Day 49

Friday April 9

Mark:

We’re exactly where we didn’t want to be. Living back in what we’re now referring to as The Carrol, after the name of the road. It was my home for six years and I didn’t really see any real circumstance in any kind of mid to even long term where I would have been thinking about leaving it. Well, I did leave it, accidentally and overnight, and now I’m kinda accidentally and overnight back here again and it’s the last place I wanted to be. I wouldn’t expect Maja to, but even I instinctively no longer refer to it as home. It is just The Carrol. We’ve opened up the single bed to make it into a double, which means it now covers the entire width of this tiny room – it literally touches both walls. So, as you enter the room, immediately on your right you have the wardrobe, in front of that and touching the bed is the cake trolley with a lamp on top of it. And to the left and up against the wall at the end of the bed you have our basses. All of which means the patch of floor we have available to us between the door and the bed is about the size of a large toilet mat. Not even luxury large. And of course, below all this is Jenn. Who is simply delighted that we’ve moved back in. Of course she isn’t, for anyone silly enough to have believed that. Sorry if that describes you but I guess that means you just have to face it now. You’re silly. Oh damn, we really need to be moving out of here again. And soon. Forget the fact that we now have a plan to move to Ireland as soon as possible. This is going to be beyond awkward and beyond cramped. Right now, all we’re thinking is to rest up and go to Alex’s party, aiming to arrive around seven. Then tomorrow or maybe the next day, we can start to get our things out of Sarah’s and move it into here, all the while trying to see what kind of other place to stay we can shake out of the trees.

I go outside and make a bunch of phone calls to friends to see if anyone has a heads up on anything, but the most we get is people saying they’ll be on the lookout, and a possibility of a place in Clapham for way over double our budget. When I say our budget is probably less than half of what’s on offer, I get laughed off the phone. Yeah. I’m not convinced London is the answer. And that’s a shame too because, as much as I had no thoughts of moving out of this house, I had even less of ever leaving London, a city I’d wanted to be able to live in again for so long before the opportunity to do so actually came up.

As we talk more about this, we start to think that, maybe rather than try to move somewhere else in London when we’re ultimately looking at leaving the country anyway, we should just stick it out here and make the big move when we’re ready. With that, we agree that I should continue to do the two weeks I’ve committed to the bar as notice, while making plans to move to Ireland as soon as that’s done. This thing will probably take around two weeks at least to plan and execute anyway. So why throw away all my goodwill and reputation, built up over three years, for the sake of leaving a few days early? After all, we still have a lot of research to do. All we know is, somewhere in Ireland. Beyond that, we have no house and no leads on one, and no car, and no leads on one. And we still need to get ourselves properly sorted out here. So no. Bar or no bar, this is not something we’re going to do overnight. So yeah. I’ll do the two weeks as planned while making a plan, and then, all things going well, soon after that we’ll leave.

I phone Paul for a bit of a chat and an update, and a little about what we’re thinking next. ‘Bloody hell Mark,’ he says. ‘You two should be on Oprah.’

Yeah, there still seems to be a lot going on. I think we really want to forget about all this, just have a nice time at the party, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Approaching 4pm we’re just lying down taking it easy, not intending to move until we have to. Maybe a couple of hours of just total chill time. Sounds lovely. Doesn’t happen. This plan lasts until 4:30pm when I get a voice message. It’s from Sarah. We listen to it together. Oh dear. She’s telling us that if we haven’t got our stuff out of the room today, it will be taken out. She says it will be put into the hallway, but whatever, it doesn’t sound good. We need to go. Now. But how? We have no car and I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking Cris to help us out because he’s not at all happy that we’ve come back and plonked ourselves right above Jenn again. Fair enough. Which is why I won’t put him in the position of having to say no. Then I remember Rafael who was so put out when we didn’t ask him to help us move to Sarah’s. It’s worth a call, but I’m kinda asking him to meet us now now.

