So, one of the reasons that London smells, you will agree, is that quarters are close. Flats are small, offices cramped and tubes stuffed. It's not so much a problem as a fact of life, like living in one of those fold-down apartments in Tokyo.
Having decided against moving, myself and The Bearded One resolved to love our flat more, which is easy enough, considering that at £210 per week with no council tax to pay, it's a steal for a teeny one-bed on two floors with the aforementioned weenie patio in its fantabulous location convenient to work and friends. So, friends should come round more, and did last night, which was nice. Seems we could manage twice as many as we had in the end, so watch this space, party central.
Downside? At the moment, however, I'm huddled on the less pleasant of the two floors, because my Scary Neighbour is upstairs with The Bearded One. The Bearded One, like most boys, has a long fuse for people, unlike myself. Scary Neighbour is a large, strong, loud man in his thirties who, we can tell from being on the patio, likes to scream abuse at his wife. OK, so sometimes she screams back, but very rarely. Scary Neighbour, an equal oppurtunities screamer, also shouts filth when he's alone. He is, I believe, unaware that we know either of these facts. As sorry as I feel for the wife, what confirms his craziness in my mind is that he plays out entire fictional arguments at the top of his voice out the kitchen window while he does the dishes alone in his apartment.
I object to being forced to know these sorts of things about people.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Editors 'R' Us... now with added cash!
So, the real belated news, told smugly while munching Portugal's greatest export of a sunny Sunday morning? The real news is a change of job and a complete and utter change of life for yours truly. Shortly before I travelled back to the US for Thanksgiving, I was given the heads up by the Editorial Assistant for Fiction that she was changing careers and going travelling in between the scenes, leaving her position gloriously vacant. Attempting a cross-departmental move in a fourteen-person company is something to be considered, as it does have the potential to backfire horribly, but not so here! And thank Christ for that, as I just don't think I could take it if this job went wrong. I've invested too much in being here to have to pack up now.Organising the move was extremely stressful, most of it masterminded while sitting on the floor outside the VIP Lounge at Detroit Airport, stealing their Wi-Fi. (A lovely Japanese man and his wife invited me to come in just as I was finished, because they were allowed to have a guest, which was sweet.) But come January, I was back in the same lovely publishing house, full-time and fully engaged as Editorial Assistant for Fiction. Publicity, particularly part-time, is simply not me – not here, anyway. I have difficulty getting into the national press here, although it will come with time. More of a Guardian and books press girl, myself, but of course publicity requires so much more. The other thing about publicity at its lower levels is that it’s simply not brain work: strategy, planning, organisation, yes, but hard analysis, working with texts? Notsomuch.
So now, I actually read and write for most of the week- submissions, nothing finished. I now understand why editors have never read the backlist. Fantastic experience, and it really feels like a great match between academic thought and knowing the market. It’s extremely exciting. I just can’t believe that it took me a year and four months to get back to Plan A, and how long and awful that time was.
But now, now, my friends, I’m enjoying something of a revival. I’m back in the world, going to the theatre, concerts, (that's Willie Nelson, you heathen)
buying nice food with the yummy mummies in Primrose Hill… smiling. Extraordinary stuff. Kind of like real life, but without the Irish people and the sea. Will keep me going in the meantime, anyway.Will report, albeit somewhat cryptically, on what I’m reading as I go along. Meanwhile, enjoy the pics of my new, improved life and times in London. Congratulations in order to the team behind a well-thought out exhibition in a spooky locale, Art and Pigeon Pie.
See, I told you I was doing stuff. Having no money doesn't make you less able to attend great free events, just less willing, so I really have no excuse for not having done more of this kind of thing before, except that I was using every spare minute to freelance myself into another £60 or looking for a new job. Before I had quality time with a laptop, and now... I have art and life and food. It's turning into a good year, I say in a small voice.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
And so this is Christmas...
A quickie on the personal blog backlog before I cover the rest.
Christmas with The Bearded One took us to the South Bank for a frosty stomp, then an old-school sushi-chase and tickets to a truly kinked-up Cabaret. (Good work, Captain J.)
Christmas was spent quietly in Old Country, fresh air, sea, duck, wine.
Went to a litterati party, no less, up a boreen in Blackwater on Stephen's Day. Gorgeous and surreal. One prizewinner, one serious contender, a poetry editor, half a small, dysfunctional press' board, some artsy bigwigs and the prizewinner's family including a funny dentist who hated her job, and her brother, who fell three stories from a Barcelona balcony and was put back together with metal.
