Round-up

The past two months have been rather odd for me. Rather than continuing to acquaint myself with an ever increasing number of couches, I’ve actually settled down into a room that I’m renting.

At last, the long couch-surf is over. Albeit relieved, I’m also somewhat disappointed that this period of my life has come to an end. Although it was undeniably demanding and stressful (and the fact that I didn’t have my own space was beginning to drive me insane) the three months for which I was homeless probably rank among the best of my life.

Despite the various jabs of my colleagues and the hardships, and stigma, that one inevitably faces, being ‘homeless’ brought with it a sense of liberation that is sorely missing in Western day-to-day life. Not knowing where you are going to stay the next night ingrains a sense of freedom into the uncertainty of your life.

There are no obligations to spend money in order to be happy, as you’re too busy living. You don’t need to devise ways of making yourself happy just for the sake of being happy. You either find yourself preoccupied with surviving or else having a fantastic time with the friends and people who are showing you their kindness by inviting you into their homes.

Leaping from one lounge to the next, you interact with people at their  most generous and welcoming. You yourself are stripped of many of the comforts that compel you to arrogance and safety, and rather are forced to acknowledge yourself and engage with those you trust (and sometimes those that you don’t). And when you realise just how seemingly unimpressive an ordeal / experience you are enduring compared to others in this world, you find a much clearer understanding of yourself.

Regardless, living that lifestyle is one thing when you’re backpacking through the jungles of Asia. Juggling that amount of freedom with a demanding career is quite another task unless one wishes to become a professional monk. And one can only live off the goodwill of others for so long. So it is that I find myself settled into a house in Earlsfield.

Yes, I had wanted to move anywhere but the South West of London. However, I gave up for the sake of convenience. Besides, after however many months of couch-surfing in London I felt that I ought to take the easy route for once.

However, being settled does open up some other opportunities and I shouldn’t lament the fact that I now am leading a somewhat more structured lifestyle. I’ve had the pleasure of having experienced some of these opportunities over the past two months and I’ll look to share them in the coming weeks.

From concerts to shows to clothes flying out of windows to unforgiving photographs to air-guitar bands, 2010 has been a hell of a year so far.

A serene Saturday

A burning ambition that I’ve always intended to fulfil is that of attending a Premier League game. Ten months on in London and this goal still hasn’t been met, so I decided to do something about it on Saturday. Unfortunately all of the Premier League games were sold out but tickets to the next best thing were still available - a Millwall F.C. game.

For those of you not in the know, Millwall is one of England’s truly great clubs. Unlike a Liverpool or a Manchester United Millwall hasn’t made its reputation by winning any major trophies. It’s currently battling for promotion from Football League One (30 odd places below the bottom Premier League side) and its factory-like stadium is situated in the delightful South East of London.

However, Millwall’s history is unmatched in one aspect – that of brutal and bloody violence. You see, Millwall’s the club that Mike Tyson would support if he weren’t such a pussy. These are the guys who have a reputation for drinking beer, throttling opposition fans with barbed wire when their team wins and firebombing retirement villages when it loses (or if there doesn’t happen to be anything on the telly worth watching).

Millwall fans getting ready for the big game

And that’s pretty much their legacy in a nutshell (that and a run to the 2004 League Cup Final where they got trounced by the Red Devils). Oh, and they have a song:

No One Likes Us, No One Likes Us, No One Likes Us – We Don’t Care!
We Are Millwall, Super Millwall, We Are Millwall From The Den!

In short, it’s an experience worth having. When a mate (a Millwall fan) called and asked if I was interested in catching the Gillingham game, I of course said yes. With just enough time to write up my will and buy a stab-proof vest, I caught a train at London Bridge and tried to be as invisible as possible in a carriage crammed full of gigantic dock workers, beer cans and Millwall tattoos.

After meeting up with my mates and having a few beers at a local pub, we made our way into the stadium (past a disturbing lack of security). Walking to our seats we were greeted by a gaggle of fans frothing at the mouth and waving ‘pikey’ signs at the visiting Gillingham contingent. For a moment I was worried that I had made a significant mistake and that my lack of tattoos would prove to be a fatal flaw.

Well, suffice to say, I obviously survived the affair, and I actually ended up having an amazing time drinking it up with some local fans.

The match report follows:

• Goals: Millwall 4 – Gillingham 0
• The amount of times I heard ‘fuck’ in the 90 minutes: 97
• The amount of times I heard ‘shit’ in the 90 minutes: 14
• The amount of times I heard ‘cunt’ in the 90 minutes: 173
• People removed by security from the stadium: 4
• Number of stabbings witnessed: 0
• Best comment of the day: ‘Nutter, your dad was a cunt for having you!’

