adventures in housing, part four

[previously in this series: spurious reasons for keeping a deposit, sleeping on floors and a possible Murder House]

At this point, I'd been homeless for nearly a month and I'd exhausted all my offers of longer-term crash space in London. I would spend one night in a cheap hotel, the next on a friend's sofa, the next on my dance teachers' floor, the next on the floor of someone I barely knew at all. At the weekend I decamped to my little brother's place (oh, the 23-year-old with his mortgage and his spare room and his parking space and his two bathrooms in a two-bedroom flat). I was carrying my massive suitcase into work and back on the tube during rush hour every day. I was gradually taking over more and more cabinets at work to lock away things I wasn't going to need that night and lighten my load slightly. Most mornings I would wake up with no idea where I'd be sleeping that night. Nobody was responding to my messages online. The potential flatmates I'd found disappeared. All my muscles hurt, sleep had long since stopped being restful, and any time someone made a well-meaning joke about my situation I almost burst into tears. I needed a break. Just a few nights where I didn't have to do this.

It occurred to me that I could check into a guest house for a few days. It would be cheaper than a hotel, I could still have a room to myself, and I could get a bit of rest. I found somewhere a little way out and booked myself in for the best part of a week.
I left my brother's place on Sunday afternoon, got the train back to London, went dancing (because priorities) and trekked out to the further reaches of East London to get to the guest house, which was labelled as such by an almost imperceptible sign next to the door. There was no doorbell. I knocked, and a few minutes later a woman answered.

"Hi," I said. "I'm booked in for four nights."
"Oh." She laughed. "I don't work here. I'm staying here. You need to phone this guy's mobile and he comes round and gives you the keys."
"Um. OK then."
"Yeah, I know. I don't understand it either."

I made the call, and a man showed up with the keys. He showed me where the bathroom was, gave me the WiFi password, and told me I was free to make use of the kitchen. He showed me my room, which was huge and warm and nicely decorated. The internet worked. I dropped everything in a heap on the floor, collapsed into bed and slept for ten hours straight.

The next morning, I was woken up by one of the other residents knocking on my door. "Hi," she said, "I'm really sorry about this, but these guys from the electric company have shown up and I can't hang around to deal with them, I'm really late as it is. Would you mind?"
"Sure," I said and came out of my room.

On the doorstep were two men, one of them holding a search warrant. I ordered the small alarm going off in the back of my mind to shut up, everything was fine, there was no way that everything wasn't fine.

"We have a warrant to come in and have a look at your meter," said the man with the warrant. "We cut the electric to this property due to non-payment of bills, and we have reason to believe that it's now being accessed illegally. This your place?"
"No, I'm just renting a room for a few nights."
He gave me the most sceptical look I've ever seen in my entire life. "Renting a room."
"It's a guest house."
"It's not licensed to be a guest house."
Oh, for fuck's sake. "I didn't check. I just booked a room on the internet."
"Hmmm."

I let the other man, the engineer, into the house to look at the meter, while I stood on the doorstep trying to convince the first guy I wasn't running a shady guest house that was at least three types of illegal and lying brazenly about it to his face. After offers to show multiple forms of ID, booking confirmations, the original online listing, and the contact information of the people who actually were running a shady operation, he decided to trust me. He took the phone numbers I offered and was about to make a call when the engineer came up out of the basement where the meter was. He looked ever so slightly shaken.

"Nothing we can do," he said to the first guy. "I am not touching that."
"What is it?"
"They've rigged it to get free electric like we thought, but the way they've done it... there's exposed wires everywhere, it looks like it might blow up any minute. I'm not touching it, it's not safe." He cast a glance at me.
"She doesn't live here," said the guy with the warrant.
"Get out," said the engineer. "I'm not kidding. That thing's a death trap."
As the engineer pulled out a phone to call his boss, the guy with the warrant took me to one side. "You need somewhere else to go. That guy's a qualified engineer, he's been doing the job ten years. If he won't touch it, it's dangerous. Legitimately this place might explode. You can't stay here, it's not safe."
Oh, for FUCK'S sake. "I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Find somewhere," he snapped.

They left, and I called the owners, wondering what on earth I could have done to invite this level of exhausting over-the-top stupidity into my life. "Hi, I'm renting a room from you at the moment. Um. The electric company showed up and said you're not a licensed guest house and you're accessing your electric illegally and that the house might explode."
"Oh," she said.
"So, obviously, I can't stay here."
"Why not?"
"Because the people who know about electricity said the house was going to explode?"
"Oh, that." She laughed. "No, it's fine."
"No, it's not fine. They said the house was going to explode!"
"No, it's fine."
"Look, I can't stay here. I've been told it's not safe."
"You can leave if you want to, but the place is fine, so you won't get a refund."
"You can't rent an exploding guest house!"
"It's not going to explode. No refunds."

I phoned the electric company.
"Hi. One of your engineers just came by the place I'm staying and said it was about to explode. Can I get that in writing so I can get a refund?"
"Uh... what?"
"Can you provide a written statement saying that this place is about to explode?"
"...I'm going to be honest, I've never been asked this question before. Can I get someone to call you back?"

I phoned my manager.
"Hi. So an engineer just showed up at the place I'm staying and said it might be about to explode and now I need to find somewhere else to live and am possibly having a mild panic attack."
I wish I could have seen his expression. I bet he would have beaten the guy with the warrant for Most Sceptical Look Ever on a Human Face. "So you're not coming in then."
"I would be of very little use, unless you need someone to sit under a desk and cry for five hours."
He sighed. "Fine."

