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December 26th 2009

"The sun does not set in London.....it just gets Dark"

I had always had a thing about living in London when I was a teenager, in the 90's the 'Cool-Britannia' and 'Brit-pop' era seemed to me to focus the capital as its base, If you wanted to be cool then that was where you had to be!

However, all the ariel shots of Canary Wharf, The Mayors office and Tower Bridge, you see on TV shows like The Apprentice I found to be very mis-leading when in 2008 I got the chance to move there.

After finishing university, a lot of my former course mates moved to the capital, this being the media centre of the UK, I fiqured that I would stand a good chance of getting somewhere in my dream career if I went as well. Likewise my girlfriend had simular thoughts, and as we were now living apart (me in Derby and her in Edinburgh) after moving out of Halls, we figured that moving

to London would be like bringing on back the good times! Emily was the first to get a job at place in Wimbledon, at first Wimbledon seemed like a very nice leafy suburb in the south west with good transport links, but it soon turned into the arse-end of nowhere if you where trying to get back from a night out anywhere north of the river.
With Emily already down there, this gave me the kick up the back-side to get a job and get down there as well, this was made a bit easier by the landlord who Em was renting a room from, a manc bloke called Terry (not hs real name, I changed it just in case he ever reads this).
At first Terry seemed quite nice, didnt mind me stopping there at least once a week, took me to the local and payed for my drinks all night as in his words 'I know what its like when you're starting out and looking for work' things seemed to be on the up when a month later I got a job and Tony even offered the room as a double for me and Em, to save us the trouble of looking elsewhere (for a big hike in the rent price, but what the hell he was giving us a break!) All this kindness shown towards us binded me to the many signed around his house that underneath he was a bitter and twisted nut job. One of the first signs was the sheer number of pictures he had around the house of him as a kid, roughly 50 plus framed photos hanging up around the house of him as a child, possibly most disturbing was the fact that he had a one of his old school reports framed and hung in the toilet, in a place that you couldnt help but notice when sitting on the Lav, (genrally he was rubbish at every subject and his headmaster said he lacked disapline)

Another tell-tale sign he had a few issues was his fridge magnet (see right) which said 'How old would you be if you didnt know how old you are?' A statement that one would only make if you spent a lot of your doing stuff you regret, and now you realise your sad, old, alone, and desperatly trying to re-capture your lost youth. The day after I annouced

that I'd finally got a job and was taking him up on his kind offer of moving in, his true colours showed. he called me into the kitchen for a chat, and basically told me that I couldnt move in i would upset Pete the other house mate, who had lived with him for almost 2 years.
Pete was was in his mid-thirties, and worked as some kind of I.T manager, and if you could imagine what one of the Bee Gee's would look like if they were ginger then you would get the general idea of what Paul looked like. He rented the bigger room in Tony's place and spent his money mainly on buying EVERY games console there was to buy, one day while he was at work I had a sneaky peak in his room and it looked like he's ram-raided game station (Ps3, Ps2, Xbox 360, Wii, Ds lite etc....) where all plugged in waiting for there ginger master to return. And although he had congratulated me to my face on getting a job, he's immediatly gone to Terry and told him he didnt want me there.
'You see Alex, the thing is that Pete and I have very stressful jobs and having a couple around the house would be too much'. Feeling very patronised and angry after hearing this, I now faced the prospect of having a sales job in Paddington with no home to go to. Looking back I can see Terry and Pete might have been a little bit jelious of having a happy couple around, as I found out that Terry had been divorced, his wife had left him after one day of living together and all the photos of himself as a kid had been photos of man and wife, and Pete wasn't what you would call a casanova either. He had a girlfriend who he saw only at weekends and the only activity they'd do together is go out to trade the games he completed. The only time you'd hear Paul screaming YES.....YES.....YESSSSSSSS from his bedroom is if he'd unlocked a new level on Grand Theft Auto.

After we'd made it very clear to Terry that we wernt happy on how we'd been treated he blanked us and only spoke to Emily via email, one of which saying 'I want re-paying for all the beers I bought Alex' and 'He can stay one week, but after that I want you both out of this house'

So my London experience wasnt off to a great start, but ever the optimist I soldiered on, I temporaly rented a room owned by two Turkish blokes, and as far as I could understand they were both called Murrat, I was there for two weeks while Emily saw out ther time at Terry's before we both got somewhere else. We attepted to stay the night but my bedroom was next to the bathroom and the murrats' had only put up half a curtain, so anytime someone went to the toliet and swithed the light on the whole room was illumiated, and what made matters worse the water systern was in my room so we where treated to the sound of the of pipes knocking and banging for an hour after someone flushed. We where made very welcome at the Murrats place, but it was impossible to sleep there if you had to be up at 6am for you're one hours tube ride to work, so we worked out a system of eating there, then walking to Tonys and Emily had to smuggle me in to her room just so we could get a good nights Kip.

