Day 11: House husbandry

"A place for everything, and everything in its place" - Isabella Beeton, from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.


From the outset of my short career, I travelled.  It was par for the course - time in your home office, whether that was London or elsewhere, was generally limited to a Friday, and for the rest of the working week, you were expected to schlep your way to wherever your client was based. The firm took great pains to let their graduates know that this was normal behaviour, that personal mobility and flexibility was a given, and I inked my name of the dotted line fully expecting to spend my life on the road.


I know former colleagues who went to great pains to chain themselves to within the Square Mile, shaking their heads at fantastic roles outside of the M25, and I know those who have racked up so many airmiles that they were practically on first name terms with Border Control. Some people had family lives they wished to protect, others openly believed that London is the centre of the universe (clue: it isn't, by any stretch of the imagination) and couldn't believe that business could possibly be conducted outside of the capital.  Still others grasped the opportunity to see the world on the company dime and worked in Spain, the Czech Republic, India, even Australia.


Me, I was somewhere within the middle, fortunate enough to mix time in London with time away, but at one point, I visited the London office three times in six months, as I worked my way along the South Coast (a far from unpleasant experience in the summer of '09).  I stayed in ten different hotels in that period, always aiming for small independent boutiques (within budget of course) rather than the faceless chains that knew you by number rather than by your favourite gin, and I would be lying if I said I didn't rather enjoy the plumped up pillows, the attentive service, and the endless, needless supply of three-course dinners.


But I was coming home every Friday night, shattered from another two-hour train-plus-tube journey from Cosham or Totton or Worthing, and finding that my housemates were becoming increasingly, worryingly accustomed to my absence.  I'd be left out of house dinners, not maliciously, but simply because I wasn't expected to be available.  I'd wake up on a Saturday morning and find a fully stocked wine-rack, but no bread in the cupboard. I'd be faced with the choice of either braving the Holloway Road on a Saturday and raid the supermarket, or eat out, or worse convince myself that I didn't even really need to three proper meals a day. I'd try to do my laundry, and find that my housemates had already block booked the machine throughout the weekend.  I'd be invited out to dinner and resent the fact that this was something I'd actually have to pay for myself rather than simply waving a corporate credit card. I'd be invited to a gig or play on a weeknight, and would have to reluctantly turn the opportunity down as I knew I would be in a hotel room instead, either working, eating, or sleeping.


In short, I was slowly, but surely, forgetting how to live life.

Fast forward to the present day, where Jo now quite reasonably assigns me tasks to carry out during the day while she is actually earning money.  She asked me to wash the towels - I managed to wash none of the dirty ones and all of the ones she had washed the week before.  She asked me to cook fajitas - I'd have to check with her exactly how long rice took before it became edible and not toxic.  I've taken on, willingly, the mantle of house husband, but I'm about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. 


Fortunately, I'm learning, and I have an extremely patient girlfriend who is dragging me back to the real world.  I'm determined to stay there, and earn my keep.

Day 10: Retrospective #1

"'I don't have time to sharpen the saw,' the man said emphatically.  'I'm too busy sawing!'" - attributed to Steven Covey, from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People


At my old firm, we had a strange fascination with the concept of "Lessons Learned".  After a particular project or phase of work, enlightened managers would ask the more junior staff to gather together their thoughts on what had been successful, and what had, frankly, been a bit of a disaster. We would toddle off and produce an exhaustively peer-reviewed, smartly formatted document or "deck" (PowerPoint presentation to most mortals), deftly presented to our bosses and our bosses' bosses using terms such as "joined-up approach" and "enhanced collaboration". Copies would be distributed to the team, efficiently filed in a detailed folder structure on a shared network drive, and we would pass serenely on to the next phase of work. 


And we would make the same mistakes again.


I'm perhaps slightly over-dramatising for effect, but the core concept holds true.  The world turns at such a terrific rate of knots that we have neither the time nor the inclination to reflect on what we have achieved - or to use Covey's analogy, we continue to labour through our wood-cutting without resting to sharpen our saw. These "Lessons Learned" dossiers were a good start, if overly formal and sanitised, and I only wish that on my particular project we took that process further.


