I’ve been living and working in London for a month now and it’s all going really well. Raine moved down here permanently a couple of weeks ago and she started work - at the University of London – on Monday. In the end we only had to spend three weeks apart (this broke our four and a half years of not spending a single night apart, but it was a lot less time than we’d originally feared), one of those weeks was a half week and we saw each other every weekend. On Raine’s final day in Lancaster I secretly took a day off work, spent seven hours creased up on a National Express coach to Blackpool and arrived in Lancaster in my dad’s car. Raine was outside our house packing our car; I got out of my dad’s car and asked if she needed any help – big hugs followed! Who says romance dies after the first couple of years!?;-) We spent that weekend ooop north together before heading back to London.
I’m enjoying my new job. It’s a very quiet time in the office and I’m looking forward to things getting a little busier, but the people I’m working with are really friendly and the office is very chilled out. My biggest work based problem is deciding what to do with the enormous amount of leave I get! I get seven weeks paid leave, on top of University closures and bank holidays. We are thinking of going to Australia for three weeks in December. We both have a week booked off in April and we’re planning to go abroad surfing, either to the Canary Islands or Morocco.
Things are going pretty well down here. Having one room of our own, rather than a whole house takes a bit of adjusting to (though it’s luxury compared to our first two years together, when we lived together in a single student room), but the accommodation is really great. The location is excellent– the area feels really safe and we’re only two miles out of Central London. We can either get the tube or a bus from outside the door into Central London. It takes me 20 – 25 minutes to get to work in the morning, which means I can go to the gym (which is in the basement) or have a good lie in on weekdays – I don’t start work until 10am. The accommodation’s social space rocks – we have a gym, a cinema, table tennis, fuse ball, a lounge (with three games consoles) and a patio with a BBQ. There are drinks for all the flatmates each Wednesday and other events through the month.
I think London’s everything we imagined before we moved here. There’s always something to do – which is what we wanted. We’ve been to the theatre several times and the shows we generally want to see don’t break the bank. We went to our local theatre last Monday; unfortunately the play: The Dead School, was a bit disappointing, but the theatre is really cool – fairly progressive and innovative, it tends to get plays by new writers. We’ve enjoyed both shows we’ve been to at The National Theatre. Most recently we saw Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves A Favour. A full orchestra was incorporated into the production which made for really interesting viewing. We’re going to try and see Waiting For Godot whilst it’s on at the Theatre Royal, we both really like the play but have never seen it together before.
People ask us a lot if London is expensive… I think the only thing we’re really feeling the cost of is cinema, you pay the best of £10 (if you’re lucky) for a cinema ticket, which is hard to justify. We’re going to try and get to Orange Wednesday showings, but everyone has the same idea so it’s always packed and hard to get tickets on a Wednesday. I feel like I should make a stand. There’s this advert that they show at the start of every film, an incredibly patronising woman comes on and tells us that Piracy is killing cinema…I’m going to make an advert for the cinema owners, telling them that their prices are killing cinema.
We bought a couple of DVDs the other day, rather than going to see MicMacs – the two DVDs were considerably less than two cinema tickets. We might start making movie nights a home affair (though it seems sad), we’re thinking of investing in a flat screen TV, as the TV we currently have in the room is miniscule and the one we’ve left up north is gigantic and bulky and would almost involve a whole car journey of its own.
We’ve found some great places to eat out and there’s a wonderful music venue in Camden. Richard Shindell’s playing there in August (one of the few artists I love but have never seen live) and Eric Taylor is playing there in the autumn. They also have an Open Mic every Sunday, which I’m planning to play fairly soon.
Finally, the most exciting piece of news – I got to sing with Nanci Griffith in Belfast last month! This is a life time ambition come true and I still can’t believe that it happened. We sang Well Alright and If I Had A Hammer together. I kept opening my eyes whilst I was singing, seeing Nanci and thinking, ‘Oh My God – that’s Nanci Griffith!’
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