Time marches on quicker when you're woking full time as compared to when your a student, and as time marched on I found London to be over hyped,(I think it was down hill for me when I learnt the tubes dont run 24 hours a day) Also un-neccaseraly over stressful, over populated and over poluted, aparently during the Bejing olympics of 2008 there was a report that London's air quality was worse that smoggy Bejing and they dont meet the Olymic committes standards, and had a lot of hard work to do before 2012. And anyone who's ever used the district line to get to work will tell you that transport for London has a worse Human rights record that Bejing as well.

We thought things would pick up for us when we moved to our new place. From what we saw our new pad had friendly house mates, two Aussie girls and a pale Irish bloke who wore a kaftan and the leaseholder, who worked in law so as before, Im going to name her just in case she ever reads this and decides to sue my ass off.
Almost immediatly after moving in, we were told

that under no circumstances will there ever be any hot water! Kaftan man was down as the water bill payer, and even though we split all the bills, he was very quick to dish out a big dose of catholic shame on anyone who was suspected of wanting to take a hot bath. Downstars in the conservatory was the a power shower that didnt require central heating, and our only 21st centuary means of keeping clean. As it was getting onto summer we assumed that this no hot water rule was just becuase the warm weather was on the horizon, but as we found out when Emily tried to take a hot bath when she was off work with a dose of flu, there were no exeptions! The lack of warmth didnt end with the hot water tank, Irish kaftan man and Irish Law woman's inital warmth wore off in a matter of weeks. After the bizarre time in the first house the second was going the same way, and we were beggining to think that it was us who had the problem.

Irish Law woman was particualy up herself, I sence once she was a nice person, but working as a city Lawer sucked all the Irish charm out of her and frankly she was a cold hard bitch to live with. This approach even extened to her boyfriend, who me an Em gave the name 'Lurch' as he only ever grunted whenever we spoke to him, and we only saw him late at night when Irish Law woman gave him a booty call. We knew that one of these booty call's where going to happen as she would lock herself in the bathroom for two hours to apply fake tan, even after which she still looked pale and cold.

It was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire with regards living with people who didnt make us feel welcome. The one and only redeaming feature of living there was Irish Law womans pet cat called Scamp (see right) who she bought when she moved into the house two years earlier, anoher clue that once upon a time she was a bit more on the 'fluffy' side of life.

Scamp was both cute, and mental. She would sleep for most of the day and then have a mad three hours in the middle of the night, her favorite trick was to hide in the bath at night waiting for someone to go to the toliet, and when they were 'mid-flow' she would pop her head over the side of the bath and frighten the life out of them, more than usually followed by her then jumping on there laps in they were sat down, or she would stay in the bath and wait for you to turn the taps on a little so she could play with the gradual small flow of water that would run up the bath. But above all scamp wanted fuss and a lap to go to sleep on after a long day playing in the garden, and she was a much needed warm welcoming life line in an otherwise cold harsh house.

After a couple of months the Aussie girls moved out to go traveling (as is the law if your an aussie) and there replacemenst moved in, a white south african brother and sister who were young, got rich parents, and far too good looking for there own good. The Brother was a landscape gardener, who was tanned, toned, and had a six pack that Peter Andre would kill for, and when he would walk from the shower in the box room fitted in the conservatory all he would have to wak through the house in was a towel the size of a flannel, which made a man like me with flabby white man boobs feel very inadiquate indeed!

His sister, if Im being polite was an absoulte nightmare, she worked in south africa as a model and she was looking for work in London, and she had the attitude problem of Naomi Campbell when its her 'time of the month' She expected to be waited on by everyone else in the house and would let out a sulky 'Isnt life so hard' sigh that had the desired effect of Iraish Kaftan man who would run to her aid, likewise Irish Law woman would more more than freindly to Johnny six-pack whenever he wanted it. I think that was the most irritateing thing, after months of trying to be accepted by cold Irish duo, these two newbies swan in and they're instantly best friends.

It may sound a little whiney, but when you in a job you dont like, commuting for hours a day on a packed sweaty tube in mid-summer, you need to feel that the place your going home to is an escape from the hard day, not just another set of problems.

