Backpack Storybook

Labels: UK

London, United Kingdom - Backpack Storybook is now coming to you live from Earlsfield, a tidy suburb in London’s south west.

This area is about as typically English as it gets. Rows of Victorian terrace houses give the suburb a homely character. A busy high street has a decent selection of pubs, off licenses and Asian food stores. It’s reasonably close to a train line and two tube stations.

Home is a very agreeable existence. I share it with three professionals. We have wireless broadband installed. I shower each morning in a renovated bathroom with a power shower. I cook each evening on a marvellous gas range built into a groovy kitchen island bench.

But Earlsfield has some funny English quirks. Across the road from us is a great expanse of playing fields and several tennis courts. However, it is all fenced off from the community and apparently you need to be a fully paid up member of the sports club to use them.

Each evening I'm taunted by the shrieks of delight from horsey-faced, knobby-kneed middle class English kids as they complete their private tennis lessons. What I'd give for an hour on one of those well maintained courts.

Further along our road is a block of of land divided into individual vegetable gardens, each with a little potting shed. I'd love to get my hands on some arable land to grow herbs this summer. I wonder if anyone would like to sub-let to me?

Labels: UK

London, United Kingdom - I joined my local gym recently. It's part of my strategy not to turn into a fat, pasty white slug like the other Aussies here in London seem to have done.

A signature on a form and a promise by the gym to deduct money from my account each month was all it took before I was free to use their lap pool.

I should say here that my experience of lap swimming in Australia is of crystal blue 50 metre Olympic size swimming pools. Eight lanes of pure swimming clock work. The women sleek and lithe as seals in their one piece outfits. The men churning the water with their powerful strokes.

In contrast, there are just four 50 metre pools in the whole of England and just two in London.

The Tooting Leisure Centre is not home to one of them. Instead, it has an odd-shaped 33 metre pool with three wider than usual swimming lanes.

The right hand lane was the 'slow' lap lane. In there a variety of very white, whale-shaped people did a fair impression of nearly drowning as they crawled up and down the lane. I gave that one a miss.

The left hand lane was reserved for public swimming. A couple of unathletic teenagers made their way up and down the pool by clinging onto the side the whole way.

I thought the 'fast' lane in the middle would be for me. But on closer inspection, it seemed little better than the slow lane. One man looked to be paralysed from the waist down as he dragged himself along in a cumbersome freestyle. Another was so slow at freestyle, as I found out when I jumped in, I overtook him while doing a very leisurely breastroke.

Two eagle-eyed lifeguards sat on chairs at each end of the pool. At first I thought it was an overkill, but I soon realised it was a very real possibility someone would drown during the evening.

Who knows, with this sort of clientele, perhaps someone already had?

Labels: UK

London, United Kingdom - I've joined the black-clad masses in London and become a worker ant.

Each morning I stamp off to the train station with the other workers. Dressed in a black suit and black coat, black shoes and black gloves. The uniform of the commuter.

I have an MP3 player in my ears and a thousand yard stare on my face. All the better to avoid interaction with anyone else on the journey.

When I get to the platform I look left and right and try to pick which side is less crowded. When the train arrives I move in front of the doors like the rest, making it almost impossible for anyone inside to alight. But at least I'll get on.

I stand in the crush near the doors while the aisle standing room remains uncrowded. Nobody asks the aisle dwellers to move down, we just press tighter against the people near the doors as more step into the train.

At Waterloo station everyone alights and sprint-walks through the cavernous station. No one sticks to the left. Or even a consistent path. I'm constantly dive bombed by kamikaze workers cutting across from the left and right. I try to pick a bloke with big shoulders to walk behind and let him clear a path in the madness.

The office, despite being just a few minutes from the centre of London, is well and truly in a rust belt suburb. Ominous projects - those failed social housing experiments of the 60s and 70s - guard the entrance to the main street. If you're not dysfunctional when you move into one of those flats, I reckon you soon would be after a week or two. I'd lose my mind just based on the depressing architecture of it all.

But its good for me to get out of my London comfort zone. Until last week I inhabited a narrow strip between the pleasant, cafe-lined residential street I'm living in and the city. I wondered if all Londoners lived in charmingly renovated Victorian terraces, parked their Porches and VWs out the front, worked in the city and ate out every lunch time.

Now I know they don't. Some live here where the main street is lined with off licenses, charity shops and fast food stores. Fried chicken is apparently a big hit among the large West Indian population.

So are the elaborate hairstyles. The women walk down the high street with braided, brightly coloured hair frozen into intricate patterns piled on their heads. Like a sticky toffee or an icecream cake - all pink and brown and caramel colours.

The males here aren't quite as colourful. Hoods up and pants way down, they shuffle and pimp-roll down the footpath challenging grandmas and kids to get out of their way.

