and now, some good news...

we were due for some good news. waking up this afternoon, hung over from a night out in Shoreditch which ended in a walk home from Waterloo and a fight that ended in tears, Lou checked her email to find out that she won the job she interviewed for last monday, and waited all week for word on. it's something i applied for on her behalf a week and a half ago now. a Tester for an IT project running out of one of the universities. at £90/day, it's better paid than almost any of the admin work she's been looking at for the last month or so, and if she's lucky it might lead to a better career than being a recptionist. it's only a 2 week trial to start with, but i have every confidence that she'll make it through that just fine. it's great news, especially because it will ease the financial situation. Lou was always going to run out of cash before i was, and this means that it'll just be me bleeding cash onto the pavement.

speaking of bleeding cash, i finally bit the bullet yesterday and dropped a stack of cash on Regent St. i'd gone on a wander on friday evening after leaving Leicester Square. it was 4PM, getting dark, and i was in no mood to head home just yet so i wandered up there. it's barely even a 5 minute walk fromee Leicester Square - you cut across the north end, cross a couple of roads and you find yourself in Piccadilly Circus. Regent St heads off there directly to Oxford Circus. i'm still trying to work out the local meaning of the word, but there are a few of them around. anyway, i meandered up and down the street for a while trying stuff on, came up with a couple of candidates and decided to come back again later. when i spoke to Lou she was entirely up for the idea of spending someone else's money so on Saturday afternoon we headed in.

after dismissing the candidates i'd come up with the day before we wound up back in Tom Baker which i've been led to believe is something of a boutique. 20% off everything, you say? the niciest jacket i've seen so far, you say? give me that, and that and i'll pay Richard Branson off shortly. it's warm, comfortable and very very nice, as is the shirt i picked up (since the discount covered the cost of a really nice shirt i figured that i might as well consider it to be a package deal). i didn't want to be spending the money just yet but i'm past caring right now. it was a nice little pick-me-up and now i'll be warmer when we go out in the evening.

tomorrow i'm meeting with another pimp about a job out near Earling Broadway - at the far west-end of the Central Line. it'd mean around a 45 minute commute, but there are far worse commutes to be had in this town and right now, it'd be worth it to be able to get into work. get me though the next 3 months, get some cash into me so that i don't feel guilty every time i order a beer and hopefully get me past the current economic insanity. there are a couple of others i have to chase up about other roles, and another meeting on wednesday.

right now i'm sitting on the floor of our room with my Eee on my lap while i watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. i upgraded the OS on this thing from Hardy Heron (8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) a couple of days ago, partly in the hope that it'd fix some of the problems i was having, but mostly because i was kinda hoping that it'd break a few things that i could put some time and effort into fixing. i think it's all back up and running again now - i spent 3 or 4 hours earlier testing the speakers, microphone, camera, Skype, networking, all the functions i use. now it works i've started reading up on schematics with vague thoughts of pulling it to pieces and messing with the hardware. i'm liking the idea of installing a couple of LED's in the screen frame which are powered off the backlight (or something like that) so that i can see the keys when i use this thing in the dark. it's a silly project, but it'd keep me occupied, and my mind switched on for quite a while. not that i have the tools i need here - drill, files, multimeter, soldering iron, none of these things. perhaps if i'd been a little less preoccupied before i left i'd have done it before i left, but what the hell.

but hey - at least we met some interesting people last night.

every once in a while...

since i got here i've been cruising the markets and high streets looking around for a new jacket. my beloved Safety Trench (think Linus' Safety Blanket in Peanuts) sits packed into a suitcase under my old bed in Canberra - a last-minute executive decision leaving it behind as too old, ratty, threadbare and more importantly; thin to cope with the cold here - and so i've been trying to find something nice to take its place.

we've shopped high, we've shopped low, from Brixton to Beckenham, Camden to Croydon, the haute couture of Knightsbridge to the bright lights and crowds of Mayfair. yesterday i was in a shit of a mood and went for another wander up Regent St in the evening. evening here, now, starts at about 4PM - it's well and truly night by 5 and i can see this getting even more extreme. walking outside at midday will see the sun low, low in the sky to the south, not to rise higher until deep into the new year. i had a nice time walking the streets on my own, ducking and darting trough the throngs of friday-evening shoppers. today i dragged Lou back in because, godsdammit i'm getting cold! singlet, long-sleaved tshirt, hoodie, leather jacket and i'm still feeling it.

