Makes the World Go Round

It is raining, rather hard right now, in my part of London.

I really wanted to start this post out with a song from Cabaret, but alas the lovely Alan Cumming version that I've had going through my head the last 48 hours or so is not to be found in good quality on YouTube.

When I get really stressed out about things I can't help, I break out in a rash on my hands and feet. Yesterday morning that rash started peeling, so there's that.

I'm doing complicated things with money these days. It's hard on me to realize that even though my income this year will be, on paper, something like three times my normal annual working salary, I've earned a little less than a tenth of it (and I automatically owe half of that tenth back in taxes because I earned it as a 1099 contractor). It's maybe a bit more if you count the two months of unemployment I was eligible for before London. Directly before leaving, I paid half my savings to do one thing, and then another fifth of the remaining savings in taxes. And hopefully by Thursday (tomorrow) I will have made it all back, plus enough to make me feel better about all of it.

London is an Expensive City(tm). And living cheek by jowl to Belgravia, I realize that even working, even at my top income, in the grand scheme of things I am distinctly middle class. Maybe even lower-middle. And the financial institutions have made that quite clear.

I'm trying to take a class at a lovely historical research group. Because they are small, they have a very limited array of ways to accept payment. Their card processor has irreconcilable differences with each and every credit and debit card I've tried. And my small credit union doesn't do international wire transfers, and the external vendor they've "partnered" with only does person-to-person transfers, so even attempting to wire the funds direct from my bank was canceled. Also, I cannot get a bank account here because I'm not a permanent resident, nor can I prove that I reside here - since this is a corporate rental flat, none of the utility bills are in my name, and because none of my financial institutions can transfer my account to the UK, I can't even get them to send me anything at this address. Amex very kindly offered to convert my card to a UK card, which sounded great until the part where they expected me to pay it off each month from my UK bank account, which I can't get. That's okay they said, because you can pay by wire transfer. WRONG. Can't do international wire transfers to a business.

There are a few large commercial banks that allow you to open an account as a non-resident. But because I'm on a tourist visa and thus unemployed, I can't prove my income. And because the complicated thing I'm doing with money hasn't completed yet, I haven't got the large-quantity-of-cash they'd want me to sink into their bank otherwise. The last ditch effort might be to open a joint account through one of these (reputedly predatory) financial institutions with Mike, but the question remains if they'll let me actually use the account since we're not legally recognized as partners.

The end result here is that every time I buy something I have to deal with the surprise of the till-worker, and I have to carry a pen because nobody is used to swipe-and-sign cards here. It also means that unless I can visit enough ATMs in a long enough period to *not* trigger fraud alerts, I cannot seem to find any way to transfer money to take the class that I want.  And also, because I can't prove residency, I can't even get a library card at the local (apparently quite nice) library.

The other result is that I feel like a non-person. I feel like an accessory to a masculine lifestyle, like a housewife - the thing I was terrified of - and I feel helpless and trapped by my inability to manage my own money through no fault of my own.

Relying on Mike isn't the worst thing in the world, but it feels like giving up so much of my independence, even though I know it's not. It feels like making someone hold the straw for you while you drink. It feels like failure.

Seeking Warmth

I always pride myself in being prepared. England has defeated me.

Wait, let me back up here for a moment.

Yesterday, I bought three different jackets.  This is on top of the hoodie I brought, the trenchcoat, and my 1970s tux jacket that I tend to wear as a blazer. I bought three jackets because England has Weather, and as a native Californian, I am unaccustomed to Weather.  Also in my defense the weather absolutely faked me out: it started raining in California as I left, and when I got to London it felt like warm, mild California weather for the first few days. So, I thought, this will be fine.  Then the weather changed, and we had bitingly cold wind which pierced through everything I had, regardless of how many (4!) layers I threw on.

So I spent most of yesterday going around to shops looking for the quickly-diminishing Warm Clothes. I now have three cardigans that I can put on over things. And I have a packable (backpacking friendly!) puffy down jacket. And a £8 Primark rain shell covered in a touristy print of London landmarks... and a navy blue leather moto style jacket.

That last one cost more than I expected (but a fraction of what it was worth), looks fabulous on me, and required a second trip by Underground, a walk from Hoxton to Oxford Circus, and a serious wrangle with an over-enthusiastic stock clerk who started to put the day-hold items back a full two hours before he should've.  Seriously, after I put it on "thinking about it" hold, then raced back to get it, it was gone. It wasn't on the racks, and it wasn't on the hold pile, and it look a very nice cashier who recalled where it'd gone to retrieve it. Thank. God. The lady behind me fell afoul of the same issue, but made at least a fifteen minute tirade of it to the store manager; I was just happy enough to get my awesome jacket and get the heck out.

And then today dawned sunny and mild again, and I sort of wonder if I'm going to have a reason to use any of these jackets for a bit.  Well, no, that's not true - I'm wearing the blue today. :P

And then it was a week

Ha, it's Tuesday night. I've been here a week and I haven't blogged again. My apologies.

I've been busy, and I've fallen into a sort of routine. Mike wakes up in the morning and goes to work, I have a muffin and tea and read email and putz on the internet. And by putz I mostly mean "order things that we need for the apartment" because as much as this is a beautiful example of modern streamlined Euro-style living, it's also missing a lot of things. Like anywhere to put things in the shower. Mixing bowls. Washcloths (face-cloths). Any number of other small, piddling-but-really-irritating things that I already have back in California but that I now need to buy again.

After breakfast, I shower, and go wander the Town. There's a lot to wander.

