Flashback

Money, Hypocrisy, Williamsburg and Wall St: They're not as bad as eachother

In the last couple of weeks I’ve somehow found myself in 3 separate jobs, working almost 7 days a week and simultaneously moving house. Phhew! My feelings of guilt towards this blog hold what I imagine to resemble the awkward feelings of a busy, neglectful mother towards her child. All I want to do is look after it and write for it and plan more things to do with it, but unfortunately, earning money has to take precedence.

In about a month I’m going travelling, and come September I’m going to have bills and expenses flying out of my bank account left right and centre. You know, like other functioning members of society do all the time? My break from the world of careers and study will soon be over, so I’m going out with a bang. The day before my 21st birthday, my friends and I are flying out to Amsterdam! We’re going to spend 3 weeks interrailing round Europe, and fly back to the UK from Venice in September. If all goes well, I won’t even notice myself morphing into a responsible adult. That’s what happens when you turn 21, right? I’ll return to the country an of-age young lady, and with all these exciting experiences under my belt, will settle immediately back into Birmingham life. I shall get a job and pay my rent on time and never drink too much and shall consider hand sanitiser, plasters and tissues as handbag essentials …


I’m going to have to get myself a handbag…

So unfortunately my writings have suffered in this new onslaught of life-stuff. It’s a bit of a sad situation. But while I have a spare couple of hours, rather than leave this space blank, I thought I would make like a dodgy sit-com episode, and go over content I’d made before. I curled up with my notebook, and had a read through the old scribbley pages from New York that hadn’t made it into digital form yet. So, again in afternoon television fashion,

HERE'S ONE I MADE EARLIER

:

I’m sitting in a café on Bedford Avenue (aka Hipster High St, Brooklyn). I’m in the corner on a rickety chair; the walls are stained with chipped yellow paint, which strange stained glass lamps on the wall dye orangey red in places. An exceptionally raucous Buzzcocks number is playing, much louder than a coffee shop should. A large black woman is taking orders behind the bar, belting out every instruction and customer request in bold soul-singer style. ‘Plain bagel and cream cheeeheeese, yeah!’ ‘thankyouuu, coohoome again!’ She doesn’t worry about making her tuneage meld with the angry guitars also blasting through the small shop.


I’m watching the queue for the bathroom begin to snake out of a dark, red-painted tunnel, at the end of which I can only assume is a tiny door shielding a toilet lodged in a cupboard. I really need a wee. I bet there isn’t any loo roll.


On using the toilet, I found band stickers plastered from ceiling to floor, across the cracked mirror, and even on the toilet seat. The one right above the sink said ‘fuck your job, write your screenplay’. The soap was kept in one of those plastic ketchup bottles you get in diners. There was loo roll.


I like Williamsburg. I like the cracked paint, the rickety chairs and the loud music. It tickles me, rather than repels me, that it is has been necessary to put up a sign saying ‘no spitting’. I like that I am asked whether I want ‘big or small’ as opposed to ‘grande or tall’. I like it, but I’m also faintly amused by the whole atmosphere I now find myself in.


Looking through the bookstalls stationed up and down the bustling street – every one of which has at least two Camus books, a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and a minimum of one novel by either Virginia Woolf or Doris Lessing – I can’t help but crack a bemused smile. There’s something undeniably hypocritical about an area where people sell their art on the street every weekend for $10 or $15, and give their books away for any donation, but where the shops sell ‘vintage’ clothing for upwards of $150 and bespoke indie jewellery for as much as you would find in Manhattan. You can’t help but wonder whether the sellers are just setting up bookstalls in order to show the world that they have read Camus, and philosophised over the Greeks. The majority of people here are not short of cash. The local houses are beautiful family homes, or river view penthouses. With this in mind, the rickety chairs and chipped paint of this café become highly intentional design features, rather than odd quirks. People seem to be paying a lot of money to appear poor, anti-establishment, and grassroots-y. And frankly, thanks to their ripped levis and genuine ray-bans (even though it’s October), it’s a slightly half-arsed effort. Haight-Ashbury this is not.

All this amuses me, but doesn’t anger me at all. I have no judgement to pass on Williamsburg, as I did on the BusinessAwards Dinner. I don't have the same vom-ball forming in the back of my throat when I overhear conversations here, about tattoos of cats and bikram yoga. People here have just as many image hang-ups and hypocrisies as their Wall St counterparts, but at least the image they are conveying is one of sharing, and a lack of emphasis on money and value. Their hypocrisies don’t effect global finances, or lead to tax evasion, or deny school places to children in Africa. Hell, I’m sitting here too. Writing in my hardback notebook, wearing Calvin Klein jeans. And I have a copy of Ariel in my bag. I’m right at home. I don’t really see a problem with maintaining an atmosphere of dilapidation and retaliation despite the wealth of the area. 

