Home comforts

I'm sitting on my big furry cushion on the floor and have become rather accustomed to sitting on the floor lately because this is what I do when I need some kind of urgent change.  It's the equivalent of when Bagpuss puts on his 'thinking cap' (a literal thinking cap) to really figure something out.  I'm hoping it will eventually work out for me.  It's been a bit cold and gloomy in Praha over the last few days and I think it's starting to infiltrate my brain.  Not only that but things are on the point of spiralling out of control financially as so many meet-ees have cancelled recently and are continuing to do so, which is more than I can afford.  Something must be done.

In the meantime, while I figure out what on earth that 'something' can be, I can at least reminisce about how I was able to look after myself better when I had money for nice chocolate and some reasonable Czech white wine. (Thankfully, that was only last week and I still have a bit of both left.)  I don't have the money to buy magazines anymore, and my Hearst magazine subscriptions have yielded all of 3 copies in the year since October so I'm furious with them (but I digress...) so I have taken to re-reading old magazines and books I've read before in order to keep surrounding myself with little bits of inspiration and comforting ideas.  I even took to the traditional 'old spinster' comfort of a hot bath and a bunch of things to read.  

As you can see I added the Slovakian chocolate and Czech white wine (in a champagne glass to pretend I'm living the high life) to give me the full relaxation experience:

If I'm going to descend into spinsterdom, then I may as well do it in style.  And I feel that this is indeed what awaits me because the cowboy is certainly, lovely as he is, not someone I could live with for any great length of time, especially being that I'm self-employed and work largely from home.  I pointed this out to him recently, in fact.  Most couples, I assume, have less of a hard time deciding to move in together because, for a start, there's the no-brainer of saving on the rent, but secondly, because a shared space is fine as long as you only have to use it in the evenings and at weekends.  But if you need it all day long as a studio, bedroom, practice room, library, writing room and chill-out space at the end of a long day, it soon becomes unbearably small to share it with anyone else.

I'm so glad that I do now live on my own.  Finally.  It was a long time coming.  I have had some 'interesting' flatmates from the past, one of whom used to put her hair in a towel when she came downstairs to do any cooking that involved onions because she didn't want her hair to smell of onions.  Another lived in the room next door to me and when he wasn't playing his own songs on guitar he listened incessantly to Radiohead.  Another had a dog who she palmed off to a friend she managed to get to come and live with us so that this friend ended up looking after her dog for her.  She was particularly unhappy and so was the dog.  Another had the most repulsive, smarmy boyfriend ever, who left the bathroom in a state which you would only imagine possible if the abominable snowman had just used it.  And another has become a well-known pop star in Denmark.  Wow.  There were some characters.  I could write a book about them...but I'd rather not.

So it's back to figuring out another source of income somehow.  Though I suspect a square of that Slovakian chocolate would do wonders for my brainpower right now, so I might just have to sneak into the kitchen and retrieve it from the fridge.  (Tip:  living alone is great, but the downside is there's no-one to judge you on your intake of chocolate so you'd be better be sure you've got fairly phenomenal willpower or at least, good old fashioned British self-restraint.)  I'm doing aerobics later, so it's ok.  Honest.

Sadness, failure and a Swedish Faerie Godmother

The tiredness and confused thoughts in my head do not seem to have abated much.  I apologise that I didn't succeed in harnessing them better, and untangling them enough to make my last post comprehensible, but it was a case of having a 'jumbled-up haze' post or none at all.  Maybe none at all would have been better, I honestly don't know.

As it is, things here so far have been a sad reminder of how I no longer belong here and perhaps, how I never did.  I have been confronted with all the mistakes I made and all of the consequences of not having found confidence in what I was doing soon enough to make use of it and it's been painful to look at.  As I waited last night for a bus to take me back to my lodgings from Victoria, I felt like a scorned visitor, who has no real place here anymore.  As though unless I have some important, well-paid work to do here, I have no right to consider myself a Londoner.  How long do you have to live in London before you can call yourself a Londoner?  And does that get revoked if you have to leave in the end, no matter how long you were there in the first place?

In New York, there was a phrase going round that 'for up to 8 years in NYC, you're merely a 'zoo-yorker', just one of the millions who try and nestle in to a choice spot, but have to face the horrors of housing competition among the huge numbers of people who require it.  During those years, you have to put up with some barely habitable places before you finally find somewhere (if you're lucky) viable to live in.  Some never make it to the finding somewhere habitable stage.  Maybe that's my experience with London really, although I lived here earlier on, years back, when it was still vaguely possible to afford to live on my own, albeit in a gloomy basement flat with no washing machine.  

I had enough hope left back then, that made living somewhere dingy more bearable.  Plus it was really very central, which is something I loved about it.  The rent was quite high, but nothing like today's standards, and I was still prepared to spend a greater percentage of my income on rent than most people, even if it meant I never had enough savings to buy clothes anywhere other than in charity shops (a state which, sadly, has not changed in over ten years) and no money to go out for meals.  I suppose that was my downfall and still is, but living alone means that much to me, that I continue to sacrifice all else, because it really does make such a big difference.  

After a day full of crying (embarrassingly frequently) and feeling bleak about everything yesterday, I suppose I need to make an extra effort today to do fun and frivolous things.  A silly film is lined up for viewing tonight and I think some chocolate ice-cream is in order at some point today.  Other than that, perhaps I can say a fond 'hello again' to my old haunts , especially Kensington Gardens, and see if I can stop worrying about the future and how much I've screwed it up, for just a few hours at least.  Funnily enough, the wise Swedish Faerie Godmother told me yesterday, "it's strange but sometimes when you think you've screwed life up completely, you find there are second chances."  I hope she's right.  She usually is, in fact.  Being that she is both wise and utterly nutty, two qualities I very much aspire to having myself, she's always got a good point.