So as the beautiful sunshine London has enjoyed this week makes way for torrential downpours, and as I realise I have reached the quarter-way mark of my allotted period of freedom, I feel I should act on my own advice. So, what do I feel I have achieved since I woke up on Monday 25th July and foolishly set out for that first run? 

• Blog: You may have gathered that I love writing, and the desire to keep posting interesting and thoughtful entries has motivated some of the activities I've been undertaking these last few days.  I'm extremely grateful for the comments I've received so far, and for those who have taken the time to read  this - thanks for your interest!
• Gym: I wouldn't want to bore my readership with tales of squats and lat pull-downs, but I've rather bizarrely enjoyed rejoining a gym and dedicating time each day to put myself through pain and misery on various torture devices. 
• Travel: I've been out and about more than I thought I would when I was first dreaming of my freedom a few days before I resigned - Durham, Wimbledon, the O2, the Proms, plus that brief but fulfilling visit to South Bank.  I have more exploration planned, as I persist in believing that only through widening horizons can you hope to understand yourself and others.

And what has not gone so well?

• Piano: I stated in my first post that I want to take my Grade 8 exam in November, but these first few days I have done barely anything to make that ambition reality.  I've braved some of the easier scales, and looked at some of the pieces, but if I took the exam tomorrow I'd be laughed out of the room. Must. Try. Harder.
• Spanish: I also wanted to start learning a new language.  No progress on that front either, although I'm starting to think that with my new-found enthusiasm for the gym, and the piano exam looming, I may be biting off more than I can chew.  Still, half an hour day is surely achievable, especially if the rain continues to pour.
• Cooking: My girlfriend will certainly testify to the fact that I have not spent enough time sharpening my culinary saw (a kinfe?). The Chelsea Splodge aside, I resolve this week to push on with this - I'm no Heston Blumenthal but I'm sure I can make a curry.

Those are my 'lessons learned' for the first ten days of my freedom.  But overall, I'm enjoying every minute of being away from work and I'm in no hurry to return - that at least goes some way to validate that decision to "strike the board and cry, 'No more!'"

Day 9: Pink Floyd

"Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
The time has come,
The song is over,
Thought I'd something more to say..." - Pink Floyd, Time


In 1995, two seemingly unrelated events took place.  My school in Bristol started giving me 'prep' (homework to pretty much every other school in England) and my loving parents bought me a Sega Saturn for Christmas. (A Sega Saturn! What a way to show my age!) I'd never owned any previous consoles, having only experienced them wonderingly at neighbours' and friends' houses, but as the occurrences of the first event became rather more regular as the school year dragged on, I found myself unable to enjoy the second event as much as a ten-year old boy should.  When you have a demon of a maths teacher like Mr. Evans, you don't dare turn in your algebra a day late just because you were trying to set the Mountain course record in the Lancia Delta in Sega Rally.


However, by pure accident, I managed to combine the two. The Saturn was stationed in the 'playroom' by a charmingly clunky Acorn CRT monitor, a hangover from our old Atari ST, not far from a battered old sofabed which I would wearingly unfurl every evening and cover with old-fashioned exercise books and ring binders. One evening, when I was particularly frustrated with an English essay that had started but simply refused to end, I took a break and started rooting around the desk, toying with the idea of taking on that ridiculous fifth boss from Panzer Dragoon again. (I was so close!)


Instead, though, my eye caught a glimpse of a CD cover lying on the desk.  I hadn't remembered putting it there, and had only vague memories of my Dad mentioning it. It simply bore a stylised ray of light shining into a glass prism and refracting into a rainbow. It was undeniably striking, especially to a ten year-old, but it didn't even reveal the artist or the album title. Intrigued, I turned the Saturn on, let it run through to what was then the thoroughly modern CD screen and slipped the disc into the tray.  I pressed C on the joypad and returned reluctantly to the essay.