the candidates i picked out last night were met with disinterest from my fashion consultant. eventually we wound up back at the store i'd lingered in a few weeks ago. 20% off everything in store, you say? the nicest jacket i've seen since i got here, you say? and it's gorgeous - the sort of style that i like. it's showy, but conservative, a magenta-purple lining flashing out as you move. mached up with a violet/silver/black shirt (with cuff links) and my credit card took a £244 hit today.

still, walking off towards the bus (my regular buses go up Regent Street, past Trafalgar square, then straight on towards my house) i was looking a million dollars, and i was warm.

i needed this. it's stupid - i can handle deprivation if i've got something to distract me from it all. greasy food, staying in a backpackers, in an exotic location? no worries? sitting on my hands for weeks on end while the pimps whinge to me about the job market and how hard it is and how great my CV is but right now they specifically need a Server Engineer with experience in a Bank, cleaning out the bonobo cage at the zoo and jizz-mopping at ClubX who'll take £100/day to do a demeaning job headfirst in a bucket of shit? you know, not so much

fuckit. at least i'm going to be wandering the streets in a beautiful jacket i could never have found back home, in the land of the surfies, "pre-stressed" denim and the "doesn't come in black" fucking blandness. fuck it and fuck them all - for a while i'm going to feel like i look good.

i'll get dressed up in it all and get some photos taken soon, i swear. right after i have a shave...

savouring the fruits of failure...

it's been nearly 2 weeks since i've really felt the need to say anything. it'd be nice to say that this was because i'd been so busy enjoying myself, running around the place that i've not had the time. realistically it's because i've not really done a whole lot. as the costs of living start to bite, and the job hunt proves fruitless, i've been lying low a lot of the time. last week Lou and i headed off to see the local fireworks display for Guy Fawkes Day (me with my V For Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask and all) on the wednesday, then another on the Thames for the Lord Mayor's Show. we wandered Oxford St for a couple of hours on the Monday, and Camden Town a couple of days later. the rest of my time was spent applying for jobs, calling agents, doing interviews (with mixed success) and then chilling out for the evening with the help of Fallout 3.

my job hunting has been a little different to usual. because i'm going through a consulting and umbrella company i've been making use of their office space on many of the days. they have coffee and phones i can use and with the cost of making calls it more than cancels out the bus fare for getting there. that said, this is the hardest i've had to fight to find work in over 5 years. i'll admit that i've had it pretty easy for the last few years in Canberra, but the timing of the fall of the local stock market was cripping and i was wholly unprepared. as it is i've interview for 3 roles. one of them i got, but in a risky move i turned it down because i had 2 more interviews coming up which were more the sort of work i want to do. perhaps i should have taken it, but there was no way to be sure of any outcome and i felt it was worth the risk.

i can say that Camden Town was a funky little area - an entire market of hippie-clothes and accessories, a couple of goth shops which i can see the Canberra Chrome and Perth Sin crowds pecking clean in an orgy of gleeful commerce if but they had the chance, and a generally good vibe. i've found some niceish clothes in and around the place, although most of them outside my current budget. 280 Pounds for a nice coat isn't HORRIBLE when you're earning (and the purple lining was as sexy as chocolate-dipped lesbians), but i wasn't going to spend it right there and then. oddly, Knightsbridge (which is where you can find the buitique stores for Prada, Versache and so forth) was oddly disappointing. Harrods was an exhibition of oppulance and wealth - coats i'd have been happy enough to pay a couple of hundred for basking in the glow of their P999.99 price tags. the Dodi & Dianna memorials (there are two) are... gaudy? i'm not sure if that word addequately describes the lack of taste displayed, but you should never underestimate the love of an extremely rich man for his son. that said, the food court was insane (and amazingly reasonably priced), the Egyptian Escalators incredible (if tacky) and the live singer performing Ave Maria walked to the edge of her balcony so that she could smile and wave at me which put a flattered smile on my face for the following hour.

i vaguely enjoyed Harvey Nichols, although there was nothing much in there that i could see myself wanting to wear. the rest of it was... boring and overpriced, really. Petticoat Lane, i've been told, is something i should go and check out.