Come the early evening and they lose their menace among the sheer mass of the people in black. Commuters file out of their offices on the dot of 5pm and swamp the footpaths as they march towards the bus stops and train stations, sweeping everything in its path along with it.

Labels: UK

London, United Kingdom - After only three weeks I'm already realising living in London is not something you can do on a whim.

I might be trying to keep the free spirited traveller groove going from Asia, but this city forces you to bend to its staid, bureaucratic will.

Just the basics of getting a bank account, job, room in a sharehouse and access to basic medical services is a nightmare of paperwork.

A bank account requires a trip through a circular hell. The bank wants to see a utilities bill for proof of address. You can't supply that because you don't have a home until you get a bank account. You can get a job but they can't pay you until you get an account. And round and round it goes.

In an unfamiliar city you'd think that using commission-hungry recruiters to find a job for you would be the way to go. But it means endless rounds of meetings with them as they "get to know you".

Then the phone calls start as they ask permission to send your CV to companies followed by another round of interviews with employers. Or as they say in London, "informal chats". With three strangers behind an imposing desk. All taking notes.

We've just started the hunt for accommodation. Thankfully we've been spared the weeks of trekking out to over priced shitboxes whose bathrooms are pulsing with mould and to be interviewed by potential flatmates who have yet to master basic domestic skills such as Taking Out the Rubbish Before Maggots Breed or Doing The Dishes When the Stack Reaches the Ceiling.

Spared because we found a room at the second sharehouse we looked at. New kitchen, gas range, wireless internet, backyard, barbecue, done.

Now the real hassle begins. Dealing with real estate agents who see you as total scum clogging up their office while they make enormous profits on the booming London real estate market.

Labels: UK

London, United Kingdom - The Backpack Storybook team’s been busy sight seeing in our first three weeks in-country. Here’s the highlights:

Buckingham Palace
My first “I can’t believe I’m in London” moment. A place that previously only existed in text books or on TV and there I am standing in front of it, wondering if the Queen’s at home. After the elaborate wats and temples of south east Asia Buckingham Palace is a little staid and conservative with its large gates and acres of paved or gravel-lined grounds. Still, the guards and their slightly disconcerting wind-up toy-like goose-stepping is a sight to behold.

Trafalgar Square
Up the road and through the arch from the palace and we come across the bustling Trafalgar Square. Dozens of ubiquitous red double decker buses and black cabs shuttle around the ring road presided over by Lord Nelson on his sky-high column. At ground level large, black marble lions guard the square. We sit on the steps amongst the pigeons in the weak winter sun and catch a glimpse of Big Ben through the buildings, glinting in the sunlight.

St Paul’s Cathedral
I’m exiting Manson House tube station on the way to an interview and bang! I spot an enormous dome rising above the uniform concrete office blocks. It’s huge and ornate at the same time. Standing in its shadow I find it hard to pull myself away from it to get to my interview on time.

Tate Modern
From St Paul’s a long walkway leads through the office buildings to the Millennium Bridge, over the Thames and to the Tate Modern. This gallery of modern art inhabits an old power station. It’s brown brick slab-sides seem at odds with the rest of the landscape. When we visit on a weekend its empty. The Unilever ‘art’ installation featuring steel slides, some as high as five stories, is ours for the taking. We come back on a weekend and its packed to the rafters. We check out some famous pop art, including Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe piece and the Campbell’s Soup box.

National Gallery
Free entry, a couple of sets of stairs into the basement and I’m looking at original Monets, Cezannes and Van Goughs. It all seems to easy. Like I’m an imposter. People pay thousands of dollars to come to this city for their vacation and see sights like this. And I’ve wandered in off the street because I have an hour to kill. Past the rooms filled with paintings of elaborately staged biblical scenes I find my favourite. A Da Vinci. What that man can’t do with light and form is not worth painting. Amazing.

Westminster
A stroll in the late arvo sun along the Thames takes us past the London Eye and the Globe Theatre up to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben is smaller than I imagined, although it’s still huge. Yet the detail and intricacies in the tower and clock are amazing. I could have stood for hours. The concrete barriers and machine gun-toting police surrounding Parliament can’t dampen my enthusiasm for what is an elaborate, gothic palace. I wonder if the architects who designed this hall over the centuries ever thought the threat would come from within Britain? Across the road is Westminster Abbey, a little less impressive after craning my neck at Parliament and Big Ben but still outrageously old.

Monopoloy
I bump into them without trying. Old Kent Road. Whitechapel. My bank is at Pall Mall and I can’t help stifle a laugh when they send me down there to sign a form. The three ‘green’ streets: Bond, Regent and Oxford. Park Lane. But no sign yet of the purple or brown streets. Must be in the north or east of London where I’ve yet to venture?

Labels: UK