That night was the first ever time I had listened to music on the Saturn, and it became a ritual that I adhered to for as long as I remember grappling with homework.  I eventually added other CDs to the roster - Billy Joel's An Innocent Man and its brash reworking of soul and Stax; Dire Straits' easy-listening giant Brothers in Arms - but those records were in the rather unfortunate position of having to follow Dark Side of the Moon.  I'd never before heard alarm clocks or cash registers or disjointed voices layered together in music.  I'd never heard an instrumental, much less one with a single female voice improvising a horrendous yet melodious cry to heaven (or with titles like "The Great Gig in the Sky").  And I'd never heard anything so fatalistic and final as the closing song cycle of "Any Colour You Like", "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse".  My small childish brain was simply blown away by what I still consider the greatest (non-classical) album ever committed to disc, and I have spent the rest of my life trying to find something to equal it (and have some fairly close with The Who's Who's Next and the Floyd-esque Ten Silver Drops by Secret Machines).


I had the opportunity to revisit those early memories when my girlfriend surprised me with tickets to see Brit Floyd at the London O2 yesterday evening.  Various extenuating circumstances meant we could only see the first half, but they were note perfect from the outset, sensibly dividing guitar and vocal duties across the band and keeping the inter-song chat to a minimum.  Particular highlights were the monolithic "Welcome to the Machine" and a sensitive, studied "Us and Them", although both Jo and I found the visuals, while appropriate, slightly disconcerting at times.


I left feeling as if I had rediscovered a small part of myself, reaffirming my faith in music and its power not only to delight in the present but also to transport to the past as well as any sepia-toned photo album or battered train ticket.  My Saturn may have bitten the dust a long time ago, but it opened the door to my current obsession with music, and to lose that would be to lose a part of me too precious to replace.

Day 8: Wimbledon

"The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club...reserves the right to refuse entry to anyone adopting unreasonable social behaviour..and/or commits any action against the spirit of The Queue" - AELTC Wimbledon Website


In this inter-connected, smart-phone-dominated world, it amazes me how much sway paper still has over the national consciousness. As the summer holidays grind into gear, and thousands of families flock to airports, Dad might at the check-in desk smugly whip out a tablet that contains the flight tickets, the boarding passes, the travel insurance and the kids' dental records, but they'll still all need to glumly root through their oversized baggage to track down the tiny red book that ultimately grants passage through Terminal 5. All the technology in the world can't help you if your passport is still in the sock drawer.


I remark on this because yesterday saw the official opening of the All England Lawn Tennis Club Public Ballot for Wimbledon 2012. Being unemployed and a (gentle)man of leisure, I thought I could probably clear a few minutes in my packed calendar to fill in the online application form. Except, I couldn't find one.  I couldn't even find a link to download a PDF, or, heaven forbid, an RTF file. It turns out that the first stage in applying for the ballot is to send a stamped, self-addressed envelope to a PO BOX address in SW19. The gentry at the Club will then check that the envelope is the correct size and of the self-sealing variety (those AELTC tongues have far more important things to do than lick your SAEs), that the address is legible, that the stars are aligned, and then they might, MIGHT send you a form. And all this to qualify for a glorified raffle, with the prize being the chance to give a tennis club a lot of your money.


What I thought would take a few minutes eventually took a morning, as I scoured the flat for envelopes, broke two biros, covered myself in ink as I resorted to fountain pen to scrawl my address, and then trudged to Sainsbury's to buy stamps.  It says something about our current attitude to letters, too, that at the checkout the lady was so surprised that I wanted stamps she had to ring a supervisor and ask him to unlock a drawer within which the offending bits of gummed paper lived. I hadn't realised that in the eyes of supermarkets, stamps were now controlled goods.


But in the end, I had to give the Wimbledon people credit. After all, we are the only country in the world that believes that the queue to witness a particular sporting event is as enjoyable as the event itself.  In an age where buying a flight to New York would take less than five minutes, I applaud the organisers of one of the most well-respected tournaments in the world in standing by their old-fashioned yet quintessentially English processes, and insisting that for attending one of their tennis matches, obeying paper-related rules is as important as handing over the cash.