I put the call in. He’s happy to help, but really not sure he can help now. Maybe tomorrow. No, I say. Really sorry, but tomorrow’s no good. It’s now or I’ll say thankyou very much and we’ll just do it ourselves. Oh damn this feels bad. He says he’ll call back in a few minutes. This is a tense time. Nothing we can do between now and then. But he does call back in a few minutes and says he’ll meet us there in ten but he’ll only be able to help for an hour or so. Thankyou thankyou thankyou, but I tell him we’ll be there in more like 15 because it will take at least that long to walk there, and that’s if we leave this very instant, which we will pretty much do. Fine.

As we approach Sarah’s we’re keeping a curiously nervous eye out to see if any of our stuff has been thrown out onto the street. Thankfully, it hasn’t. But there’s behind the apartments as well, with a whole garden area back there. I go round and have a look. OK. Nothing out here either. That’s at least a little relief. Now to go and wait for Rafael. We really don’t feel like encountering Sarah before we have to so we decide not to wait out front, preferring to go to the end of the street, on the corner with the main road. Every now and then, I walk out into the road to see if I can see him. After five minutes or so, here he comes. His van is painted in his company’s colours and has a bit of a strange roof for carrying particular materials, so it’s very distinctive. I thank him very much for coming. No problem. He goes and parks up outside where I tell him the apartment is and me and Maja go in.

We reach the front door and, although we have a key, I think it’s only right to knock rather than just walk in. To be fair, Sarah is someone who, if she has an issue, says her piece and mentally moves on and, outwardly at least, she’s pleased to see us and is welcoming, although she does make a point of demanding we take the fridge as well, because she doesn’t want it. Fine. I walk in first. I don’t see what looks the two girls exchange behind me. 

We walk into what we’d started considering home until last night and thankfully, everything is as we left it. To make things a little easier on Maja, who really doesn’t want to encounter Sarah too much, I opt for the heavy lifting. This means I’ll be taking everything downstairs to the van and Maja can concentrate on packing. And out on the street, Rafael says I should just drop everything next to the van and let him pack it. We have a few backpacks and a whole bunch of shopping bags. Plus, there are quite a few things that can just be taken down whole, such as the two bass amps. We get started. It does take an hour or so and is without incident or any kind of harsh words. Only best wishes from Sarah as we reach the end and give her her key back. The one bit that could have been sticky is getting the fridge out of there, but those things are a lot lighter and easier to move about than you’d think, even down stairs. Van all packed and we give our eternal thanks once more to Rafael and we’re off. Once at The Carrol, the job does take on a bit of a seemingly never ending quality as we first empty the van, which is parked about 40 yards from the house, and then get everything downstairs and back into the room, which Maja is organising. This sees us both carry everything from the van to the house, piling up the front garden and then the street, and then I start to take everything downstairs, bit by tiny bit. Yes, including the fridge, which means we now totally have our own fridge and freezer in the house which is quite handy. 

Unbelievably, from receiving the scary message at 4:30, by 7:50pm we’re on the bus to Angel. It was horrible having to do everything like that, and in the mad dash way in which we did, but now we can go to the party with the whole move behind us and tomorrow is completely clear. Yes. So much better that it’s all done.  

And this party will be Maja’s first indoor London social where she will meet what I consider to be my central London crowd made up of some of the coolest and best bar staff and bar managers in London. Basically people I met while me and Dan were playing the scene as pop cover duo The Insiders. And yep, when we arrive, there they all are. Not everyone, but a really good representation. Kristoff, Alex, Tom, Jess, Shane, Molly, Jess, and a few other people. They’ve been busy recording the video for the lead single off Alex’s album which I’ve done a few sessions of bass recording on, including the song in question today. For that reason he asked me to bring my bass along, which I have, so that he could possibly film a scene with me and him. We don’t get around to that tonight. Instead, we arrive deep in party territory and just get stuck in. Oh, these guys love Maja and she’s instantly the centre of attention and having a great time. So the pubs aren’t open yet, Maja’s never been to a London pub, and now here she is at a party above one. And yes, we’re going to stay the night. Of course, it turns into a very late one.