London, I hate you

Stories from my entire adult life

(title is a loving foil to Aliona)

This is probably the first of many articles, or at least a couple more. When me and the big ex broke up I made lists and lists of all the stuff I didn’t want to forget about him. Driving in a taxi home today from an epic date with my dapper lover at Quality Chop House in Farringdon I realized my eyes had already begun to do the same with this city. A gummy nostalgia is finally making London lovable to me because finally the idea of leaving is real. Every year, in my six years, I’ve said I’ll leave soon, and then something keeps me and keeps me, but now my grad visa is going to expire in January and I feel absolutely no compellence to fight or fawn for a talent. The wind knocks me out cold in mid May and I sigh in relief that I am not doing winter here a seventh time.

The craziest times in the past few months have been going somewhere that took up months, virtually eons, of my time at one point and now it’s just a place where I have to do something. A couple months ago I needed to pick up someone important from the Stansted Express in Tottenham Hale (Totty H), where i used to live at 18-19, my first two years here. In winter to spring 2021 I ran every day from my student accommodation near the station to somewhere half an hour away and back. I was trying to stop being an alcoholic and get over this Turkish guy who is now a Buddhist (hi I love u). I ran through Walthamstow Wetlands constantly. I listened to Jack Harlow while running through the wetlands at around 5pm every day, in my mom’s old racerback sports bras and bike shorts I had stolen from a place in Totty H’s classic Zone 3 “retail park”. When I was at Totty H in March I was early so I walked against the wind from the station and quite a bit through the park, all the way up to the edge of one of its reservoirs. The sheen of the water hit me as my bitter coffee spilled onto my thumb despite its lid. I looked at it for a second and then turned around and walked back.

I was thinking about my big ex’s (ex) flat in Camden on the edge of the canal, on a new build distinguished by its tinted aquamarine floor-to-ceiling windows. The two chairs on his balcony are the stars of my best poem yet, which I wrote in 2023 when I was so preoccupied with him that my coursework became about the way he was teaching me to cook. At night, before he closed the curtains, we would watch people pass by on the other side of the water, chatting or screaming or biking home in the dark sometimes even. I liked that flat a lot when it was empty. Over winter break 2023-4, when he and his flatmate both were in Hong Kong between UCL terms, I went there to clean up the house and take some packages in. The light streamed in blue and damp in some way. I loved cleaning his electric stovetop with a wet Clorox and it beeping because I had forgotten to turn its sensors off before doing so. I slept there that night. Other times when I was there alone I loved putting away his laundry. He didn’t get the way I folded his socks. I liked learning how he liked things organized in the dishwasher. For a long time I never turned the dishwasher on myself because I knew he would come home and reorganize something before turning it on.

I was also thinking about how I’ve been to nearly every major university in the city for one reason or another. A lot of them have been for shoots with people I wouldn’t recognize in the street or maybe even if they came up to me. One of my biggest flâneuse tactics in 2021-22 was UAL Creatives. UAL Creatives might not exist anymore — I think it’s a much more serious endeavor now, like some studio or something — but it was basically an Instagram page where any UAL student or otherwise could post a request for a model or MUA or videographer or whatever. The request would be posted in blocky white create mode italics on a black screen and you would be tagged. This is how I ended up in LCF sharing (physically) a giant black cone costume with a girl who was a costume designer for Bridgerton, and also how I ended up in Westminster’s Harrow campus modeling for some jewelry brand that was taking advantage of required course internships.

Another flâneuse tactic in 23-24, heavy in spring 23, was the acquiring of antique furniture for my flat solely through Facebook Marketplace. I’m talking a pink 70s filter coffee machine, an handcrafted yellow cushioned chaise a guy living somewhere DLR ends brought over from his mamma in Italy, sun king chairs I would sit on the tube in to get back home, reading my Deleuzeslop media theory. One of the most stygian yet thrilling memories of the big ex: standing outside a three-floor mansion near Shepherd’s Bush at midnight, a gargantuan solid mahogany Edwardian wardrobe in pieces on the street with no way to get it home, and him pausing his pacing to look me in dead in the eyes, smirking, his hands in his big red puffer’s pockets. He says, “This is how you know I really love you”.

Other maps of London: the small plates restaurants lover D has taken me to especially in fall 25, the array of Airbnbs and quasi-studios I’ve been to in Zones 3, 4 when I was a nude and boudoir model for various male photographers I found on the ancient, Talmudically sexual Model Mayhem that always seem to have the same brown couch, the various routes me and bestie V have walked through and around the blessed parts of Northwest on what always seems to be sunny days, the rotation of the few Leicester Sq/Oxford Circus eateries that are open past 1am, notably rife for running into celebs, when me and colleagues, many with visas on a sliding scale of dubiousness, would get off work from the Nobu rip off in Mayfair I worked at in fall 2022-spring 2023.

The “male photographer” couch

I love London Fields when it’s sunny and Bloomsbury anytime. Everything else I hate. Most of all I hate the train stations, except St. Pancras. One time my lover had a sex dream about its exterior, which I find odd, because I would have a nightly emission much easier to its interior. I hate most “greasy spoons”, I hate pubs beyond belief, I hate the absurd noise level of the tube train grinding on its tracks, I hate the “high streets”, I hate the football so much, so much. I hate the bay windows on Victorian houses. I hate the supermarkets, I hate the voice that talks to you in the Tesco checkout when you realize you’ve forgotten your CLUBCAHD. I guess I hate all of it but I like what it makes you do. I like that it makes you into a scourer, a curator, a post-apocalypse emissary looking for that ghastly vestige of love and life. I find that London is fun when you act like you’re in Mad Max and you’re just moving between blessed tolerable places, and while the movement between them exposes you to borderline intolerable scenery, you look really cool because you have a very protective jacket and you are likely in sunglasses. I haven’t seen Mad Max actually but that’s what I imagine it’s like. My best advice about London is to wear sunglasses even when it’s not sunny, or even light outside anymore.

Here’s some other advice about London I guess. Utilize hotel lobbies, especially those open late, because they often have free wifi, chargers, and might let you sit without buying anything. If you can help it, go to the Asian/Eastern European/Turkish/Nigerian/etc supermarkets for food shops instead of TESCOEH. A microwaveable curry from Muji is the same price as a stupid meal deal, provided you’ve been smart and invested in a rice cooker, which you should do. Also, many coffee shops have a very cheap soup of the day that comes with bread. Always carry: Advil, allergy meds, tampons, tissues, perfume sample that is respectable, delightful beverage of some cheap or homemade sort, lighter, pen. Umbrella if you know how to not lose them (I don’t). These are all for yourself but also for other people. In my case I also usually carry a toothbrush but that’s because I’m thrilled by maximizing mobility and I don’t actually like acting like I have a homebase life to return to. I know I will like it here so much more when I’m just here to see my friends, and God, all of it, all of it, just won’t be my professional problem.

I don’t know where I want to be my professional problem next. I think I will put my furniture in storage and have my professional problem contained to within my phone, and move around the world like a sexy bird.

Last Saturday I had an hour-long break from one of my last shifts at my waitressing job at 4pm and I walked to Soho Square to read Lauren Fournier and annotate it with my pink pen that has a cat grip on it. It was sunny and warm for once and everyone was cooped up on one little corner of the park where the sun hit, ravenous. As it got later, the sun space on the grass expanded and more and more groups of people sat down. I liked that.