So taken was I with this wonderfully traditional process that I decided to spend the afternoon in Wimbledon itself.  I'd never been before, though I have friends who love life there, and thought this was as good a time as any to pay my respects. Outside the train station, it seemed that the area hadn't completely escaped the onslaught of modernisation, as Alexandra Road was covered for half a mile in extensive roadworks, but fortunately I'd heard good things about the Village, so I hurried my way there first. Climbing Wimbledon Hill Road, I could indeed feel the crowds of Frappucino-slurping students and honking car horns behind me, and I reached the quaint High Street in good spirits.


As I approached Wimbledon Common, however, I could see that the searingly hot sunshine that day imbued the whole place with a kind of stale, staid immobility.  The grass was faded to a limp straw colour, there were small clumps of teenagers slumped sweatily here and there, and even a group of enterprising Frisbee players looked  lethargic and defeated.  The paths around the Common were little more than dirt, and in the oppressive heat the stones and pebbles seemed to glint and shimmer.  I didn't last long before I turned around - I'd spotted a Pain Quotidien on the High Street and lurked there for an hour or so with tea and a tartine.


Mid-sip I was struck with a sense of familiarity.  Just as the hill lead to a beautiful High Street and untamed Common, so did Holloway Road lead to Highgate Village and Hampstead Heath, my favourite stomping grounds of a few months ago way up in N6. London may be a patchwork of many patterns, but look closely and you'll see the same cloth repeated over and over again. Perhaps I'm starting to make sense of this city now - starting to make the connections.  If days of freedom aren't intended for us to make sense of the world we live in, I'm not really sure what they're for.

Days 5, 6 and 7: Alma Mater

"Why, it's a perfect little city.  If you have never been to Durham, go at once.  Take my car.  It's wonderful" - Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island


The East Coast mainline has long been my personal railroad. My first ever journeys to London originated from the wildlands of West Yorkshire, as I gingerly boarded at Wakefield Westgate what was then a tired but proud GNER service. I remember as a teenager, Young Person's Railcard in hand and tiny rucksack on my back, sneaking a glimpse at the ostentatious restaurant car and the opulent (for me, at least) surroundings of the First Class carriages. I'd hurry quickly onto Coach B and realised I'd booked, yet again, a seat in the Quiet Coach, where at least one pariah of silence would look thunderously at my Creative Jukebox Zen and oversized wraparound headphones (this was long before iPods were de rigeur, of course). The journey to London lasted two decidedly uncomfortable hours, and I used to pass that time in expectant agitation until the confused microcosm of capital activity that is King's Cross Station loomed into view.


Fast forward to last Friday, and I had the pleasure of visiting King's Cross again. GNER has now morphed, via the disastrous National Express stint, into the safely anonymous 'East Coast', but the station is still one of the more unpleasant in London. A claustrophobic mix of greasy fast-food, frantic coffee-shop waitresses and unrelenting Tannoy announcements is disorienting enough, but add crowds of tourists efficiently wheeling their suitcases over your toes or sprinting en masse to the immensely unhelpful barriers and your departure becomes a Herculean labour of patience. Whilst the beauty and luxury of St. Pancras lies just moments to the west, East Coast passengers must tolerate the madness of King's Cross as their own gateway to the capital.  Its long overdue facelift cannot come soon enough.


Our train yawned and stretched its way to the North. The track unfurled past luscious green as we curved through Doncaster and York on our way to my university friends' long-awaited wedding.  The approach to Durham is particularly breathtaking, with the city's towering viaduct offering a spectacular view of the famous Cathedral and Castle. In the Friday evening twilight, the city lay twinkling below us, but its vista felt immediately familiar and curiously distant, as if the city was challenging me, three years after I had last visited, to rediscover its treasures and compare the glorious past with this suddenly inconveniently real present.


With the Friday evening drinking crowd in full swing down North Road and around the Market Place, I impatiently waited until Saturday morning to commence my re-exploration, satisfied with merely recounting memories of misspent youth to my long-suffering girlfriend on the walk to the hotel. Even a brief wander, though, made the years drip away, so that the sudden jolting appearance of a Tesco Metro weighed on my heart as much as the comforting immutability of that tiny pub I got drunk in lifted it. As I sat in The Swan and Three Cygnets with the groom and assorted ushers, necking Sammy Smith's cider on a drab bench overlooking the mighty Wear rushing below us, I was a drunken stumble home away from 2006.


