After promising the moon on a stick in terms of frequent writing, I’ve been trying to cling onto my laptop with my fingertips while a visiting ninja took the last two weeks, shredded them and cast them to the winds.
I’ve realised that I’d become a creaking creature of habit in London, always ducking into the same bars, getting friends to meet me in the same places, ordering the same chicken yakisoba from the same Japanese café. Don’t twist my words, or my melon – it’s good chicken yakisoba. I’m just aware that I’ve been ploughing the same social furrow for a while.
Refreshing, then, like an amphetamine sorbet, to have someone who wants to run around town and see it through different eyes. I live so near the London Eye, for instance, that tourists can watch my washing my smalls in the bathroom sink if they squint. Have I ever set foot on it, though? Have I bog roll. So last week I hopped in a capsule and looked out over this city I live in from a new place.
I’ve walked through neighbourhoods – Chelsea, Marylebone, Shoreditch – that I would never usually step foot in except if I fell asleep on the night bus and missed my stop. London has been opened up, wrenched open like a stubbornly-locked trunk.
Last night, for example, I sat in a bar and ate jelly cubes that tasted exactly like Hedrick’s Gin and tonic, and watched another drink where a quince butterfly emerged from a honey cocoon. Now, you don’t get that in the snug of the Queen’s Head on a Thursday night.
Granted, I’ve been jammy. Jammier than a clumsy conserve thief. Commissioned to review ten London hotels., which give a handy base for adventure, and pull me to the outer corners of my Zone 1 universe. It’s crashing a lifestyle to which I’ll never be able to afford to become accustomed to; in the words of Withnail, “Free to those that can afford it, very expensive to those that can’t.”
Champagne tastes, shandy pockets. It’s a lifestyle I’ve dipped into but never with such intensity. One minute we’re sipping wine overlooking Michael Caine’s apartment, the next being ushered into a minimalist suite by a top-hatted minion. It’s hilarious and surreal and there’s six more weeks of it. I may need a stand-in if this pace keeps up.