I phoned my mother.
"Hi, Mum. This guest house is illegal and the engineer said it was going to explode and the people won't give me my money back and I don't know what to do."
"WHAT."
"What do I do?"
"YOU GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW WE WILL GET YOU A HOTEL BUT YOU NEED TO LEAVE RIGHT THIS SECOND YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO GET BLOWN UP."
"...okay."

My parents paid for two nights at a hotel, and my aching muscles gave me a talking-to. The chances of finding anywhere to stay in London within the next few days are slim to none, they told me, and you clearly, clearly cannot do this anymore. Stop it. My friends had been offering me their spare room for ages, but I'd kept turning it down because it was in Southend (and honestly, who lives in Southend? I know you're reading this, you're both ridiculous). I didn't want to have to commute into London every day, and I didn't want to be so far away from my social life, but I couldn't prioritise that anymore. The longer commute had to be better than lugging all of my things up and down escalators twice a day. A bed had to be better than a floor. Comfort and security had to be better than blindly hoping for somewhere to stay in zone 2. Staying with people I knew and liked and who probably weren't going to hate me after two weeks had to be worth leaving a few dances earlier than I'd have liked.

I took them up on their offer, and two days later my suitcase and I left London.

[in part five: the joys of commuting and a possible actual place to live]

new

So NaNoWriMo didn't work. I'm not sure why. I got just about to my word count on the first day, skipped the second day, wrote 4,000 words on day three, and then got stuck. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to say. I didn't have a character I felt connected to, I didn't have a plot point I wanted to get to, I didn't have a setting I wanted to describe, I didn't even have a snarky conversation that amused me enough to write down (I pretty much always have snarky conversations. Whatever else my story might be about, you can always count on snarky conversations at completely inappropriate moments). I gave up trying ages ago, but I wasn't going to come back here until November was over because blogging in November rather than writing a novel would be an admission of... something. I have no idea how my brain works. But I've decided to work on the basis that writing stuff gets me closer to being a writer than sitting around thinking about how I can't write a novel.

I've been thinking for a little while that I need something new to learn. I've stagnated. The things that were new to me aren't new anymore, they're just an accepted part of my life. Which is great, I love these things. But the highest points of my adult life have come when I'm discovering a passion I didn't know I had. It makes me happier, it makes me braver, it makes me friendlier, and because of that other good things start happening to me at the same time.

The first time this happened to me was with the camera. I'd hated cameras throughout my entire childhood and would run away and cry when I saw one. I got used to taking silly photos of my friends in the pub after I left school, but I couldn't understand why anyone would bother taking photos of things. It just seemed like a waste of film. (Yep, film.) I hung on to my crap film camera way after most people had switched to digital. I even tracked down another crap film camera after my original one broke, and that was not an easy thing to do in 2007. I'd taken maybe two rolls of film with it before I acknowledged that no, this really was a crap camera and all the photos looked terrible and maybe I should admit defeat and look into this digital nonsense.

I bought a digital camera and took it to the zoo. After about 20 minutes photographing seals and being increasingly thrilled and delighted with what was happening, I decided my new camera was the best thing ever and started carting it round with me everywhere. Everything was a photo opportunity and I loved it. I photographed everything in sight for about eight months, but I don't remember any photos I took until this one:


It's nothing much. But at the time, I genuinely thought this was the most impressive fucking thing I'd ever done in my life. It's not just a photo of a thing I saw, there's forethought and viewpoint and some measure of artistic fucking merit in that thing. I got myself a Flickr account for the express purpose of putting that picture on the internet, and though I've deleted a fair few of my older photos, that one is there for good. First photo on Flickr. It means something to me.

I started researching. For the next year or so, the internet was composed of three things: photography tutorials and advice; other people's photography; and diary sites where I could blither on about photography and how amazing it was. I quickly came up against the limits of my camera, which was on the fancy end of point-and-shoot, and when my parents offered me a graduation present I asked for a DSLR. My mother asked if I was sure I wouldn't prefer a piano (an instrument I'd had one lesson on and hadn't touched since), but they gave me what I asked for.

I got my D60 in June 2008 and it's probably still my favourite thing that I own. We still go on walkabouts together, and my photos get better as I sharpen my understanding of my camera and its relationship to the world. Over the last six and a half years, my D60 and I have taken photos of friends, of family, of fireworks, of woodlands, of weddings, christenings and graduations, of Rome and Venice and Prague and Cancun and Las Vegas and New York, of beaches and zoos and cemeteries and mountaintops and of me doing stupid things in any or all of these places. My love of photography is still one of the most important things in my life.

But it's not new anymore. I don't have the rush that I got when I first started learning photography (or dance, or practical employment law). Coming to a new skill with zero background knowledge means that literally everything there is to know about that thing is sitting there waiting and I try to take in as much of it at once because of course I do. Then once I have very basic knowledge I start discovering all the other interconnected spheres and I start studying fashion photography (or spending hours on end amassing an enormous collection of blues music, or reading all the unnecessary case law I can get my hands on). I don't have time for anxiety or to second-guess myself, because I need every spare brain cell to learn as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. But the point comes where I basically know how it works, and now I have to get good at it. And that doesn't feel like a world full of barely-tapped possibilities; it's a slog. An enjoyable slog, but still a slog. Progress slows down to the point where I can't see it for myself anymore, and I start to see my own intrinsic limitations - things which I could work on, but probably never get over to the degree I'd like. I have no intention of abandoning the things I've learned at the point where it gets difficult, but I miss the newness. And I feel that if anything's going to pull me out of a stagnant patch, it's the newness that'll do it.

So now I need something new, completely new, to learn. I'm taking suggestions.