As I was providing the music for the wedding, including ten minutes of 'incidental' music I had previously completely forgotten about and had to improvise on the spot, I had little time to get too sentimental, and once we'd scarfed down a fry-up at the Saddlers and strolled across Prebends Bridge (frustratingly enveloped in unsightly scaffolding), the nerves began.  Accustomed as I am to playing in public, wedding music offers little room for escape - the line between enhancing the poignancy of a bride's entrance and rendering it farcically amusing with a false note or chord is remarkably thin.  Fortunately, all went well, and bride and groom tied the knot with no accompanying musical hilarity. 


The wedding itself was beautiful, a real unpretentious, joyous occasion.  The venue was our old college, of which the ninety-two guests had pretty much exclusive use, and stalking the old corridors of the Junior Common Room, the Dining Hall and the Bar I noted how little things really had changed.  It was admittedly difficult not to wallow in nostalgia as I ordered the first round of drinks, but as I pulled out a twenty-pound note from my wallet, when years ago I would have filled the barmaid's hand with change, it dawned on me that we could not have had a better reason to revisit our alma mater. To return thinking that the city would welcome us irrevocably with open arms and envelop us in a motherly embrace would be folly.  We had travelled full circle from that evening at The Swan and Three; now we were celebrating a wedding of close friends with a meal where we had shared innumerable student dinners before, and where the bride and groom had blossomed to the beautiful couple they now are.  Now we were enjoying our appreciation of our past without allowing it to dominate our present, and as the Viaduct vista receded into the Sunday afternoon distance, I left knowing that while university starts us on our path through life, it is well beyond the student bubble where we must travel.

Day 4: Baking

My Masters year at university was one of the best. I loved my course, I loved the grizzled postgraduate life, and most of all, I loved the fact that during the backs-to-the-wall period of furiously typing and re-typing my dissertation, my contact hours with tutors dropped to an average of one a week. I was expected to write ten thousand words about Robert Browning and the dramatic monologue with the least possible intervention from my tutors, and the independence and isolation suited me completely.


Immersing myself in the intricacies of Victorian poetry and Romantic aesthetics for hours at a time would on occasions leave me mentally exhausted, a condition only a healthy dose of Neighbours could cure.  More often that not, however, my thoughts would just turn desperately to distraction and the need to occupy myself with something, anything, that wasn't throwing virtual words onto a virtual page.  In short I needed an excuse to leave my desk, yet keep the creative juices flowing - and hence I discovered baking.


I've always believed that cooking is art, but baking is science. Cooking requires a reliance on subtlety and nuance, where flair and variation is encouraged.  In contract, baking demands a precision that is rarely required in all but the most gastronomic of cooking.  If a recipe says 125g of flour is required, you need electronic scales to accurately weight that amount.  For 100ml of water, you must revisit your Key Stage 3 Science and check that the meniscus of the liquid is perfectly in line with the mark of your measuring jug. It's an inherent paradox that an English and Music student thrives on such mathematical logic and scientific exaction in as trivial a pursuit as making a cake, but baking a perfect cake is to be so much more satisfying than throwing together a stir-fry.


On this particular day of freedom, I was reminiscing about those days (mainly because I return to my alma mater for a wedding this weekend) and had an urge to bake once more.  I'd recently bought my girlfriend a copy of British Baking by the geniuses at Peyton and Byrne, and within was a recipe for one of my favourite childhood obsessions, Chelsea Buns.  A quick trip to Waitrose later and I began.


At first, progress was serene. Butter was rubbed into flour, salt and sugar added, and then dried yeast with liquid carefully mixed in.  With the addition of a single egg, the dough became sticky but it came together pretty much as it should. As per the recipe I was obviously tirelessly following to the letter, I covered the sweet lump and left it to its own devices for an hour, where I would expect it to double in size.