It wasnt the fact that Emily and I are the type of couple who never make friends and shut the rest of the world out, we are very welcoming warm and friendly people, but from what we saw, a lot of people who had spent a long time in London became very small minded, or as the phrase goes 'Londoncentric'. This even goes as far as being predjudice to what side of the river you where on, North London looks down on South London, South London looks down on North London, and all of London looks down on Croyden.

Our situation wasnt great, and we had to move agian when Irish Law woman told us she was giving up the lease to move to clapham junction, we found a new place but just as the credit crunch was starting to take hold late summer 2008, I lost my sales job and was now on the hunt agian for work 'Wont take me too long' I thought, 'Im in London, all the jobs are here for a graduate like me! and now I've got Five months experience under my belt! What I didnt see coming was endless registrations with endless recruiters being told that they would be in touch when something came in, and then never did.

We moved into what would be our last place, roughly half a mile down the road, a loft conversion with an en-suite. What sold it to Emily was the sloping celieng in the bedroom, which if you stuck your head out of the skylight you could see the bathroom skylight (so you could have a chat with someone who was in the bathroom if they stuck there head out of the window there as demonstated in the picture below)

Our new housemates where all south african, and very friednly, but after meeting so many people during the year who had turned out to be anything but, Emily and I were wary about getting friendly with anyone, a trait we dont have usually, but our experience of londonsentrics had seemed to have knocked all the trust out of us.

To begin with I didn't tell our new housemates I was out of work, as I was convinced it would only take a few weeks to get back on my feet. My upbeat feeling that this was a fresh start was soon starting to fade when I went to register at Wandsworth Job centre.You know when life's on a downturn if you are now reguarly having to go to a town thats only famous for it's prison. The building itself (along with the rest of Wandsworth) sucked the life force out of me, the whole feel of the town was a hasty eighties rebuild during the Thatcher years, and nobody had bothered with it since.
After six weeks of going,and what seemed like an endless and fruitless job hunt they finally decided I wasn't entitled to any benifits but I still had to keep going every two weeks. The woman who informed me then handed me a piece of paper.

'Here's a letter Mr Leam, you've got to attend a seminar on getting an interview next tuesday at 10am'

'I can't make it' I told her

'Why not?' She replied

''Because I've got an interview next tuesday, at 10 o clock' I told her, now impossible to hide my frustrations.

'Oh' she said, now looking really let down 'Well, none attendance will effect any benifits your recieveing'.

'You've just told me' I said, now through gritted teeth 'That I'm not entitled to any benifits because I live with my partner who's in work'.

'Ok, I guess we'l have to rebook it for another date then' she replied now aware of her own stupidity.

This great level of service was typical of the staff at Wandsworth job centre plus. I'm no scrounger, I'm definatly not dole scum either, and I would have given my left bollock to be in a job, but mid late october things were getting more than a bit desperate, and these pillocks were not helping. I didn't go to the re-booked meeting on how to get an interview, as I was too busy getting interviews, calling them was an impossablity, and I centainly wasn't going to waste any precious Oyster card credit going there so I just stopped caring. The day after the 'getting an interview' meeting which I didn't go to, I got a voicemail from the same doapy woman from the job centre. As it turns out she didn't have any telephone skills either.

'Mr Leam......(big pause)....its Wandsworth Job Centre, I was....I'm just calling regarding the decision you did last tuesday....(longer pause, then she hung up.)

To this day I still hadn't got a bloody clue what she was on about.

The only thing at ths time I was looking forward to was going back to Bournemouth for my graduation, (see previous blog 'Nostagia for the homeless' written at the time) A bit of time off from this jobless hell I was going through, which after time makes you feel very useless, and you lose all self respect. For the first time life was really starting to feel like a constant kick in the nuts, there was no good news on the horizon, and it seemed that the world at the time had a simular feel to it, all the banks were collapsing, the world was in financial meltdown, and John Seargent was making a tit out of himself on Strictly Come Dancing.

Finally things were starting to look up, a little beaker of light came when I had a job offer, and they wanted to me to start the following week. My recruiter (one of many) who told me the good news, informed me that she'll call back in a couple of hours to let me know whaen they want me to start.

I was over the moon, so much so I went straight away to Wandsworth Job Centre Plus to tell them to get stuffed. just as I got off the bus my recruiter called me back 'you've got two training days, very important you go to these! They're next thursday and friday!' There was a silence my end, 'Errm, slight problem with that', I said my voice now starting to quiver slightly 'There my graduation days,I'd already told you I can't miss them!'

She said she'd call back to see if they could be moved, but when she did she told me they'd already refilled the position, before I bloody started it!