Isn’t it actually nice to think that some of the people giving away books on the street must be highly paid city-workers…?

'I'm from Hertfordshire Darling'

My first post of the new year, 20 days in. This poor blog's been neglected for 3 whole weeks. Sorry about that. My friends were back from university for Christmas and I got quite excited. There’s been a lot of catching up to be done. Now they’ve all returned to studying and my to-do list once again reads something like:

 - Find a job

 - No, seriously, find a job

 - Any job

 - Sort out banking and tax forms

 - Start getting up before 11

Of course now it’s snowing all serious plans are on hold, but once the weather clears up I will stop writing rude words outside with sticks and taking pictures of frosty spiderwebs, and get back to sorting my life out. Well ‘get back to’ may be slightly over-optimistic wording. ‘Start sorting my life out’ may be more accurate. I haven’t been in St Albans that much at all these last few weeks. Considering there’s not that much to entertain or distract me here, it’s strange that this fact depresses me slightly.

I went to Scotland last weekend. It was lovely. I met up with my best friend from childhood (and from, like, ever) and celebrated her turning 21 in beautiful, rowdy, drinky, teary style. Getting off the train at Waverley always makes me feel excited and nostalgic, and whenever I go back to Edinburgh, I always find myself wondering why anyone would leave. After spending all of 5 seconds in the capital, the crash of rain and the sound of piping hits my eardrums, and my mindset completely reverts into ‘local’ mode; 5 minutes walking down Princes Street and a brash Scottish twang that I never really had even when I lived there injects itself into my accent, and I’m complaining about tramlines, Lothian bus fares and tourists with everyone else.

This time, despite being overjoyed and excited and completely ready to blend seamlessly in to the post-hogmanay birthday celebrations, I found myself not quite so brash. I didn’t encounter anything as drastic or conscious as feeling out of place, or like a foreigner (which, in fairness, with my accent and dislike of irn-bru WKD, would have been easy to do in the circumstances). But in hindsight, I think after having been away in the States, I arrived with a slightly reinforced southern identity. Going for walks round St Albans on Google street view was easy to explain away as simple home-sickness when done from New York. Now though, I found myself in Edinburgh, my second home, still talking about pub closures, and the accordion man, and the field I had to take a piss in once. I think I may have become an official, proud Home Counties resident.

Not, I hasten to add, that I have become some kind of League of Gentlemen style ‘local’. It doesn’t mean that I’ve somehow suddenly accepted everything I used to hate about living in a £4 a pint Tory safe seat where the shops are shut by half four and people wear suits to the pub. I’ve not started baking cupcakes or taken up knitting, I’ve not joined the town council and I’ve still never bought anything from Liberties, Boohoo or Waitrose (apart from gingerbread). But I think there might be something deeper to be gleaned from that fact that throughout my weekend in Scotland, home of whisky and Tennents and Brewdog, I stayed markedly sober, playing only the less popular (and much less interesting spectator sport) ‘water-pong’. Ditching the cava around 2am, and getting into my pajamas, I reasoned to my friends and fellow revelers that ‘where I come from, the pubs shut three hours ago.’

Maybe it’s just living at home, and not frequently being around so many people my age. Maybe it’s not being at university. Or maybe it’s something more. Maybe it’s what 8 years of St Albans residency has done to me. Maybe it’s having spent most Friday nights since I was 17 in the same two pubs that put disco lights on after 9pm and host dodgy middle-aged cover bands; the strange purgatory to which teenagers living in English towns are seemingly committed until they move to London. Maybe it’s, despite having grown up there, not being from the city. Maybe it’s not being used to ‘Hive ‘til Five’, or having ever heard of a ‘jager-train’. Maybe it’s that during the compulsory pre-party drinking games, after a few rounds of ‘never have I ever been fingerblasted in St Andrew’s Square’, and ‘never have I ever got my foof out on a Lothian bus’, I hadn’t drunk a drop, and felt the intense need to stand up in the middle of the circle and declare (in slight deviation from the standard game format) ‘I’m from Hertfordshire! Drink if you’ve ever realised mid-way through sex that you’re doing it to the Radio 4 shipping forecast!’ before downing the rest of my G&T. Level the playing field. Cultural difference, innit.

For those of you who don't know, this is the accordion man. He really deserves a shout out.