we've been getting out here and there when we can in an attempt to keep our spirits up. i'm getting ground down by the constant energy-expenditure of cold- and warm-calling pimps day in and day out. Lou's been having the same problems but with even less motivation, and she's been pining for Paully pretty heavily. we've been here a month now, and the cracks are starting to show in the both of us. another week, i think, and we're going to be looking to change track. maybe make that trip to Amsterdam we'd talked about, or something like that. i don't know, but sooner rather later we're going to have to think of something before someone goes Postal...

the little differences that keep life interesting...

slowly but surely i'm coming across some of the little differences in language which can lead to embaressment and mirth. it started when i told Alex that i'd put zucchini in the stir fry. "around here," i was told in a straightforward, but helpful way, "it's called a corgette."

eggplants are aubergines, but a loo is still a loo. i'm pretty sure i could get away with referring to it as a bog as well... although not in front of the Queen where it's a lavataory.

a buck's night is a stag night, but hens are still hens. i was corrected on that factoid when we spotted 3 of them, all going in different directions, meeting on a street corner in Piccadilly Circus on a night out in the city. Alex is in the habit of correcting me on these things almost with the sternness of a school ma'am, saying "In Britain, which is where you are, it's called a..." because sometimes i need reminding...

warm beer actually means room temperature... or at least the temperature of the cellar it's stored in, the tap pumps it up the pipes rather than it being force-fed under pressure, needing a couple of pulls to pour the pint and contrary to expectations it's quite pleasantly drinkable. Fosters is in fact served on tap in most of the pubs i've been in so far, but they serve beer as well.

a bottlo or bottle shop is an off-licence and i couldn't help but laugh out loud when we walked into one this evening and found that they had XXXX by the carton in pride of place in the window. when you can get some seriously drinkable polish and czech and belgian beers on the cheap i have no idea why people drink that dirty water, but if i find someone selling Carlton Draught, VB or Pure Blonde i'm getting some, even if just the educate some of the locals.

the public transport system is fantastic and not a shambles, but you do still hear people complain about it when they get delayed a couple of minutes. it takes a lot to get me to use public transport at home. a gun to the head is usually effective, or being in Sydney or Melbourne for a couple of days can usually do it. i've been in a car once since i got here, and then for less than 5 minutes. i have no idea when it'll happen again but i know it won't be soon. the buses still run most of the main routes throughout the night, so before you go out to Islington for an "you can sleep when you're dead" bender you just make sure there's an N-service running and you're set... or you pile as many people as possible into a cab and crash somewhere central.

a kebab uses a pita bread half the size of what i'm used to which is split open and filled, rather than being rolled up. how people eat this on the move i'm still trying to work out. i haven't been able to eat one without it falling to pieces yet.

the hot water is turned off and on like a lightswitch to save power and the water pressure would embarress a 4 year old with a weak bladder but somehow everyone else seems to be able to get all the shampoo out of their hair.

people don't complain about how far they have to walk to get somewhere unless it's over half an hour, it's raining and they forgot their jacket. i remember the moans of complaint i've heard from people when you park at the far end of the car park from the supermarket. here i've carried two armloads of groceries home from the shop in hail and been grateful it was only 25 minutes.

young people don't share houses or flats here - they share rooms so they can afford the rent. you can live comfortably in London on P15k/year. an acceptable starting wage is 7-8/hour, but if you know where to look you can have lunch for P3, and a healthy all you can eat vegetarian buffet for P4.50. enough pre-made soups, pizzas and some pasta and sauces to last 4-5 days can cost as little as a tenner if you're careful and when surrounded by so much decent, cheap food people still flock to Maccas where the prices are almost dollar-for-pound. Pizza Hut charges P11 for a large pizza, but Sainsburys will sell you two for P2.80 that take 5 minutes in the oven.

