Friday February 26
Maja:
Why can’t things be simple? Just why can’t I just simply be able to do what I want? What we want? There’s too many whys here, and it just doesn’t add up.
Mark:
Why isn’t it spelt whies? Sorry. Not helpful. Carry on Maja.
Maja:
I just can’t get what I want in a simple way. Why does it have to start off with an impossible list? Why do I have to navigate a way through the impossible, just to be where I want with who I want? Yes, I’m complaining a lot right now, but it really feels like this. I can’t even stay here in this miniscule room for long, because of Brexit. Why does it have to be so complicated?
I’m feeling a tiny bit of whelm here.
So, what do I have to do?
Get a divorce, sell my apartment in Sweden, fix a new home for my dog Tommy, get a job in London, or some remote job at least, get an apartment in London, get a visa to be able to be here because of the stupid cursed Brexit. All of this, and I don’t even know where to start with the first one. How should I even approach that? How should I even think about that? I mean, I love him so much still, but I can’t be with him now. How do you even get a divorce? How am I going to be able to say that to him? How am I going to be OK? I don’t know how I should handle this.
I just don’t know.
This is impossible.
Mark:
Very quickly we’re realising that we’re going to need a bigger boat. We really have to take a pragmatic approach to what’s going on here.
To start with that, we make a list of what we need to overcome. We quickly call this the Impossible List. It looks like this.
Divorce, which means she’s going to have to make the actual call to say she wants one, and then have it granted and administered.
Organising/selling the apartment in Sweden
Getting a job in London, or some remote working job
Getting an apartment London, and lockdown London at that
Visa to be able to stay in post Brexit Britain, which will probably be dependent on whatever job she’s able to get, and even then, it will be a huge ask.
Tommy – her dog. What will happen with him?
For my part, I have to deal with Jenn and how to break that, while still living here for the time being. Oh, mini reveal of what you probably already knew if you’d thought about it. Me and Jenn are still sharing a room. Yes I’m with Maja a lot, and in her room a lot, but the big downstairs room is still mine and Jenn’s. In any case, the three of us are all still living in the same house. Awkward? You said that. I couldn’t possibly comment.
Maja:
Yeah, come on. The whole Jenn situation is really not helpful right now either. How are you going to square this circle Mark? I mean, just how?
Mark:
If that’s going to change, I have to figure out how the hell I’m going to make enough to pay my share of an apartment in London, with deposit. And if and when the move does happen, I also have to do the right thing which means, on top of that, keeping up my share of rent payments on the room here for at least a reasonable amount of time whatever that means.
In this area, and anywhere else this central really, property is truly expensive; in many parts of the country you could get a two bedroom apartment for the price of the double room in this house. A one bedroom apartment, which is what we’re looking for, costs around twice the price of the room I’m currently paying for.
On top of all this, I’m currently on furlough. From a bar job. And get a new job? That could pay what all the above would require? Here? In lockdown, almost totally furloughed London? Don’t think so. Which means we have to come up with an idea or ideas for how I could make more money to help fund the new reality and whatever comes next.
Combining our situations, pick any one of the above and you’re looking at an insurmountable problem. As an entire list, it’s impossible. Just impossible. There’s no other word for it. We are totally deluding ourselves if we think we’re ever going to get that lot ticked off and somehow sail into the sunset. But amazingly, we manage to solve all the problems almost instantly. We do this by refusing to think about them. Then we realise that, while this might feel nice, it really isn’t a solution that’s sustainable for any amount of time.
The first real biggie is the possibility of a divorce. It’s huge that the situation has even come to this, but it is very much acknowledged that this would have been on the cards even without me, or anyone else, on Maja’s horizon; even if, instead of coming here, she’d decided to go to a Caribbean island on her own to have her much needed break and to get her head around everything, she probably still would have come to the conclusion that the marriage was over and that she would need to move ahead with that. So no, I don’t feel responsible for that and no, I don’t believe that anything we have done or said has precipitated that. Nevertheless, it is something that will have to be addressed and something that will ultimately have to happen. Along with the divorce is the attached inevitability of her having to sell their apartment in Sweden and get all that stuff organised; of course, the mere fact an apartment exists means there are a lot of things in it. Where the hell do you start with that? From here?