As you can see, ‘cunt’ is the preferred term when attending a Millwall game and one needs to master its use in order to blend into the crowd and to fully appreciate the event. Some variations that can be integrated into your speech for the 90 minutes of playing time include:

• ‘You cunt’
• ‘Fucking cunt’
• ‘You fucking cunt’
• ‘You yellow cunt’

If you can accompany the slur with a two-fingered ‘V’ at the opposition then you’ve just taken your first step to becoming a Millwall fan.

The match itself was a a scrappy affair, however three of the goals were pretty damn good, albeit they all benefited from poor defending, and the seats offered a perfect view of all of the action, both on and off the pitch. With the London sun blazing in at 17 °C (this is the borderline territory where Londoners consider bringing out the oil), a kick-ass atmosphere and a great excuse for drinking, it was a Saturday well spent.

Captain Crank

So, remember that amazing camera that I bought? The one I really loved? The one that I was willing to give my left nut for in the first place?

Well, I lost it. I violated point #4 in my own list of essential skills to survive London. Realising that I’d jumped off the night’s last train at Earlsfield and left my most valuable possession behind me, I turned around on the platform and tried to jump back onboard when the doors closed in my face.

Alas, no amount of clawing, swearing, snarling, kicking or spitting could pry them open again (although I did get the satisfaction of making a young passenger cry).

I wonder where it is now. The last I saw of it, it was heading off to Reading for a rendezvous with some lucky douchebag who is hopefully going to get fried by karma in the new future. I hope rabid fleas devour the sod’s genitals!

Yes, I have become very eloquent in my current state.

Captain Crank flipping the finger and signing off.

Rites of passage of living in London

As I stood next to a well dressed man, who at the time was violently depositing the residue of a good night all over the floor of Friday’s last Tube, I came to the realisation that in six short months I have experienced a considerable amount of this city’s rites of passage. It’s quite amazing that in such a short time I feel that I have become so familiar with London’s own unique flavour. Perhaps though, it is not so coincidental that this epiphany came to me at the same moment as did the pleasant waft of stale beer, wine and gastric acid.

I wouldn’t consider myself a seasoned London veteran – I still have a soul after all – but I have definitely seen my fair share of the city’s sights. Some of these, and their related learnings, follow:

1) Semi-respectable people vomiting in confined public places

At 00:30 on Saturday morning I wasn’t the soberest person in the world. Following a night of swearing and nearly bludgeoning my computer, I went to drown my sorrows and frustrations at my friend’s house before catching the last train at Earl’s Court in a pleasantly inebriated state. With my iPod blaring out some funky tunes I only just heard a disturbing wet noise.

Looking to my left I saw a very well dressed fellow emptying his stomach through his mouth. Looking to my right I saw an open door. To my left again, the fellow neglecting the said-door and electing to stay put. Unfortunately, as it was the last train, the rest of us were forced to do much the same.

Crowding in at the ends of the carriage, as far away as possible from the stench and the ever nearing puddle of gastro-juice, I was soon presented with a new threat. Those of my fellow commuters who had slightly queasier stomachs than I suddenly began to turn a delicate shade of green. After another minute or two of the fellow trying to expel his stomach through his mouth, and with the contents of said stomach drawing ever closer to the crowd huddling at the end of the carriage, some began to retch.

Mercifully, the doors for my station opened right about then and I promptly dived for cover before a 28 Days-esque chain reaction could occur.

This is just one episode of many. There have been plenty of others – at bus stops, in random roads, even on escalators – and it is perhaps inevitable that at least once a month you will come across one of London’s ubiquitous ambassadors.

2) Tube spit attacks

Compared to the above this one’s not too bad actually. As the Tube comes speeding to the platform, some considerate individual will decide to spit directly into its path. As the globule of saliva connects with the driver’s window, those standing on the platform are treated to a refreshing shower which must come as a relief in the stuffy environment. And people call me odd for using my umbrella in the Underground…

3) Missing your station

London’s trains are incredibly comfortable once you have consumed the right amount of alcohol. So much so that one tends to doze off. This has happened to me on a few occasions, the first of which resulted in me waking up outside of London in some shitty little town that didn’t even have the decency to have cows to make this a worthwhile anecdote.

The more annoying episodes result in you paying a £20 -£50 fine for being caught out of your Oyster Card’s zones. One ended up with me waiting for a bus outside Belmarsh Prison at some ungodly hour. The fact that Belmarsh Prison isn’t even within the confines of my A-Z map made this a particularly unproductive night.

4) The leap / lurch of faith

Once you have suffered through #3 enough times you develop an advanced urban instinct which manifests itself as a blind leap / lurch. Waking up just as the doors at your stop are about to close, you dramatically leap out of your chair at the exit while simultaneously grabbing your bag. Considering this is often undertaken with your eyes closed, old people and small children are very much put at risk.

5) Night bus drivers

“Hey, where are we?”