Returning to the kitchen at the prescribed time, the dough remained resolutely its previous size.  Confused, but not perturbed, I rolled out, dotted butter in the centre, and folded in on itself, before rolling once again.  Here the problems started to occur.  If the dough had risen correctly, it would overpower the butter and welcome it into its folds, but as it was flaccid and stunted, the butter just rose to the surface on rolling, cracking the dough and spurting unattractive yellow ooze from the sides. A misguided attempt to let it rise again produced, unsurprisingly, no results. My yeast lay deadened within the dough, and no amount of coaxing, I thought, would enliven it.


There was nothing for it.  I made the sugary, curranty filling, spread out across the rolled-out disaster of dough, gritted my teeth and rolled. What resulted was a horribly misshapen, Cornish pasty-shaped splodge, fruit leaking from all sides.  The dough cast aside all attempts to seal the fruit within, mockingly splitting at every opportunity and pouring sugar all over my sideboard.  In the end, I just put it in the oven, lamenting an entire afternoon wasted.  What came out was ugly, unsightly - and perfectly, wonderfully edible...

My yeast had woken up, in the nick of time. A splodge had turned, rather euphemistically, into a loaf. It just goes to show - art can sometimes, just sometimes, triumph over science.

Day 3: South Bank

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew." - Samuel Johnson


September 2007 was the first time I travelled to London without a return ticket.  Indeed, I didn't even have a single - my Dad drove me from West Yorkshire to North London, with most of my life tucked away neatly in cardboard boxes in the boot.  I remember clearly drinking lukewarm, overly strong tea in the Welcome Break at Watford Gap, still trying to convince myself that despite having never stayed in the capital for more than a night, I was relocating permanently to this ultra-city, this gigantic monument to urbanisation, commerce and tourism. I was convinced that all business in London was conducted by suited-and-booted charlatans who carried on like candidates in The Apprentice, in a cut-throat city that would envelop me in its shadowy folds and crush me to nothing.


I had two weeks from moving into my shared flat in Holloway before I started work, and so I sought to get my bearings as best I could. I remember performing a hilariously incompetent trial commute to The City, disembarking from the 271 at Finsbury Square and traipsing backwards and forwards across the Square Mile in desperate search for my new office, finding only endless sandwich shops and identi-kit glass offices with bored receptionists and shifty security staff clock-watching to stave off the immense boredom of guarding these corporate conglomerates. But I also remember enjoying immensely an inescapable sense of anonymity that I had never found anywhere else, a sense of being one person against the vastness of an unlimited but uncaring city.  And perhaps it was an attempt to recapture that feeling that led me to walk from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road, via the South Bank, yesterday evening.


I timed my trek for early evening, yet again finding myself pushing against the flow of commuters hauling themselves down Victoria Road after ticking off another Wednesday workday. Leaving Waterloo and strolling to Jubilee Gardens, I experienced again that sense of forfeiting your identity. Already the space and the noise rendered my body insignificant, as crowds enjoying the late evening twilight sought to squeeze every last second from the attractions surrounding them. I fought my way beyond the London Eye and headed left, past the National Aquarium and the imposing facade of County Hall, and with every step I found myself distracted by the flash of cameras and smartphones solidifying the South Bank onto memory cards.  As I began to cross Westminster Bridge, gaggles of giggling schoolchildren darted in zig-zags from tourist traps to overpriced Japanese restaurants, and their sighing parents handed over banknotes to the desperate tricksters inviting you to choose under which matchbox the coin was placed.


But passing over the bridge and heading down Parliament Street and Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, I reflected on, in reality, how little different I was from these clueless tourists convinced that all of London's glory lay at the feet of a mime or a magician. I may have paid my council tax to the Greater London Authority for nearly four years, but as I've barely worked here, I found myself in that chilled grey space between tourist and native. London is both familiar and utterly intelligible to me - I might be able to tell you where the best pizza is (here) or my favourite bar for a mojito (here), but for me, living here is like staring at a pitch-black sky with faint pinpricks of light that catch the eye. I need to turn those stars into constellations, those constellations into galaxies - if that's not a noble mission for these days of freedom stretched out before me, I don't know what is.