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.

Little eccentricities and other aspirations

I have discovered a chocolate bar that seems to be 50% sugar (quite literally) and is called 'Margot'. It's sort of a coconut flavour, but without the desicated coconut bits of Bounty bars and with an added dash of rum flavouring too.  I'd take a picture of it, but of course, I can't, because I haven't got a camera anymore.  Needless to say, the architect introduced me to it.  (All of the food I'm addicted to that's terribly bad for you has been discovered thanks to him.)  So I'm trying to ration it out like Kendal cake, to help me through each draining day. 

I started organising things for meet-ees at 7.25am today.  This is a miserable way to start the day, made worse by having to survive on Czech coffee, which is ok, but doesn't do the job of waking you up quite as well as the Fair Trade Peruvian packets of coffee I used to just about be able to afford back in the UK.  And the stupid institution I still have to work another month for, is still messing me about and causing me all sorts of stress.  I've had enough.  More than enough.

I shall have to fantasise that one day, one of the meet-ees will lavish great gifts on me, such as sponsoring me to have regular French lessons or commissioning me to write some songs or just offering me a week's holiday staying in their sumptuous chateau.  Or maybe something totally random but thrilling like a free course to get a licence to ride a motorbike.  Except I think I know now that the likelihood of that, even if I had the money, is zero.  Because I'm too short.  My legs are not long enough for me to sit on a motorbike and still put my feet flat on the floor either side of it.  Which is enormously humiliating and makes me feel really rather pathetic.

I did go on the back, as a passenger, on Saturday again, but the weather was awful and we froze our socks off even with a fleece jacket on underneath the extra gear.  It was so cold, that I was shivering by the time we stopped at our destination.  We actually did a very strangely grown-up thing.  We went to look at a flat.  No, please, let me explain...

It was a flat that the architect was thinking of buying as an investment, because he feels that money put into something is better than money sitting around in stupidly low-interest savings accounts.  He wanted me to come with him.  But, let's get this straight, it is another world to me.  The idea of money you can invest...  The idea of having property.  Absolutely alien to me.  He already has a flat, albeit a less than typically desirable one, in a 'panelák' in Prague 4.  This he inherited thanks to both the socialist state and his, now both dead, parents.  I have no intention of ever moving into either.  That's the other important point.

I don't see myself living with anyone else, ever, except when rents go up and I'm priced out of the rental market and forced into sharing again, of course.  To move in with a boyfriend would require some gargantuan re-thinking on my part.  Not least because I am a musician (whether I like it or not) and I cannot conceive of a time in which I would feel comfortable enough with another human being to haggle over what pictures are on the wall and where my books would go and all of the necessary inspirational things around me that would either help or hinder in my ever being able to write anything ever again, let alone sit and play.

I suppose I never even thought of it with my ex.  Even when we looked around places he was thinking of buying, when he left the West Country and moved east.  But more importantly, I never feel I have any right to anyone else's money or advantages due to that money.  When ex-partner saw his projected pension, I refused to think of that as a 'done deal', even for him, as things can so easily change with government policies and financial crises and so on.  And as for this flat the architect was looking at, I saw it entirely as his and even imagined that if he did buy it, he would probably have someone else in there with him by the time he got his hands on the keys.  

But it strikes me that this is an unusual way of thinking, at least in this country.  Women somehow see their partner's money as theirs.  All of those hours of work, even if the work is better paid for men than for women in the same job, still add up to funds that do not have anything to do with me.  I didn't work those hours, so I don't deserve to benefit from them.  But somehow, some women almost automatically start adding up these material goods and bank balances as part of assessing a potential partner, let alone while in a relationship, as though they will automatically belong to them.  Why would anyone do that?  I just don't understand it.  I want to earn my money fair and square.  The fact that I can't f***ing find a way of ever doing so, is MY problem and MY fault and always will be.

In anycase, the architect needs to find someone PROPER to be with.  Someone capable of growing up enough not to need about a hundred pictures on the wall to encourage creativity, someone who can do a 9-5 job without it nearly killing them.  Someone NORMAL.  And that, I am afraid and sad to say, I just can't ever achieve.