“What! You don’t even know where you’re going man! What’s wrong with you? You don’t even know where you’re going and you get on my bus!”

“Er… I thought this was the night bus to Southfields.”

“Where the fuck is Southfields!?”

“Near Wimbledon.”

“Hell if I know. Now piss off and go look at that map by stop PX.”

“Thank you. Have a good night.” (And die painfully)

The above interchange took place at 4am after another 4 night-buses had promptly driven right past their stops. I ended up sleeping on a bench on the South Bank.

6) Delinquent house-mates and neighbours

Whether they have shit-for-brains and think that they’re clever (the fact that they earn more than me while wearing light-reflecting clothing at work is slightly irksome), scream like banshees during sex, enjoy taking dumps with the bathroom door open (this one sounded like he was birthing a live ewok through his anus) or are on their 5th day without sleep during a Crystal Meth’s trip, you will inevitably share close proximity with someone who is not worthy of the title ‘human’.

Oh make no mistake, there are plenty more than just the above: chavs on buses insisting on telling you about how they got strip-searched last night, heroin addicts striking up conversations while waiting for late night trains, old grannies trying to beat you with a stick for not waiting for the green man at the traffic lights, old hags without teeth screeching wordlessly at you until you step aside, devil women wearing wolf heads and carrying snakes… the list goes on.

And there are some good ones as well. Some very good ones. Unfortunately though, I have some work to do and a season of QI to finish so I’ll leave you to Monday.

Stephen Fry ftw!

Packed up boiler

If Murphy’s law were to be embodied by one contemporary scenario it would be this: “When showering, as soon as you have lathered that last, hard to reach area of your anatomy the boiler will switch off.”

Coming from Cape Town I usually consider a geyser malfunction being something which results in mild discomfort and a completely disproportionate (and hence, completely gratifying) amount of swearing. Little did I know what our friends in Mud Isle have been enduring…

My house has its quirks. Not the type that endear it to individuals who know it well enough to love it in spite of its faults, but those that make me want to burn it (and my neighbours) up in a fiery bonfire which would likely resolve itself into a flaming visage of a roaring goat.

One of these character traits is a boiler that hates me in specific. None of my other housemates has ever suffered its cold apathy, but every morning when I am just getting into the holy routine of cleansing my sculpted bronze body, it decides to turn off the hot water.

In most normal parts of the world this would involve a sudden gust of cool water giving a mild, amusing shock to the bather. In anywhere colder than London such a thing would be inconceivable as all plumbing has to be designed to survive a nuclear holocaust.

Perhaps nowhere else in the world will water cold enough to cryogenically freeze a mammoth suddenly shoot all over your cojones from what was, up until that point, a very innocuous and friendly enough looking shower nozzle.

As if the agony endured by that first wave of attack is not enough (and mark my words, it is an agony comparable to tea-bagging the tide in Llundudno), the shower nozzle that by now has beady eyes and resembles Hal 9000 still taunts you with the knowledge that you somehow need to wash the soap off.

It is thus that I have found myself, for four days in a row, shivering on the Tube heading to work.

Beware the crank.

Cyberdog and crucified women

Cyberdog is one of those things on your London to-do list that you probably wouldn’t give a second thought to if your friends didn’t constantly refer to it as such an outlandish experience.

As it’s situated in the popular Stables Market in Camden,  if you live here long enough, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll eventually end up popping in at some point. I mean, it’s tough to walk past a giant entrance that’s flanked by two twenty-foot tall silver cyborgs and not wonder what’s inside.

Once you’ve passed through the doors you’ll be confronted by a blast of psychedelic colours and blaring trance music designed to leave you wondering if you have somehow fallen down the rabbit-hole and indulged in the mushrooms a little too early on in your adventure.

There are a few raised platforms on the wall at the far end of the ground level, each of which is host to a girl in tight black clothes dancing to the beats emitted by the impressive sound system. Unfortunately the desired effect was somewhat dampened during my visit by the fact that they were moving more stiffly than Hugh Hefner on a viagra ovedose and looked like they were having as much fun as a Jewish kid taking an underground shower.

They weren’t particularly good looking either. Not to open a whole kettle of fish here, but if you’re going to have someone hovering over your store dancing in tight black clothes you’d better make sure that they’re damn hot, good dancers and look like they’re enjoying themselves. As it was, it all just felt too contrived.

Dancing girls aside though, it was a heck of a lot of fun looking around the place. It’s not every day that you’re tempted to buy a circuit board that you can implant onto your grandmother’s head for Christmas.

A lot of the stuff was genuinely cool and the place is definitely worth a visit (I’d recommend pitching up at 9am on a Sunday morning just after church). The decor is out there, and the merchandise is so over the top that one feels obliged to buy it.

