur things with fluffy white tails swing to and fro, while on the other side of the river an African wild dog paced back and forth, its coat blazing orange and black.

We walked along the water and talked about the death penalty; Kate has just finished reading Truman Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’ and has now started on Proust’s famous lighthearted romp ‘In Search Of Lost Time’. I talked at length about my need to find a job, and the struggles I’ve been having in defining myself without one – the person I once knew as Dan, the adventurous writer who travels a lot, is now Dan, the guy who… just sort of… lives. Kate, who reads a heck of a lot of philosophy and is very clever, suggested that I might be afraid of success – of taking the big, scary steps that could very easily redefine myself in a new and exciting way. I suppose I am scared of success: making some sort of social channel, chucking my writing and creations out into the world – that scares me, but not nearly as much as the idea that they might one day gain an audience. Because – then what? How can you possibly have the clarity of mind to speak when you know everyone is listening?

Kate’s view on this is that being inducing cringes in others through one’s beloved creative works is not only normal, it’s necessary and good – and who gives a shit anyway, and fuck anyone who laughs at you (I’m paraphrasing). In fact, I am inclined to agree.

When we had walked ten kilometres – to Little Venice, a charming neighbourhood with lots of canalboats – we reached a pub I’d heard was pretty and went in to warm up and rest our feet.

“It’s funny, you know,” I said, as we sat and chatted and got sleepy as the sun went down. “I spend a lot of time thinking about what I don’t have. Money, job, pension. It’s so easy to tumble down that rabbit hole. But one thing I’m realising since losing my job is that I’ve never – ever – had so many people around me who are rooting for me.”

And it was true. I thought about it all the way home after we’d hugged goodbye: about the different eras of my life across different cities and countries, about all the times I struggled and couldn’t think of anyone I could call on a dark night. But here they all were: a warm, supporting circle of people, new faces and old, who only want to see me do well.

It doesn’t solve everything, of course. I still have to do the work necessary to drag myself out of the AI-shaped hole that opened up and swallowed the copywriting industry and with it my livelihood. And it’s tough – some days it’s really, really fucking tough. But I am surrounded by good, kind people now – and there’s real hope in knowing that.

World Hangover

Bad decisions make good stories.

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