Then... New Year's with fabulous friends in Dublin. Amazingly, of the twenty people in the room, say, 17 of them Irish, all had been living in, were living in, or were moving to London.
Et me voila.
Christmas with The Bearded One took us to the South Bank for a frosty stomp, then an old-school sushi-chase and tickets to a truly kinked-up Cabaret. (Good work, Captain J.)
Christmas was spent quietly in Old Country, fresh air, sea, duck, wine.
Went to a litterati party, no less, up a boreen in Blackwater on Stephen's Day. Gorgeous and surreal. One prizewinner, one serious contender, a poetry editor, half a small, dysfunctional press' board, some artsy bigwigs and the prizewinner's family including a funny dentist who hated her job, and her brother, who fell three stories from a Barcelona balcony and was put back together with metal.
Then... New Year's with fabulous friends in Dublin. Amazingly, of the twenty people in the room, say, 17 of them Irish, all had been living in, were living in, or were moving to London.
Et me voila.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Back in business
So… here we are. February.
It’s been a busy few months, and I return with my tail between my legs. I think I’ll do a few separate entries, rather than one big behemoth job.
I last wrote in November, when I faced harsh truths about working part-time:
1. You can’t live on a part-time publishing salary in London, no matter how much freelance reviewing you manage to land.
2. If you do work part-time, and your company has use-it-or-lose-it holidays, you have plenty of time, no money, and holidays you must, well, use or lose.
3. Holiday days carry more weight when you’re part-time. If you work a three-day week, nine days of holiday means three weeks off.
I could have just handed them over to The Man, but I was having a lousy time and determined to sit around in my bathrobe and eat discount bonbons in Norf London if it came to it. A girl’s gotta do…
But that would have been grim- my own sugar-laden company can only amuse for so long. Instead, I spent a week toddling around London, seeing the sights, meeting the mates, reading through the stack.
Then, I thought about where else I could go. I had to have accommodation supplied, under the circumstances, so I considered the options, and found myself back in the town of my birth. Very odd to be back, and odder still as I it was the first Thanksgiving in eight years I had in the States.
My cut-price where’s-the-catch? trip took me from Gatwick to Detroit to National Airport. Not Reagan. National. Got it?
At any rate, I spent most of it inhaling a copy of I Served the King of England by Brohumil Hrabal (Vintage, 2005). A slim volume with a decadent, mouldy brown cover sporting a dusty 1920s scene in a plush hotel, waiters, flappers and wealthy gentleman sunk into velvet banquettes, hiding in snugs and dark wood panelling. Hrabal’s was not a name I knew, but Milan Kundera called him the greatest writer in their country. If it’s good enough for Kundera, it’s enough to knock the rest of us sideways. It is essentially a picaresque, but not of the sunny, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked, dirty fingernails variety. The book opens with a young, poor man helping his resourceful grandmother with her rather unusual work: she profits from the profits of others, as visiting salesmen up on their luck toss their old, worn shirts, socks and jocks out the window into a stream. There sit the young man and his grandmother, who wait, heron-like, ready to lift them out, wash, mend and resell them down the ladder of working men. Soon, the boy seeks to come up in the world, and gains employment as a waiter in one of Prague’s old hotels in a day when waitering was a career, and only the observant, the skilled and the discreet could get ahead.
From this unremarkable start opens the most charming, exquisitely-written tale I have read in years. Though it never leaves Prague and surrounds, the boy has an education beyond his wildest dreams, as lush, exotic and glittering as the most colourful travel lit. Hrabal writes sensually, not sexually, about the boy’s first encounters with the garish women who frequent the hotels, as he ‘covers their laps with flowers’. He captures awe surrounding the prime minister’s misleading dinner for three, as the staff twigging with varying speeds to the non-existence of third diner as man and mistress tumble, sweetly into a pergola in the gardens.
There is an air of magic to this book, and though I know that the term ‘magic realism’ can turn people clean off, there is nothing here as blatant as Garcìa Marquez or Angela Carter. It is as if the magic has just left the stage, leaving just a twinkle in its wake. Here, the King of Ethiopa arrives with his full entourage, and a banquet is created the likes of which Bohemia has never seen. The near-orgiastic scene that erupts as the camel stuffed with x, stuffed with y and flavoured with all the spices of the Orient is cut and consumed is loud, sparkling, funny and mesmerising. There are more such scenes, but I won’t spoil it for you. (If you’re interested, another blogger, waggish, has run through it comprehensively)
What’s more, I was so astonished by it, that I threw my copy across the living room in Washington at my father, and left it there, demanding that he read it. Oi, you people who don’t read modern and contemporary fiction – get to it.