people sleep shoulder to ankle (we're in a 2 bedroom flat with 6 people in it (the living room's been converted to a bedroom)), but they don't complain about overcrowding. terrace houses are the norm until you get half an hour out of the CBD so the population density is staggering. that sort of density makes it worth running buses, trains and tubes ever 3-5 minutes in peak hours and each one is comfortably packed with people and if a line's starting to get chockers in the morning THEY RUN MORE FUCKING BUSES! a high density draws in the merchants, so when i walk out my front door there's a fried chicken place to the left and a 24-hour convenience store to the right. if i walk 3 minutes i'll go past 2 more fried chicken places, 2 chinese take aways, 3 off-licence convenience stores, one bottlo, a tappas place, an eritrean restaurant, 2 kebab/burger & chips takeaways, 2 high-end delis, 2 dry cleaners, a laundromat, 2 real estate agents and a great southern indian restaurant and this is achieveable because it's so packed together that it's worth it. no fucker has a back yard, but no one i've spoken to cares or else they'd move out to the 'burbs. people don't complain - they just get on with it. everyone gripes, i mean everyone, everywhere, but people don't complain and pontificate about how the government should do something (the whinging pom is dead, or so it seems. they're all too busy apologising for shit they have no control over, like the weather, or the trains running late. i don't understand it either). if they don't like it they fuck off to Manchester or Liverpool. Birmingham's a couple of hours away by train, so you can still come into the city on the weekends. hell - there are people who live in the Midlands and commute into London every day by train, then tube the rest of the way to the CBD, taking two to three hours each way, 5-6 days a week. no one expects to have it all, all at once, so they move around as it suits them.

it's all remarkably entertaining, and i'm loving every confused glance i get when i use a phrase i thought was universal, but turns out it isn't. i told a South African guy today that i was going to bomb something, which i then had to explain meant that i was going to do something poorly and fail (in this case intentionally. alas i failed at failing, but that's another story). i'm loving being different, and obviously so, but only when i want to be... like whenever i open my mouth, grin and say g'day! otherwise, no one notices yet another guy walking by wearing black which is working out pretty well for me right now...

a room with a view...

i've been quiet over the last couple of days - after a verbose week or so i dropped off the radar in the face of a huge lack of motivation. my hangover on sunday didn't help one bit. it was Alex's boyfriend Ian's birthday party on saturday night and i wound up getting drunk with the boys out in Islington down the road and around the corner from Angel station. a good night had and i feel i held my end up fairly well. there was one conversation i had with a floppy-haired lad:

"How ye doin? Are ye noo drinkin?
course i am - just havin a break, y'know?
"...I dinn'a think Australians took breaks..."

we got back to Lambeth at somewhere past 4 in the morning after a freezing late night bus ride which i'd have had difficulty navigating while sober, and chose not to think about much while drunk. Alex knows, so we followed Alex. in Alex we trust. joyously, one of the nearby take-aways was open at that ungodly hour and so we got home with hot chips (covered in garlic sauce) in hand.

sunday was one long hangover. i dragged myself up at 1:30 in the afternoon and spent the next 11 hours feeling sorry for myself. a walk down to the local grocers led to the acquisition a fresh baguette, ham, cheese and tomato and this filled the hole, but didn't fix the head. i spent most of the day playing Unreal Tournament sitting in the armchair in the living room and not moving much, apart to refill my water glass.

yesterday was similarly unmotivated. i made the trip into town again to apply for jobs jobs jobs but wasn't performing and so i called it early and returned to my laptop and armchair. the job hunt continues to get me down. i can't help but feel that i'm just about to crack something open and then it all dances away laughing in my face. my hard work on Lou's CV and applications seems to have paid off though - she's landed herself an interview for tomorrow. this is awesome - we need a win.

that said, i'm writing this lying with my headphones on, At The Drive-In playing off my laptop, lying in my own bed in the room we secured a week and a half back. our own room where we impose upon no one and can spread out shit out wherever we please. it's freezing fucking cold outside - i went out to check out the sleety-snow earlier and even with 2 jackets on i was COLD, but it's pleasant in here. the double-glazing keeps the road-noise down to... nothing really. the drone of the cooling fans on our laptops is louder most of the time. there's ample furniture provided with more hanging space and shelving than we need. it's going to be a comfortable base of operations, even if we have absolutely nowhere to put anyone up who comes to visit. it'd be nice to have a flat of our own with our own rooms and a couch we could have surfers on, but have you seen the rents in this fucking town???

we got the move done in the afternoon, after i got back from Leicester Square. it took two trips, mostly because we had to go back to borrow bedding from Alex. that girl is way too nice for her own good. once we get some cash coming in we're taking her and her boyfriend out to an Eritrean place down the road that she's been wanting to go to for ages (i remember her mentioning off-hand once, weeks ago). i've even got Ian on-side and made him promise to find excuses to stop her from going until we get our shit sorted.

