Shedding Pounds

Right then, let's look at one of the things about London which ain't so fabulous and which I glossed over while I was there.

Cost of Living
Now, you don't move to the world's second most expensive city (Moscow took the lead, fancy that!) and expect it not to be...you know...costly and if you did, well then you shouldn't have been allowed outside your polyurethane bubble-diaper.

This is something which a few naysayers and honest-meaning worriers brought up during my last few weeks before departure. My response was usually along the lines of "Well, the seven million people living there seem to manage somehow. I'll just have to figure out how they do it". Now, of course, it's not worth getting into how every class and strata of those seven million survive seeing as how I myself don't fit into every demographic - I'm not every man or even every woman.

So the question is, how does some twat who is on the other end of a degree but not working at a highly professional level get by (while pursuing the arts in one form or another)? Well the answers seemed to boil down to...

1) Be a Trustafarian
2) Live with those who begot you
3) Live well outside of the parts of London which generally entice young, idealistic folk to move there (essentially zones one and two).
4) Live with a reasonably large number of house mates (as I did).
5) Squat (for reasons unknown to man or beast, VICE UK repeatedly pushes this option).

The thing I learned over time was that contract work, like what I did at Network Rail and in Barbican, generally pays a decent amount more than entry level work in anything which could lead to a career. The average starting pay in non-temp work is fifteen thousand pounds annual and honestly, (within option four) you have to live incredibly frugally without ever getting sick...unless you are comfortable with contributing to the epic personal debt phenomena England is experiencing. It's not as bad as the housing crisis etc going on in the U.S. but it certainly struck me as a genuine problem, unlike the battalion of pedophiles which news outlets liked to convince the public were inhabiting every corner of England which a parent isn't actively observing.

Giving this, I'm not surprised that property investments are unto a national sport - despite estate agents generally being viewed in the same camp as used car salesmen, lawyers and street corner DVD salesmen. As with just about everything in London, the difference between being a renter and an owner is magnified to extremes that would be comedic if they weren't painfully real.

All this made it very, very difficult to save money and it seemed my options were to work dead end temp jobs that allowed me to save a bit while living in a humble ensuite or I had to look into living in such a manner that I wouldn't be taking advantage of London at all, while working an entry level job. Add on that the vast majority of entry level film work was non-paying and, well...

I appreciate that Toronto isn't a cheap town, but given that Toronto isn't Moscow then by default it has to be more affordable to live in. In fact, so long as I manage to avoid heading to Russia's capital - SOMEHOW - then I shall be living in a more affordable city.

As I've said, I'm not crossing London off my list of places to live forever - but if I return, it will be after I've made myself either a fat wedge or employable at a much higher level.

Addendum: The rest of the Emma Clarke farcical tube announcements. She was fired after London Transport found out about these, which is kind of fair, but I'm not too worried for her as this was but one of several freelance jobs and not her sole bread n' butter. I just wonder what the tube will sound like as they make the transition from her voice to someone else...or if they'll just go on the hunt for an Emma Clarke impersonator!

I'm Brack...I mean 'back'

So!

I have returned from England early. I have returned from England with plans to stay for much longer than the holidays. Indefinitely, you could say.

I'd like to stress that I did not come home feeling that The Mission Had Failed. I'm not rich, but I'm not skidding home on an empty bank account. Nor am I throwing up an insulting hand signal to London as it shrinks behind me - I still love London and I don't see that changing any time soon. I've generally left my bridges intact and depending on What May Come, I could see myself returning there. For reasons I may elaborate upon, it just isn't where I want to be for the immediate future.

In essence, the mission - the original mission - was a success. I went to England to look around and decide if I wanted to live there. True, I made up my mind in less than the two year period I set myself. But that period's length was set completely arbitrarily and so I don't feel married to it. While looking over the details of planning a three week visit for the holidays, I starting thinking "What if I just stayed?" and the more I weighed the possibilities, the more the scales fell in favor of that course of action.

I must confess that I have been in the country since late on the 18th, but have kept quiet about it since I continued to be terribly ill and wanted a private week with my parents so that all the kings horses and all the kings men could do a bit of contract work on me. I'm finally feeling better on the whole, but my body is exhausted from fighting off the most tenacious disease I've wrestled with in about four years. What energy I have has mostly gone to fishing through the numerous boxes which I filled up and stored with my parents before leaving for London. If nothing else, I'm grateful for the year in London proving I can do just fine without a lot of the crap in said boxes - why did I save half a dozen He-Man action figures? - and thus giving me whatever I needed to be able to part with a lot of the junk.