As to my time in Washington, it was lovely, filling and all those good things. Met up with the Best Friend, and thinking of happy nights in Addis in King's Cross, introduced her to some first-rate Ethiopian in Addams Morgan, and sampled some fabulous but pricey mojitos. She is muchly missed, but there we are.
Also, did some wandering in the Old Country of the outback of North West DC and relearned my driving skills all over again. Relaxing. Not London. Good.
It’s been a busy few months, and I return with my tail between my legs. I think I’ll do a few separate entries, rather than one big behemoth job.
I last wrote in November, when I faced harsh truths about working part-time:
1. You can’t live on a part-time publishing salary in London, no matter how much freelance reviewing you manage to land.
2. If you do work part-time, and your company has use-it-or-lose-it holidays, you have plenty of time, no money, and holidays you must, well, use or lose.
3. Holiday days carry more weight when you’re part-time. If you work a three-day week, nine days of holiday means three weeks off.
I could have just handed them over to The Man, but I was having a lousy time and determined to sit around in my bathrobe and eat discount bonbons in Norf London if it came to it. A girl’s gotta do…
But that would have been grim- my own sugar-laden company can only amuse for so long. Instead, I spent a week toddling around London, seeing the sights, meeting the mates, reading through the stack.
Then, I thought about where else I could go. I had to have accommodation supplied, under the circumstances, so I considered the options, and found myself back in the town of my birth. Very odd to be back, and odder still as I it was the first Thanksgiving in eight years I had in the States.
My cut-price where’s-the-catch? trip took me from Gatwick to Detroit to National Airport. Not Reagan. National. Got it?
At any rate, I spent most of it inhaling a copy of I Served the King of England by Brohumil Hrabal (Vintage, 2005). A slim volume with a decadent, mouldy brown cover sporting a dusty 1920s scene in a plush hotel, waiters, flappers and wealthy gentleman sunk into velvet banquettes, hiding in snugs and dark wood panelling. Hrabal’s was not a name I knew, but Milan Kundera called him the greatest writer in their country. If it’s good enough for Kundera, it’s enough to knock the rest of us sideways. It is essentially a picaresque, but not of the sunny, blond-haired, rosy-cheeked, dirty fingernails variety. The book opens with a young, poor man helping his resourceful grandmother with her rather unusual work: she profits from the profits of others, as visiting salesmen up on their luck toss their old, worn shirts, socks and jocks out the window into a stream. There sit the young man and his grandmother, who wait, heron-like, ready to lift them out, wash, mend and resell them down the ladder of working men. Soon, the boy seeks to come up in the world, and gains employment as a waiter in one of Prague’s old hotels in a day when waitering was a career, and only the observant, the skilled and the discreet could get ahead.
From this unremarkable start opens the most charming, exquisitely-written tale I have read in years. Though it never leaves Prague and surrounds, the boy has an education beyond his wildest dreams, as lush, exotic and glittering as the most colourful travel lit. Hrabal writes sensually, not sexually, about the boy’s first encounters with the garish women who frequent the hotels, as he ‘covers their laps with flowers’. He captures awe surrounding the prime minister’s misleading dinner for three, as the staff twigging with varying speeds to the non-existence of third diner as man and mistress tumble, sweetly into a pergola in the gardens.
There is an air of magic to this book, and though I know that the term ‘magic realism’ can turn people clean off, there is nothing here as blatant as Garcìa Marquez or Angela Carter. It is as if the magic has just left the stage, leaving just a twinkle in its wake. Here, the King of Ethiopa arrives with his full entourage, and a banquet is created the likes of which Bohemia has never seen. The near-orgiastic scene that erupts as the camel stuffed with x, stuffed with y and flavoured with all the spices of the Orient is cut and consumed is loud, sparkling, funny and mesmerising. There are more such scenes, but I won’t spoil it for you. (If you’re interested, another blogger, waggish, has run through it comprehensively)
What’s more, I was so astonished by it, that I threw my copy across the living room in Washington at my father, and left it there, demanding that he read it. Oi, you people who don’t read modern and contemporary fiction – get to it.
As to my time in Washington, it was lovely, filling and all those good things. Met up with the Best Friend, and thinking of happy nights in Addis in King's Cross, introduced her to some first-rate Ethiopian in Addams Morgan, and sampled some fabulous but pricey mojitos. She is muchly missed, but there we are.
Also, did some wandering in the Old Country of the outback of North West DC and relearned my driving skills all over again. Relaxing. Not London. Good.
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