regardless, it took us about half an hour to rearrange the room to our liking - shifting things here and there, in and out, until we had a better idea as to where everything would fit. the result is a massive difference which feels more open than before and should suit our needs quite well. we got some photos of what it was like when we got here, if to prove the state of the paint and whatnot. once we've settled in and stuck some things on the walls and hung the flag somewhere (i brought a flag with me. it reminds me of home...) and stopped living out of our fucking suitcases i'll have to take some new ones. it'll be after i've fucking dusted, too - i was almost regretting wearing black when i was shifting the furniture around here i was so covered in dust.

tomorrow i'll go back into town and make more phone calls. i've taken to using the bus since it's almost as quick as the tube, but less than half the price. this is becoming important... not because i've run out of money per se, more that i'm getting tighter than a rabbi on the day before pay-day and i'm trying to stretch my available cash further. it's been so long since i've really had to worry about cash that it's taken me these last 3 weeks to remind myself what it's like to be unemployed with no job lined up. hey - maybe tomorrow, yeah?

city of lights and sirens...

there are two impressions of this place which i think will remain with me for a long, long time... that is, unless something else particularly nasty or, conversely, awesome happens. one of these is the near constant sound of sirens you get in the inner city. staying with Lou's cousin Alex just off Brixton Rd in South Lambeth it seemed like every 10 minutes there'll be another siren. walking across Westminster Bridge, or past Buckingham Palace, or just about anywhere in Zone 1 and there'll be cops screaming past in full lights & sirens mode. walking back towards the Underground along Portabello Rd in Notting Hill and there was an ambulance parting the crowds like they were the Red Sea.

out in Beckenham has been much, much quieter. almost disconcertingly so. last night when i stuck my head out the door for some fresh air before bed (Lou's Gran keeps the heat high in here, so if i air out my room it cools down enough to be comfortable to sleep in) and all i could hear was a cat yowling off in the distance... probably being eaten by one of the urban foxes they get around here. i never see stray cats and dogs, but i've seen a few foxes. it's a little disconcerting - a reminder that i'm a long way from home.

out in the cold night air it was quiet. what i SAW, however, was 5 aeroplanes in the sky... probably circling Gattwick. remember, there are 3 or 4 different airports strung around this city: Heathrow, Gattwick and Luton (that i can remember off the top of my head). it was constant at Alex's place - in their attic room there were two skylight/windows. i'd be lying on my mattress on the floor under one of these watching the aeroplanes flying overhead, almost tracking the street, one after another after another. standing out the front of the house on the way in or out and there was a procession, one following the next, 15, maybe 30 seconds apart. look up in the sky around here and it's as likely to be a plane as a bird.

the drone of aeroplanes and the wail of sirens. the rattle of trains and the honking of taxis. standing on a street corner and hearing french, then spanish, then getting on a bus and being surrounded by germans. the loud expat aussies giving shit to the drunken irish guy while surrounded by english voices in the beer garden of a pub just off the south end of London Bridge. the sounds of seven and a half million people crammed into an area only slightly larger than Sydney. a cacophony constantly split by the oft ignored sound of this minute's emergency flying past to the flash of blue lights while miracles of engineering carrying hundreds of souls at a time soar overhead. the strangest thing is that despite all that when people ask me "so what did you think of London?" it's probably not going to come up. strange, really...

this post is mostly filler. like my day, really...

i said i was going to do it: i did it. today i did sweet fuck all. ok, i talked to my mum and The Boy on Skype and went for a walk and picked up some groceries and i applied for a stack of jobs and received calls from some interesting pimps and watched Hellboy 2 and Lou did comment that for a quiet day i seemed to have gotten a whole lot done, but the important aspect was that i didn't go site-seeing or running around or into Leicester Square or anything like that. i bummed around the house and i ate 2 whole sit-down meals (both of which were home-made... one of them by me!) and rested.

tomorrow's going to be busy, and the rest of this week, and this weekend and... well, so on, so i needed this day. i'm really glad i had it.

most by train, the rest by rain...

quick research online indicates that the London Underground handles around three and a half million passenger journeys every weekday. most of these people seemed to be at Victoria station this evening, standing in the covered main square trying to work out where the hell they had to be to catch their trains. it had the air of a place that's usually quite ordered and sane most days, if insanely busy. today, on the other hand, it was raining - the first serious rain i've seen since we got here. an "incident" at Herne Hill had delayed the train i was to catch. most of the rest of the lines were sporting delays and in a place where even the overlands come every 10-20 minutes at peak a 15 minute delay seems to cause madness, overcrowding and delays far greater than the root of the matter would suggest.

so it was somewhat eery getting to Victoria to find this in front of me. i had no idea where i needed to be, so i joined the crowd with the Gotye remix album playing in my right ear while my left listened for announcements and my eyes scanned the boards until i found the station i was headed to, and thereby the line i needed to catch. all good and sorted, now which platfor... oh... it doesn't say. hmm. watching the minutes ticking away, and getting sick of being pushed and jostled as people's trains arrived and they dove for the gates and eventually i saw the number 3 flick up on the appropriate line and i screamed off to find it.

