Pocket Guide to Judging Areas of London #3

Starting from the new year, I’m switching offices from suburban Wimbledon to central London (West End to be precise). This is good for several reasons: a) I’m feeling a little left out of all the exciting London action here in the suburbs, b) most of my friends work in central London, and c) let’s hope I’ll be able to do more exciting things after work and meet new people rather than just heading straight home. It’s bad for several other reasons: a) the office is in the basement (I have a thing for sunlight; in fact one of the main things I love about my current apartment are the giant windows) and b) my commute is going to be a lot longer than now … which has made me wonder if  there are any neighbourhoods I could move to that are closer. My research is mostly confirming my general feeling that everything in central London is either: a) stupidly expensive, or b) crap.

Take my friend S., who lives in Finsbury Park. She’s been persuading me to move to the area for ages. (“It’s cheap and I can get to Piccadilly Circus in 10 minutes!”) While I’m jealous of her short commute, I always had my doubts and thought the place was a bit rough for my taste. Oh boy … I had no idea just how rough. Over the past year, somebody got stabbed right in front of her bedroom window (she came home to police tape all around the entrance), and just recently while we were on holiday she got burgled – someone broke a window with a knife to get into the building and then actually kicked in the door to her apartment. They left the knife in her apartment as a friendly reminder of their visit. Yet, the police claim they found no fingerprints or DNA evidence. Errrr…, slightly more drama than I can handle. Just slightly.

My research into London neighbourhoods has thrown up a great new source, the Inside London website. Some of their neighbourhood descriptions made me laugh out loud. Some of the best ones below:

North London
http://www.insidelondon.co/london-area-guide/guide-to-north-london

Camden: “… while posh in parts, is basically a drug fuelled lunatic asylum (although, as a result, very creative with very good nightlife).”

West London
http://www.insidelondon.co/london-area-guide/guide-to-west-london

Hammersmith: “… a somewhat schizophrenic place caught between 60's concrete nightmare and beautiful pubs on the Thames.”

South London
http://www.insidelondon.co/london-area-guide/guide-to-south-london

Peckham: “North of East Dulwich (SE22) things remain reasonably pleasant as you go through Nunhead (SE15) and Peckham Rye and then we get to... Peckham (SE15). Oh dear.

Long the butt of London jokes, notorious in the public imagination as a centre for guns, gangs and general dodginess, Peckham is actually an oasis of civic harmony, bleeding-edge modern architecture and progressive community relations. Hahaha. Ok seriously. The above (the bit about general dodginess, guns and gangs, NOT the other bit) is all true. There are many gangs here. Shooting incidents are depressingly frequent. BUT, if you are not involved with gangs, guns, narcotics, car theft, joy-riding, etc. IF you have reasonable street smarts and are not prone to wandering the streets at 3am pissed off your arse with your ipod in full view and turned to maximum volume... It can be ok. There are plenty of normal people that live here.”

East London
http://www.insidelondon.co/london-area-guide/guide-to-east-london

Hackney: “Now we head back to Hackney... Affectionately known as 'Crackney' and recently voted worst place to live in London, Hackney could certainly be said to suffer from a bit of an image problem. Parts of Hackney are a bit dire (I mean this in the same sense that parts of the area around Chernobyl are a bit dire). But it's not all bad!”

How to live happily ever after: my wi-fi is killing people and I couldn’t care less.

One ordinary workday evening, I get home reasonably early, and I’m quite pleased with myself lying on a cushion in the lounge watching How I Met Your Mother. Someone knocks on the door. Weird. I live in this old building converted to flats, so my front door opens to a hall, not the street. If anyone was visiting me, they would use the intercom. Like any sensible person who has lived in a metropolis for five years, I ignore the knocking. After all, nobody helped me that time when I banged on my own door for an hour after I locked myself in my apartment and couldn’t get out. (Whole different story. Yes, it was embarrassing. No, I’m not telling you.)

The knocking comes again.

I go to the door. “Who is it?”
”It’s your next-door neighbour. Do you have wi-fi?”
”Umm, yeah.” No, I don’t wanna give you the password. Get your own fricking wi-fi, I’m thinking.
”When did you get the wi-fi? Was it when you moved in?”
”Yeah.” Weird question.
”Can you open the door?” Yes, this whole time I’m talking through a closed door. I know, I’m a baaaad bad person.
”What do you want?” I ask as I open the door, making my annoyance clear.