Unfortunately, it was so striking that it lingered in my subconcious for the rest of the day. And when I went to bed, my dreams weren’t about koala bears and world peace. Rather, I had the slightly disturbing imagery that women with cyborg heads were crucified on the ceiling over my bed.

And as with all good dreams it seemed to last for hours until I managed to wake up in a cold sweat at the crack of dawn.

Indeed. Not troubling at all. And now Monday begins. Should be an interesting one to say the least…

What the *@$%!?!?!

My two biggest fears on earth:

Snakes and butter.

Ignoring the second one for now, it’s suffice to say that I have a debilitating pathological fear of most reptiles, and snakes far and away top the list. If I see one in the paper (and the Metro here seems to be full of snake-related stories) I scream like a girl, fling the offending page as far as possible and try to regain some measure of composure on a packed train.

I’m sure they don’t like me much either, but I make it a point to keep away from the vile creatures if they follow suit, and so far it’s been a rewarding mutual understanding.

Which begs the question: Why, oh why, would some twisted, depraved deity have pulled such a prank on me?!?

I was happily walking along one of the Jubilee Bridges yesterday, in what turned out to be a glorious evening, fully enjoying life for the first time after a few long, hard weeks at work. Finding myself in high spirits I decided to take in the London sunset and fill myself with the buzz of the city, so I stopped along the bridge to admire the paintings of one of the artists who litter the South Bank and the surrounding area.

It was then that I turned to the person standing at my right shoulder, and came face to face with a creature from the pits of hell.

Oh, I’m sure that underneath it all she’s a pleasant enough individual. But, for the love of all that’s holy, why did she have to be wearing a wolf’s head for a helmet while holding Satan’s love-child at eye-level!?

Yes. She was wearing a wolf’s snarling head over her own. And cradling a fricken’ snake. At eye-level. My eye-level. Within touching / snapping / biting / striking / devouring distance.

Seeing a snake was bad enough. Turning into a Gorgon with a decapitated wolf adorning her head at point-blank-range was bad enough. Both together was unbearable.

I freaked. Not in a screaming kind of way. In a very serene-two-hour-walk-home-before-dissolving-into-a-puddle-of-tears-and-piss kind of way.

I’m investing in a mongoose. One that’s been modified to fight an anaconda. I’ll call him Arnold.

And no, I don’t care what anybody thinks of me taking my mongoose with me on the train. If somebody can dress up like a cross between a lamprey and a werewolf while walking around in public with a snake at head height then I’m sure that a frikkin’ mongoose will be the least of this city’s worries!

Hating Cosiness

I find myself hating Southfields. Sure, it’s extremely pretty, serene and I have a very nice place that I’m paying next to nothing for, but I had that back in Cape Town as well. I guess, at the end of the day, I didn’t go through the drama of packing up my life and flying 10,000 kilometres to live in a slightly worse version of where I already was still surrounded by thousands of South Africans.

Having the above play on my psyche, I find myself antagonistically resenting what in actual fact is a nice, cosy, innocent English suburb. I guess that I must frighten little children and their minders by firing hostile glares and wielding the cucumbers I buy at the local fruit and veg shop as twin daggers that I’m ready to plunge into the nearest passer-by. (Note: I purposefully exclude Britain’s old people here – they require something much more appropriate and reliable than a blunt cucumber; holy water or a sharpened crucifix preferably. I’ll write about them further as they deserve their own full tirade post.)

Basically, this is a colourful way of saying that I need to get the hell out of here.

London definitely has an amazing side, but it is also a city that one has to treat with respect and tackle consciously. It is frustratingly disappointing to see so many of my South African friends spending their time lost in the South West and ignoring a city that lays claim to being the most diverse on Earth.

The heart of Southfields - where it all happens

Obviously engaging is easier said than done, otherwise I would likely be snorting cocaine off some midget Swedish stripper’s breast rather than writing this post in my cosy abode, but I came to London because I wanted to change – and to change you need to open yourself up to new things, a new perception on life (even if you don’t agree with it, you need to give it a chance – anything less is dogma) and to remove yourself from your safe comfort zone.

The South Africans I see on a regular basis don’t seem to be changing anymore than if they had gone to another city or suburb in South Africa, and I see the same in many of the English people who live here. I guess that it is a truth and a danger the world over and I am worried that I am inclined to follow suit if left to my own devices.

So I have made a plan of attack: finances permitting, I will look to move to Greenwich by the end of the year. I haven’t chosen that area out of any particular logic. Rather, I have visited it a few times and have fallen in love with it. It also seems to be quite close to our new offices, which should save me an hour’s worth of commuting every day.

I doubt it’s the best choice (I’ve been here for three months; what do I know of London?), but at least it is both a choice and a step in the right direction (or at least, away from the wrong direction).

If nothing else, it’s a change.