3.5 million passenger journeys which would indicate, with appropriate averaging, 1.75 million people using the tubes. factor in buses and overlands and you have a scarily effective public transport system that can comfortably move the population of Melbourne in a day without getting particularly upset about it. throw in the statistic that at any given time somewhere there's a blockage on a tube, or some "incident" on the overland and you realise how amazingly robust the system is.

the ride in this morning took about 20-25 minutes, after a 12 minute walk and a few more standing on the platform trying not to look like a tourist. i'd have gotten to my job agency three quarters of an hour earlier if i hadn't been walking past Buckingham Palace just in time to see the Changing of the Guard and when it happens to be going on when you're passing... well, i figured i'd be a mug not to stop and watch.

i'm making progress on my job hunt. momentum, we'll call it. i was exhausted when i got there, and by the time i left somewhere past 5:30 i just wanted to be somewhere i could take my boots off. maintaining an enthusiastic phone voice is tiring. it's worse when you're wrecked to start with. tomorrow i plan on lying around the lovely house in Beckenham reading my book, watching movies on my laptop and pretending i'm on holiday.

still, getting out i lost all sense of direction and couldn't remember the way to Trafalgar Square (i had planned on saving myself a couple of stations on the tube by walking) so i figured sod it and hopped on the tube. a change at Embankment took me to Victoria and the literally hundreds of people in the atrium which looked like it could have hosted some of the concerts i've been to. eventually i was standing on the packed overland heading south reading one of the free tabloid newspapers that are given out everywhere i look while it dawdled on at half-speed on account of the wet tracks and after fuck-knows how long i was disgorged with a couple of hundred other people out into rainy Beckenham Junction.

so i'm walking the 12 minutes back to the house getting wet and loving it. i remembered by the first corner that i was wearing a hoodie so my hat went forwards for the first time in years , the hood went up and i was another bum with a baseball cap on under a hoodie with earphones in, dressed in black, walking down a rainy London street (and before you argue my geography, i'm INSIDE the M25 and fuck you). i was chastised when i got in for not calling from the train station, but what the hell? walking in the rain with Gotye playing was actually very pleasant, especially with the hood up and brim of my cap forward keeping the rain out of my face.

so i finally got to experience London's famous rain. i'm not complaining. the funniest moment had to be thinking to myself oh, this is good... we need the rai... wait a minute! i'm so used to looking at any rain as a blessing which may, if we're lucky, fall into the dams that it was my instant thought here.

right now i'm just looking forward to my first designated rest-day in nearly 4 weeks. i'll probably wind up doing SOMETHING, but at least i'm not planning to and for the time being that's the important thing...

take excitement where you can...

i just got my first callback from a job application in this country. it sounds silly and trivial, i know, but after a week of running around, applying for anything under the sun that it looks like i can do without getting so bored that i'll want to kill my colleagues and learning to game the system the simple joy of firing off a CV and having someone call you 20 minutes later to confirm that you'll have time to talk on Tuesday is...
refreshing.
uplifting.
gratifying.
cause for minor celebration.

the job market here is, to put it bluntly, super-saturated and full of sharks. there are a lot of agencies who are cutting each other's throats in order to survive. in Canberra i'll deal with around a dozen different pimping agencies. here they talk about the top 100. in Canberra the agencies hold anywhere between 5 and 15% of the market. here the top performers squabble over 1-2% if they're lucky. cracking into it is hard work and without the help of the consulting company i'm dealing through i'd be getting eaten alive.

the thing is that back home i'd fire a resume off on seek.com.au with no covering letter of accompaniment - just a name, number and a CV - pull my mobile out and wait the 5-10 minutes for it to ring. simply put, my Australian CV makes pimps wet themselves and dive for the phone so that they can plead me to let them put me in for a job. here i'm a little fish begging the pimps to take notice. it's why i've been so fucking wrecked at the end of each day, getting back to base and passing out at 11 because i'm too exhausted to pick up my book.