Holy crap, she’s standing there with some weird measuring device that keeps tick-tocking like the Geiger counters we used in Physics class at high school to measure radiation levels.
”I knew it was your wi-fi. I have been sick since you moved in.  I have headaches, high-blood pressure, seizures. I just can’t do anything at all. I’ve had autonomic failure, … I just can’t function.”

Oh boy, I live next to a psycho. What do I do, what do I do, what do I do!!! (And what the hell is autonomic failure btw.?)

“Can I come into your flat to measure the signal?”
“What for?” I pretend I don’t understand her mission, while blocking her way with aggressive body language. In fact, I understand perfectly well what her complaint is. I’ve read about these people on the Internet before. Except, I’d assumed these things only happen in the Daily Mail, not in real life.
“Can you put this in your flat?” She shoves the measuring device in my hand.
I stand in the doorway without moving. 
“Why? What do you want me to do with this?” Lady, I’ve been to assertiveness training and I’m not afraid to use it.
“I just want to know where the signal is coming from. It’s really strong in the bedroom.”
“Aha.” Like I care.

Suddenly, the measuring device stops tick-tocking. Act of God.
“It’s broken.” I shrug and hand it back to her. 
“I will have to put some new batteries in it. ” She puts on a desperate face and shakes the device a bit. I give her a look that says Not My Problem.
“Oh, this is awful. I just … can’t function like this.”
Silence. The moment when she asks me to turn off my wi-fi is coming … the tension is building. I wait. She waits.

And then she says “I will have to move.”
I say “OK”.

We both go back to our lives. Mine probably a little happier than hers.

How we made our own Paralympics, and I discovered the best beach ever.

It seems like the Olympics finished a million years ago … the Paralympics followed and one sunny Saturday, we decided to make our way down to Weymouth to watch some Paralympic sailing. We arrived and got distracted by … oooh bacon sandwich … oooh apple cake … oooh cup of tea … oooh the beach!

And then we thought, let’s find ourselves a boat. Pedalo hire didn’t quite cut it, but … oooh good luck! The RYA was on hand, giving free dinghy sailing lessons to anyone interested as part of the “Inspire a Generation” programme accompanying the Olympics.

And so we never watched the Paralympic sailing race, but we put on some wetsuits and messed around in a fun little Laser Pico dinghy. I think this is what the Olympics should be like; instead of spending billions of public money to allow us to watch other people do sports, why not allow the public try out for themselves? I was so pleased at how easy the Pico was to handle compared to the 12-metre boats I normally get to sail on! I was so very pleased, in fact, that I spent the rest of the day saying let’s  buy a boat, let’s buy a boat, let’s buy a boat. But I’ve been told that “if it flies, fucks, or floats, it’s not a good investment”. So no.

Instead, we threw our money at an extravagant £30 cab ride to Durdle Door. Oh. My. Good. Paradise. Why did no one tell me about this place before? Why do people take day trips to Brighton when there are places like this? Wowza.

 






 

Workaholic moves house and tries to get a little life on the side … aka how to kill a blog.

If I had to summarize my life in three words, it would be this: work, work, work. My three excuses for not blogging for months are the following: work, work, work. Also, I moved houses … no big deal, just packing up approximately 40 boxes, a couple of suitcases and about 4 years of my life. It took weeks.

Don’t feel sorry. I have a well-known tendency to underestimate the awesomeness (or even existence) of my social life. Take this example … Last summer, my teenage sister came to stay with me for a month. (I blogged about it, remember?) She told my parents afterwards it had been the best summer of her life.
“What? How? OK, so we travelled at the weekends, but during the week I was just working on my thesis all the time. It was so boring.”
“But Lucie, we went out like three times a week.”
“Ummm, yeah, well thinking about it now … I guess we did, actually.” (But we stayed at home the other two nights!!!)

It’s hard not to think this way, when everyone else is constantly posting status updates about their awesome lives on Facebook, uploading awesome photos of their awesome holidays on Instagram, checking themselves into awesome bars with awesome people on foursquare …

I just got an awesome new job! They’re sending me on a business trip to New York. My awesome boyfriend proposed tonight! Had the most awesome steak for dinner! Look at me wakeboarding on this awesome beach!

