London Calling

Sept 2006 - Feb 2008 I was in Berlin. I got homesick. I'm back.



I arrived on Monday 4th February and slept pretty much the whole day. I applied for jobs on Tuesday, went to interviews on Wednesday, signed my contract on Friday and started work as a part-time English as a Foreign Language teacher on the following Monday.

Over the first two weeks I ate all the *great* cuisine I'd missed while I was away. Cheap sliced bread, spaghetti hoops on toast, marmite on toast, cheddar cheese on toast, matzos, shortbread, oatcakes, peanut butter on toast, cadbury's cream eggs, weetabix, shreddies, readybrek, grapenuts. I guess many of these things were available somewhere in Berlin, but the German classyness must have rubbed off on me when I was there.

Alongside that I began settling in to the life that's here for me. I live with my brother, who is currently involved in making short films for the internet. Consequently I came home from teaching the other day to find a Scotsman (with an extrodinarily Italian sounding name) in my kitchen editing a three minute gangster short with another guy I know from an (almost) straight to DVD film we'd once worked on together.

By the by we got talking and I found myself taking still photos for an R&B artist, Sheya, the following Saturday.

Still from 'Dream Come True' video by Sheya, photo by N. Christie

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I'm still a bit disorientated to be in London. Things are pretty easy. There are jobs aplenty. I can live indefinitely in a flat no-one is going to evict me from. I suddenly own an awful lot of things; books, CDs, childhood relics. I have a ready made social network of city-slicking Cambridge grads, and Cambridge itself not far away packed with even more old friends.

Before I came home for good, I made a couple of visits to the UK. Firstly to the village I grew up in:

Stubbington, photo by N. Christie

I'd not been back for two years, and had grown somewhat aprehensive of the place I spent my troublesome and bored adolescence. It was surprisingly untraumatic yet still mundane.

And then to London, where I knew I'd be moving too. So I was pretty well prepared by the time I got back. Still, I felt like a time traveller when I visited the i-store and saw all the new technology that seems not to have quite hit Friedrichshain yet. And like a foreigner whenever people mention things that have been in the UK media of late.