the thing is that when i get back home, with what i'll have grown accustomed to here, i'm going to be on fire. the pimps in Canberra won't know what fucking hit them. i'm picking up job-hunting skills here which you just don't need in that market but if you think i won't use them to maximum advantage later then i've been sadly underestimated.

ok, one little callback isn't the world. i've been sent down to clients a couple of times in the last few days and it's no big thing, but i needed the ego boost and the push to my confidence. it's a little peek of the sun out from between the clouds that reminds me that coming here wasn't completely insane and i'll leverage it into a pint at the pub because... well, sometimes it's nice to celebrate the little things and keep the smile on your face even if what you're celebrating is completely trivial...

pop culture references...

everywhere i go in this town i find myself on the goddamn Monopoly board. we'd been here five minutes and we found ourselves on The Strand, then Trafalgar Square. today i wound up on Pall Mall by accident, the walked the length of Piccadilly. i've been to Oxford St, Fleet St and Coventry St. i'm spending my days at the moment applying for jobs around the corner for Leicester Square. Whitehall, Park Lane, i've even wound up on Old Kent Road for no particular reason.

it keeps going, too. i've been out the front of St Paul's where the old lady's feeding the birds in Mary Poppins. sooner or later i'm going to wind up at Abbey Rd because... well, why the hell not?

everywhere we've been going we keep seeing these round blue signs saying that some Prime Minister or whomever lived here from xxxx to xxyy. you'll be walking through Hyde Park (of which i know at least 3 back home, none of them cast a shadow on the original) and there'll be a block of marble inscribed with a message saying that this thing happened in this place. walking past some looted egyptian relics we noticed a little sign saying that the scars on the sphynx were from schrapnel from a bomb dropped on the road nearby during the Blitz.

this town is so incredibly steeped in history and if you just walk from some random place A to other location B you'll likely trip over them. this place has a habit of smacking you in the eyes before you even realised you were somewhere Interesting and there is so very much here that's Interesting...

WE FOUND A ROOM!!!

after all of 2 days of looking (it was a long and arduous journey), Lou and i have managed to secure ourselves long-term lodgings. at 130Pound/week, it's actually reasonably cheap, especially for the area, and it's about 50 metres from the front of the Oval tube station. this puts us right on the Northern line, which intersects at various points with enough lines and buses to get us... well, pretty much wherever we need to go for work. i'm pretty excited by it all - guaranteed stability, a place of our own, all that sort of thing.

about that - it's actually a room with 2 single beds in it, shared with a chinese couple and one other, but then that's pretty much what this place is like. it's sharehouses for anyone who doesn't have more money than god, or doesn't mind spending most of their income on their accomodation. i have no time for this, and no intention of signing a lease or whatever so renting a room is more than fine with me.

whatever the case, in another couple of weeks (the room won't be empty until the 30th, although we may be able to be in a couple of days earlier) we'll be moving into this little place and of course photos will be forthcoming. there's a likelihood that there'll be a backerpackers stint between now and then, but at least we know that we're secure after that and there are other options in play that i'll discuss if they come about.

in other news, i've spent the last 2 days reworking my CV for the UK market and then comprehensively whoring it out to all and sundry. i've had a couple of decent bites out of it so far - it's been referred to the client twice today (which means i'm in the top 3-6), and i'm in meeting a pimp tomorrow morning to discuss "opportunities in the market". all in all, apart from being tired and passing out at 11:00 each night (yes, scary i know) it's been a good, productive day. oh, and ignoring the whole "stuck in the tube" thing - i'm going to drink away the memory of that later at the pub.

yay! a visit to a real english pub with real english people... ok, an english girl and a scot but who's counting...

panic attack...

the tube station was full of people when i got there - a hundred, two? the air was still, and it was the next best thing to silent. i've not seen this before - there's always people talking, sounds of trains, something... but now there's nothing. a voice comes over the PA advising of a broken-down train down the line and resulting delays.

the next train is announced by a building breeze down the platform - air rushing ahead of the train coming down the tunnel. at the next station the line branches east-west, and this one's for the west line via London Bridge and Bank, so i wait. it's chockers - people squeezed against the doors. some get off, others get on. the next train arrives and it's the same, but what the hell? i only have 12 minutes to ride so i squeeze on with the rest of the cattle and get crushed in from behind as one or two more people try to crush on.