I'm crashing with my parents until years end, then heading out of Ottawa to another city - Toronto being the top candidate - and seeing what kind of messes I can make there (or so the plan goes). I'm also taking advantage of this short break from the "real world" to reassess what I'm doing and what I really want, in the hopes that this will lead to a more cohesive decision based on stronger merits than before.

I don't regret going to England, mind. As you can see just by digging through this site I've been updating over the past year, I've been able to see and learn a great deal that I wouldn't have otherwise. It also forced me to be more independent than I've ever been before - though I moved out of home two weeks after graduating high school, I've always been in the same city as my parents and that can lead to the inevitable call for help when perhaps I could have just dealt with something myself. I couldn't give a fiddlers fuck* how corny it may or may not sound - my time in London was a great period of personal development, though I wouldn't say I found myself if only for the semantical reason that I've always been highly aware of my location, but also because that implies a kind of final stage of development. I think that hitting some kind of plateau like that is not the reaching of a pinnacle, but slamming into a brick wall. The day you stop changing as a person should, ideally, also be the day you die.

But I digress!

As with my decision to go to England in the first place, I can choose to sum it up in a sentence, but a proper explanation of why I left could easily get into my drawing up a pie chart of reasons. This isn't due to there being a litany of despair driving me to come back, just that I can barely decide to leave the house without at least three reasons for doing so and thus you can imagine how this plays out with something as big as moving three thousand miles.

I'm going to keep this thing going for now - I may be back from England, but I'm not abandoning the pursuit of success in film. Plus I'll be enjoying exploring wherever I end up next and I'd be interested to find other content threads to weave in here.

No angst filled poems though, sorry!

*Fiddlers aren't terribly good in bed, I guess? You can thank my dad for that expression finding it's way into my lexicon.

Emma Clarke - the voice of London tube announcments - does some fun stuff on the side

boomp3.com

Regent's Park Before Dark: Part 2

So on we go, up through the main body of the park's west side - I won't bother with pictures of that as I'm sure you're all familiar with what flat, grassy football fields look like - and then up to Regents Park Canal, which runs along the norther curve of the circular shaped park. Along this canal lay the London Zoo and I would have given it a whirl except entrance was fifteen quid and I would have only had an hour before closing. I quickly realized that that apes and giraffe's would all be from the same places as the apes etc. that I'd seen in Canadian zoos, so it wasn't a big loss. That being said, here's a snap of the portion of the zoo which lay along the canal.And then looking down the other way...Crossing this canal took me to a separate section of the park called Primrose Hill. It's from the highest point of this hill that you can achieve a magnificent view of all sorts of neighborhoods I've been talking about on this site for the past year - Soho, Embankment, Oxford Circus, Westminster, Tottenham Court Road, King's Cross...and if you cast your eyes far enough you can even see such as Shoreditch, Barbican and Canary Wharf to the east (left) or Westminster, Kensington and Hammersmith to the West (right).I took a couple of short MPEG's, the first working from east to west and then the second working the other way, but with more of a zoom. I'd suggest viewing them with the sound off as the wind was high that day, causing a great deal of uncomfortable noise to be picked up by the camera's tiny mike.


The BT telecommunications tower features prominently and perhaps these videos will reinforce what I've said about it being an immensely useful landscape for finding your bearings in North London.Eventually I came down from Primrose Hill and went back along Regent's Park Canal, heading into the North Eastern quadrant of the main park. Spotting a wild boar, I tried to grab a picture through the fence. The durn focus kept on the fence instead of the boar, but I think it's fun to see anyways.Just by the Zoo is, understandably, the headquarters for the ZSL.And now you are joining me as I swung around and starting heading southward along the eastern half of the park.Eventually I came across this little monument which, at a distance, I presumed to be some churchy church church church thing for which I had little interest.Boy, was I wrong!I fully appreciate that, in the final tally, the British going and conquering a quarter of the Earth's land area was not A Particularly Nice Thing and that it entailed some pretty heinous injustices. But it is refreshing to see someone saying "Thanks for the good stuff that came with that!", it's nice to see something which goes against the grain of almost cartoonishly villainous portrayals of imperialists if only for a greater variety of discourse. I remember often enjoying seeing this side of the Indian reaction to the English occupation in the literature I studied in my related University courses - and it wasn't always from the wealthy Brahmin class, either. As I say, though, I'm not endorsing imperialism here so much as I am a plurality of thought!.The ol' BT tower again, as seen from the South-East quadrant of the park.
This is one of the Money Buildings which lay along the eastern side of the park's perimeter. Alas, I cannot recall what it was! I do recall there were a few private residences along this stretch where, as with those homes by the heart of the Thames, the residents are not suffering from a terribly desperate need for your PayPal donations.