And if Maja is to divorce and stay here, we need to think about what that means. First, it means getting out of this room and into a place of our own. But she still has another three days of quarantine anyway, and today. So four days. Basically, she’s only just over halfway through quarantine and is thinking of not just being able to go outside, but of moving from here totally. Which brings us onto the next problem of how the hell to get an apartment in London and how the hell to pay for it. And to do that, I really need to up my financial game, and how the hell am I going to do that? In Covid, lockdown London? As it is, right now I’m on furlough so I have some kind of income, but nowhere near what you would need to pay for half a whole apartment, plus deposit, plus keep up my moral obligations here for a little while. It’s just possible, with everywhere being closed anyway, that we could look for a place a little further out, and so a little cheaper than the zone two we’re currently in which is touching distance from central London and a place I totally love. But the fact would still remain that I would need to find a considerably better income than I’m pulling in now. How?
And even if we achieve all this, Maja still has to be able to stay in the UK to make any of it workable. Pre Brexit that would have been no big deal. She’s European, UK was in the EU, not even a discussion. Live and work here, just like I went to Madrid to live and work all that time ago. Fully legally, with Spanish papers organised and everything. Almost did the same in Hamburg with Drunken Monkees; they even have a welcome centre there with all the bureaucratic offices under the same roof. Imagine. But all that’s changed now. All Maja has, and all she can have, is a travel visa which is valid for six months. Which means she can stay for at least that long. But she can’t work. How the hell are we going to square that circle? And all the other circles? All we have right now is a very very bad game of Tetris where nothing fits but it’s all coming down anyway.
But onto immediate issues, I have to tell Jenn where me and Maja are right now. She’s out when the time comes for this, so I arrange to meet her nearby when she’s on her way back. As soon as I make the phone call she knows something bad is coming and bitterly thanks me for ruining her day which she says was already a struggle because she’s been worried about what’s been going on here. Yes, we’re just friends, but friends who have lived together and supported each other for a long time and she can see that we are now nudging at the end of an era. We meet in the empty beer garden in The Vine across the road from the house. I don’t want to drag anything out so I just say it as soon as I can. ‘Me and Maja said the three words last night.’ I would like to say Jenn takes it well. She really doesn’t. But she does say this has come as no surprise to her as she’s been well aware of how we’ve been since Maja arrived. Bottom line, she asks to be given a few days to a week to process this new reality and then to maybe come round to accepting the situation. In that time, she says, I shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t speak to either of us. Fair enough.
Above I mentioned the fact that I have a bar job which I’m currently being paid for not doing. That reminded me that a certain amount of context had been missing from The Diaries, at least for people not familiar with Mark’s Diaries, which is my thing before me and Maja ended our respective diaries and started this thing.
Practically my whole life in London, since I moved here from Madrid in October 2014, has revolved around bars, with my income pretty evenly split between payments from gigs in them and earnings from working in them. Governmental stay at home advice saw bars, among other businesses, being forced to close. With that, wages, or at least a good part of them, continued through furlough payments based, in my bar’s case, on average earnings over a given period before furlough began. Which has meant that I’ve been able to keep the wheels turning quite OK. It also meant that I was totally available for all Skype calls with Maja when we first started communicating with the whole website/bass mentor trade off thing, and then it meant I was able to be available for phone calls anytime day or night when the wheels of her life started wobbling. And it means I’m 100 per cent around now as well as she settles into the house and into London. So yes, Covid and it’s societal effects have been terrible. But for me and Maja, it’s really kind of worked in our favour. You really could say we are children of Covid. Or at the very least, if it hadn’t happened, for want of a better expression, we wouldn’t have even made it to first base. I wouldn’t have even been able to mentor her, or receive her website help, to the extent that I did, which, as you know, is how we really started communicating in the first place.
Maja:
Yes. If it hadn’t been for Covid, a lot of things that happened to me just wouldn’t have happened. It might even have been a trigger for why my marriage started to break down as well. And I certainly would never have picked up an instrument if it wasn’t for Covid. So then I would never have started a band, never joined SBL, never found Mark’s diaries, never started my own diaries, never contacted Mark. And I would probably live my whole life never even wanting to go to London, nevermind live there. I mean, why would I ever want to go there? I have my job, I work as a cloud/computer engineer, my training is way too many hours a week – I train aikido. If I was to do something crazy and new it would probably be going to an Aikido training camp in Japan for a year or so. But that never happened.
When the world came crashing down around me, so did everything that I knew.
Still reading.
Great!