it's hot and stuffy in here. i'm in contact with at least 5 people that i can count and there's barely room to breathe while i stand there listening to Cog on my mp3 player. next thing i know the train's slowing... slowing... stopped in the dark between the stations. another train's pulled out ahead from a siding and there'll be a short wait. i'm standing, crammed like spam in a tin between stations on a train while i watch the people around me start to sweat and the doors are closed and there's nowhere to go and there's no way out and i can't get out i can't get out i can't i can't get fucking out i can't out out can't FUCK....

a couple of minutes that stretch to days and the train started moving. more people get out at Kennington than get on and there's some room. more get out at Waterloo and after a year's passed we're at Leicester Square. i walk around the wet streets for a couple of minutes to get my nerves back in order. i don't want to think about what i'd have done if there'd been a problem and i'd been stuck there much longer than that. i'm going to be wary of packed trains for the next little while, i think...

harden up, princess...

walking walking walking. you know that the bus costs 90p, which is the equivalent of something like $2.50? the Underground (tube in the local vernacular) is 2Pound. as a result, there's been a lot of walking. when you walk into the Money Changer and $2700 in hundreds turns into 945 Pounds (and you had to haggle to get it up from 870) you do start to freak the fuck out.

yesterday was entertaining. we caught the bus up to London Bridge, at which point we realised we were near to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre so we went and found it. we were actually headed for the Tower of London, but what the hell. just near to The Globe was the Millenium Bridge (erm... yeah. about that...) which crosses over right up to St Paul's Cathedral. being a sunday, it wasn't open for tourists, but we found the steps where the children in Mary Poppins want to feed the birds. onwards now, we managed to find the Tower without too much trouble and did a bog-lap around the outside rather than pay the P18 to get in. we had a quick lunch nearby, and this was the point at which i made Lou walk. we walked along the Thames all along the north bank to Embankment Station (google it), then across, past the London Eye and then further to Vauxhall Cross then back past the Oval to where we're staying (you can also google Crewdson Rd, Lambeth if you're bored.

oh, the whining.... of which there was actually very little. i've been making her walk quite a lot since we got here. my philosophy is that unless we're in a hurry to get from here to the next point then we might as well save a quid and leg it. that, and we've seen some rather entertaining stuff we'd not have seen otherwise if we'd been in the tube, like the eqyptian obelish and sphinx's which were pillaged by some englishman and set along the Thames. regardless, i've taken to telling Lou to "harden up, princess" whenever she starts to speak of hardship, or you know, sore feet. it's amused us both a little, and the laugh usually keeps us going for another kilometre.

in other news, it's now day 5, and it's starting to feel a little less like a holiday. today has been spent either applying for jobs, speaking to agencies or looking at places to stay. we've had one inspection so far (which was on an estate and... well, we'll see how desperate we get before we live on an estate, let's put it that way) and another two to come in an hour or so. with any luck one or the other of these ones (both of which are walking-distance from here... mua ha ha ha!) will be decent and we can consider ourselves sorted. a chunk of the float i exchanged today has been reserved for deposit and rent in advcance, etc. it's not going to last particularly long, but that's what it was for so i'll not complain too much.

i just need to hold onto my accent and i'm sure we'll all be find. a couple of times i've found myself starting to mimic the locals and this has been... unacceptable. i don't know, maybe it'd be nice to be able to put on a genuine english accent when i get back. while i'm here, on the other hand, i'm happy with mine thankyou very much. the other night, out on the town, i uttered "bloody oath" at... something. the enormous screens in Piccadilly Circus or something and Alex remarked that she'd expected a "strewth" out of me which is the ONLY reason why, a couple of hours later, i gave her one at the length of the line outside a club called "TigerTiger". i'll not use it again, i swear... unless the situation calls for it, i suppose.

gotta go now - photos to label, rooms to see. we're biting the bullet and looking at rooms, rather than flats. we COULD get a nice place in the area for 195Pound/week, but... well sod it. not when we can pay 120 and get all bills and internet etc included in the cost. power, i've been told, is EXPENSIVE here. the folks in the place we're staying turn everything off at the wall to save juice so i'm going to assume that it's superfucking expensive.

much to see, much to do... not that it seems like i'll be getting to see or do much of it in the next couple of days with the the work involved in getting a job in this town. still, all part of the adventure...