Few people share live updates about the boring aspects of their lives.  Life can seem underwhelming when the only reference point for comparison are those TV series you watch while eating cereal for dinner alone. (At least it was Cheerios, okay? That’s not depressing.) You start to believe the illusion that everyone else lives in perfectly tidy apartments, has perfect hair and make-up (even at 2 am after they drank 6 tequilas and their boyfriend broke up with them) and every day, something new and exciting should happen.

So, as a complete hypocrite, I am now going to share awesome photos of my awesome new apartment with you. Of course, I had to move all my mess out of the camera’s angle. Because my life is awesome – on the Internet.

The Day I Moved In



The Hall

The View



The Fox Outside My Window

The Kitchen & Lounge

The Goodness That Comes out of My Oven


The Postcards People Send Me


The Funky Art I Make



The Fridge Magnets I Collect

The Bathroom

The Bedroom

Pocket Guide to Judging Areas of London #2

Warning: you’ll either find this blog post incredibly useful, or incredibly judgmental and narrow-minded.

Back in 2009, I wrote this semi-serious post called “Lucie's Pocket Guide to Judging Areas of London”. My intention at the time was to help out newcomers who are house-hunting in London. Now, after nearly 4 years of living in a happy, leafy and safe neighbourhood, I am searching for a new flat. Once again, I am reminded how frustrating this process can be.  In my previous blog post, I introduced a couple of clever rules of thumb, such as …

• Wild Generalization no. 1: North and West Good, South and East Bad
• The Kebab Rule of Inverse Proportion
• Wild Generalization no. 2: Council Estates = Trouble

But somehow, the rules don’t seem enough. I still end up wasting lots of time attending house viewings in places that turn out to be … just not my cup of tea. Variations in living standards can be huge, even within the same neighbourhood. Recently, I went to view a couple of properties in southwest London.  First up, a flat on a beautiful quiet street with nice detached houses, middle-class families, trees, well-tended gardens … basically, suburban bliss. Hoooray, I thought I’d found the right neighbourhood! But no. The second property I viewed was less than half a mile away. The street was awful: overgrown front gardens, garbage everywhere, crammed terraced houses in disrepair, lots of traffic, noise and dust, a shabby-looking family having some sort of garage sale attended by hobos. Complete and utter deprivation.

I devised a couple of new tricks to help me weed out places without actually travelling there. Websites such as findaproperty.com allow you to see the street view for each advert. This is immensely useful because you can have a quick peek at the neighbourhood without actually travelling there -- check out the houses, check out the cars and check out the shops.

Wild Generalization no. 3: Watch out for crappy cars
If you can’t tell the quality of a street by the houses, look at the cars. For illustration, the photo below: lots of old cars, lots of small cars, lots of white vans. Conclusion: the neighbourhood must be mostly working-class, probably not very wealthy. White vans are driven by builders and painters-decorators; they are not driven by city executives … simple as that. On the other hand, if people are not afraid to park their Porsches and Audi A4’s somewhere, then it might just be a place with fairly low street crime.

Wild Generalization no. 4: Waitrose good, Aldi bad.
Look at the shops in the neighbourhood -- this will tell you a lot about the kind of people who live there, their level of income and lifestyle. Good signs: Waitrose, Marks & Spencer Food, Pizza Express, Starbucks, Waterstones, Whittards, nice bakeries, nice cafés. Bad signs: betting shops (e.g. Paddy Power), pawnbrokers, Aldi, Lidl, Poundland, 99p stores, Greggs, discount centres.

Happy house-hunting & let me know if you have your own tips and tricks!

>> Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations. <<

It’s been tiring, yet effortless week for me. The phone rings. The world comes to me. I don’t have to make plans – the present makes its own plans for me and all I have to do is say yes. For a few moments, I’ve managed to let go and just tune in to the good tunes of the universe. I’ve allowed myself to stop asking questions and just believe in goodness and happy accidents.

The photos below are from my little wander around Chiswick House grounds, where I met a friend for a cup of Earl Grey, sandwiches and scones. The food was awesome and wholesome, and not even the rain mattered. The place, the time, the lack of expectations placed on me, filled my soul with complete peace. I’m starting to sound like Deepak Chopra.

The quote “Nothing gets in the way of a genuine experience more than expectations.” comes from this New York Times article about “thin places” that I just read. It’s an interesting concept … thin places. I think Chiswick House grounds are thin place, at least for me.

Sh*t people say in London

So true. I say this sh*t all the time.