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March 25, 2006
Magical Mystery Tour
Plan for the day: transfer my latest website from my test site to its own domain. I just received an email to say the servers are down for 6 – 8 hours. Next plan: curl up with a book. Maybe update this site.
I’ve been back in London now for 2 ½ weeks. I was back in Guatemala for 8 months. Returning to London after that length of time is actually a rather fuzzy concept when chatting with a pissed friend, or having a phone interview at 4am for a job you never took particularly seriously when you applied for it. Eight months in one town in Guatemala may be enough to make someone very strongly want to be elsewhere, but it’s not till the plane journey that you realise you just meant a holiday, not an all-out relocation.
So I’m back. New job, new part of London, 5 new housemates, except for the minor details that I’m just ‘staying’ here. The friend I’m supposedly staying with is rarely home, which means that neither am I – either meeting up with friends or out on yet another Very Long Walk.
I had always had vague fuzzy ideas of returning to London at some point – specifically to see friends and check up on my old flat (or rather, which of my belongings my ex-flatmates helped themselves to, and check up on the state of my poor abandoned garden) – but I had joked to myself that I’d only do that once I’d been in Guatemala long enough that London would seem very very strange.
Eight months seems to have achieved that. My first day – travelling from Gatwick to Heathrow by bus, then from Heathrow to here by taxi – I couldn’t even look out of the window, too bewildered by the motorway, the landscape (it took me most of an hour to realise that it’s technically still winter – as far as the foliage is concerned), too alarmed by the buildings.
I didn’t go outside again till the next day; still, a houseful of people all drinking tea, drinkable tap water, central heating and being able to put toilet paper in the toilet again were enough to keep the bewilderment going.
Oddly, speaking English all the time has had the effect that a lot of the time, I can barely speak it at all. Though I spoke English most of the time back home – most of the time when I worked at the magazine, and with my mother – whenever I went out, whether in a bar, shop or elsewhere, or answered the phone, it’d always be in Spanish. For now, I’m substituting that with broken English, or a very strong accent. When I’m not as startled, I seem to talk with a strong Irish accent. It’s good that I like confusing people.
Talking of confusing people, one of the highlights of being back has been turning up unannounced on a couple of friends, who I’d deliberately not mentioned anything to as I was getting ready to leave, even pretending I was still in Guatemala during my first few days here. Maybe the response would have been better if both of them had been less English; I texted one of them on Friday morning to say ‘Fancy going to the pub tonight?’; as I knew that Julian always leaves work at 5.15pm, I waited outside his office for him. That, and a long session at the Rose & Crown with Matt and Martin made me a whole lot happier to be back.
Given how much I loathed sharing my flat, I’m surprised that I’m enjoying sharing with 5 people (even if I’m thoroughly insecure enough about my status here to ensure nothing of mine is left out on display, apart from my laptop and a bottle of water) – there are three guys (all geeks) and two women, or rather one and a half (the other one is an airline stewardess; she’s away for three days at a time, and is currently on holiday in Thailand). Max (South African with some Italian chucked in) and Trevor (Zimbabwean) often insult each other in South African slang or whatever it is; Andy (female, Argentinian/Canadian via Dorset) is reliably the only one of us who will sit in the living room without a laptop on her lap. Last Saturday, two of the guys were in here working, as was I; when she came in and saw us all sat here with laptops, she was horrified; I cheerfully called out, ‘There’s space for one more laptop.’ She shuddered and walked off.
There’s some parkland on the other side of this street, which leads to the Grand Union Canal Path and the Thames Path; in five years of living in a foul area, I’d forgotten what it was like to go for long walks, much less somewhere which seems so rural. It’s also a much more scenic route to Brentford, which is the only other place I’ve walked to so far in this area. (Ealing Broadway was the next plan, but I couldn’t find any reasons for actually wanting to go there).
Work…. For now, don’t ask me about work. I suppose there were three reasons for taking the job (not necessarily in this order): a) they adored me and all but offered me the job without even meeting me; b) it’s about a block from where I worked on the Project, so I’m back within spitting distance of the Project, the Rose & Crown, Eat and my old gym; c) I could get the skillset I need to be more desirable when jobhunting. (The pay is terrible).
It’s also a permanent job. If you overlook the dance job back in ’01, it’s my first actual Permanent Job. Which means three weeks of induction. Perhaps I am not meant to have a brain. Three weeks of sitting around waiting for the next slot when someone shows me something I’ve already picked up by staring at my colleague’s screen. Also three weeks of slots on the induction schedule being missed. Thankfully I’ve been backlogged enough on the latest website that I’ve just been working on that during the day, or at least as much as I can without the passwords for the control panels or FTP access.
So, back to that point about bumping up my skillset. Dan, the ‘development boss’ stormed out of a meeting on Wednesday, and hasn’t been heard of since. Admittedly, he’s meant to be in Greece for a long weekend, but that doesn’t explain his silence / absence on Wednesday and Thursday. If he returns on Tuesday, all is rosy; if he doesn’t, it probably won’t be a job worth my staying in. Until then, my boss adores me; in a week and a half, I’ve not had a single cigarette without him.
So I’m back in London, this time with very wide eyes – and broken English. To an extent, I’m grateful to be in London and not the States: not only is it relatively familiar here, but I suspect I couldn’t get away with this level of culture shock in the States (nor would anybody understand me when I speak). For now, though, I’m not someone who’s lived here for most of my life, I’m someone who’s just arrived from a bloody Third World Country – either I get over it or I go back.
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