It's strange because being an Anglophile for so long, so much of London has lived as a pile of unsorted mosaic tiles of places and things strewn helter skelter in my mind. I had the realization that we live nearish to Buckingham Palace, which is next to St. James's Park, which means St. James's Court, which is the place that Mr. Hurst in Pride and Prejudice very patronizingly offers to introduce the superior Darcy sisters into. Or that the perfumery I visited today - the one that I'd been ordering samples from back when I was graduating-from-being-into Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs all those years ago - is in Covent Garden, which is where the brothels mentioned in Fanny Hill and City of Vice were located, and which is practically on Bow Street of Bow Street Runners fame, and I in fact did pass the Magistrate's Hall on the way in.

The little tiles fall into place like colored shapes on a child's sorting toy. Except for me, they sometimes fall six or eight deep, as I recall different things that happened in one place or another over all the recorded history I've studied.

I am a huge nerd.

On day 3 I walked down to Chelsea Bridge and flummoxed by the utter lack of navigable stairs along the Thames, followed the course of the river to Vauxhall, and swept along by the foot traffic over the bridge. At which point I discovered that I was standing right in front of the MI6 building. You know, the one that gets blown up in Skyfall? There's a little walk that runs along in front of it (bristling with CCTVs, naturally) and then it crosses a little boat ramp where - get this - those same amphibious duck boat/busses that give tours in San Francisco push their way out into the Thames. And then there's a snippet of beach, pebbles and mud and ducks and not great-smelling, with plastic bottles and bits of modern flotsam. However, mixed with the anti-erosion rubble are bits of pottery and hundred year old glass, marbles and metal bits and tons and tons of pipestems. I am totally going to do that again and again and again!

We went to the British Museum, and saw an excellent exhibit on forensic analysis of mummies. I was absolutely blown away to discover that fully half the mummies I was familiar with from my childhood obsessions were... right there. There's the possibly-a-transvestite padded-and-painted mummy. There's the "all natural" sand mummy. There's the weird folded Roman child in gilded cartonnage.

And then you turn around and there's the fucking Rosetta Stone.

You walk through the gift shop, and discover that the facepalming ivory queen carving from one of your favorite material culture books is also in their collection. So is a copy of The Great Wave.

It was a little surreal. It's still a little surreal. I'm loving it.

Leaving for London

You leave your home thrice.

First, you pause and savor the moment, that strangely-quotidian, strangely-charged moment where you totter out over liminal space, knowing it won't be the same after this. Then you get to the car to start that first journey, realize you need one more thing, and race back. The second leaving is exasperated at your own sentimentality as you lock the door again. The third time involves discovering that in your attempt to stop most of the "power vampire" appliances from sitting there sucking power while you're gone, you've turned off one thing too many. Another dash back, and some troubleshooting, and you close and lock the door a third time, getting in the car for good this time.

It's not always like this, I'm told. But I do this for just about every costumed event, so it makes sense that leaving for this adventure would be little different.

It begins to rain as you leave. Precious rain that hasn't fallen on California nearly at all this winter, and it lends an eerie melancholy to things that you hadn't expected. That last lunch with your folks, their hugging you goodbye where you realize they're (inexplicably?) worried this might be the last time they see you.

As you taxi toward the north-west pointing departure strip, you get misty-eyed looking out the window at all the landmarks you can name. The Dumbarton Bridge, ugliest of all the bridges, is making you cry. Some part of you worries, like your parents did, that you'll never see this again.

You try not to think about it too hard, and this is helped by the pre-flight mimosa (sorry, Buck's Fizz - they're only allowed to call it a Mimosa if it's got honest-to-God French champagne in it, rather than the sparkling white wine in mine). The in-flight entertainment helps. The four drinks with the rather elaborate meal you get as part of your upgrade package helps.

 You catch a few fretful hours of half-sleep, finally shaking the nightmares of the last few days. You promise yourself you won't be as jetlagged and confused as you were last time. You arrive.


The next hour passes in a state of half-waking deja-vu. The habitrail of the outer Heathrow walkways, the long line of Immigration (this time sadly absent the smoking-hot Olympians who'd preceded you in line last time). The unexpected grilling of the immigration officer wakes you, and you are suddenly incredibly glad that you spent the time to print a bank statement, the address you'll be staying at, and the names and numbers of various friends in the area. The guardedly friendly immigration officer spends a long time asking you where you live normally, who you worked for, what you do, who you're here with, what they do, how much money you have, why you're here, what you'll be doing, and writes (as far as you can tell) every last answer on the back of your immigration card.

He then stamps your passport, admonishes you to always travel with an updated bank statement, and welcomes you to the country.

You reunite with your partner on the other side of immigration, sweaty and shaken, but relieved. The post-adrenaline sag hits you an hour later as you're starting to explore the rented corporate housing flat that's your new home. The bed calls urgently to you, but you're persuaded to go explore on the glorious spring day outside.

London is not the dreary, rainy fog bank you were promised. It's grape hyacinths and exotic ducks sunning themselves in St. James' Park, it's geometric modernist architecture next to two-hundred year old brick façades. It's tourists in chunky thick winter tights buying ice cream and staring at the mounted Horse Guards. It's the cheerful red terra cotta of the ubiquitous chimney-pots, and the bronze horse skeleton sculpture stark against the warm blue sky. It's the cold stiff breeze on the tide-swollen Thames. It's the delirium of seeing sixteen different monuments you cannot name and eight important ones you had no idea where so close together, while still so exhausted that you're pretty sure you couldn't retrace your route, and all with the faint tinge of panic that having a non-working mobile and inconsistently working credit cards gives you.

Eventually you are so tired you cannot read things put in front of you anymore and the constant cheerful voice of the train station announcements makes you want to hide under something and you go home to take a nap. Half an hour later you wake refreshed, and try again. Money converted to pounds, oyster card in hand, and a new sim in its packet in your pocket you go shopping, and begin to feel better.

You only peek at your Dropcam back at home once.  You're officially in London.