Category: The London Diary: Maja’s London

Friday February 19

Maja:

I wake up early to finish up the last touches of the preparations. Bag is packed, I take a shower, then decide that I will bring that raincoat afterall that me and Mark have been discussing since yesterday if I’ll need or not. It’s always nice to have a raincoat so in the bag it goes. I can only take one suitcase so it has been really hard to choose what to pack. With Corona, it’s not like I’m not really going to be able to browse in any stores once I’m there, so it’s been important for me to choose wisely what to take. Mark’s been helping by buying me the bulky necessities, so I’m going to be set when I get there. I have what I need, and I’m ready to leave. With my heart as heavy as lead I say goodbye to my husband and Tommy, my dog. It’s really hard to leave. But I can’t stay. We wave and I take a last look at them and then turn around and walk away. With tears running down my cheeks. I look at the scenery around me, and it hurts so much seeing the place I had to fight so hard to get to slipping away from my reach. It’s cold and sunny outside. The tired rays of light glisten on the snow that lies undisturbed foot-deep on the side of the footpath. I walk the same path to the underground station that I’ve walked so many times before, and everything is so familiar to me. I pass the hairdresser where I got my ear pierced when I was a little kid. The swimming pool me and my family would go to when I was still in kindergarten. I have so many memories of this place, and it is with a heavy heart and tear stained cheeks that I message Mark that I’ve arrived at the station.

The trip to the airport goes without much trouble. My suitcase isn’t that heavy, and I’m only bringing one bag and a small backpack, so it isn’t hard to carry. I arrive at the airport way before necessary to have plenty of time checking in and it goes smoothly. When I reach the check-in counter the lady sitting there seems very surprised to hear that I am going to London. She checks my document to make sure that I’ve completed all of the required formalities such as the passenger locator form, ordered the covid tests for after arrival and of course that I have a certificate telling me that I have tested negative for covid. Everything is in order and I get to continue along. Once I’ve passed security and found the gate I finally start to relax a little bit. I call Mark up to see how things are going his end. Everything seems fine. He is also on his way to the airport to meet me. We talk for a while, and I feel kind of awkward not really wanting to call anyone else, so we just stay on the line. Just hanging on. Hanging out. Not saying much or anything at all, feeling relieved to know that we’re going to meet soon. 

We hang up after a while and I have to wait a bit on my own. There’s a lady walking around close to the gate with a survey and I decide to take part. It’s about why are you traveling to London. In normal times this would have been a completely unnecessary survey to do, but with recent events it is very much a valid question. Who in their right mind would want to go from a country where everything is nice and open like it is in Sweden, to a country which is in lockdown and pretty much still totally closed? To one of the hardest hit countries of this pandemic? Well, someone like me. I answer something along the lines of: to meet family/friends. That’s a fitting survey answer for a question like that. I don’t think too much of it until she expresses surprise and delight that she’s found someone who is going to London as an actual destination rather than using it as a transit point like, apparently, just about everyone else who’s going there.

It’s finally boarding time and I reach my seat. There’s not really anyone sitting closeby, which is greatly fitting for a day like today. But the plane isn’t completely empty either. I would say, maybe about 20 per cent of the seats are taken, but I’m not really looking that carefully. There is about a flight every third day, so that’s probably why they’re able to fill it up as much as they had. I sit down next to the window, wearing my compulsory face mask. The plane soon takes off and I have this immense feeling of relief. I’m on my way. I lean back and let myself drift away, listening to the album “In between dreams” by Jack Johnson. At my request of something to listen to, Mark recommended it just before I left. It’s a wonderful record, and I let it go on repeat as I allow myself to be transported to that wonderful state in between dreams. Dreams of a brighter future. Dreams of the unknown. And just sleep.

Time flies, and after I don’t know how long, we start to approach London. I sluggishly look out of the window, seeing the city that I’m going to live in. The city called London. I feel excitement starting to bubble up in my chest as, more and more, I see the details of the endless rows of brown buildings beneath the clouds. They look like gingerbread houses. London, the city of endless gingerbread houses in their neat little rows. We get closer and closer to the ground and I feel the impact as the wheels of the plane touch the ground. I’m here now!

I can’t help myself, and I text Mark, I’m here now! The first thing I do is tell him about the gingerbread houses. 

Mark:

It’s with some relief that I chat with Maja this morning. All seems to be going smoothly and she’s out of the door by 9am my time. She’s on her way now. However, by the time I’m on my way and leaving for the airport, she still doesn’t have a room in London. I was really hoping Elvin would have left by then so that I would be able to get in there and have at least something of a once over but timings just haven’t worked out so I’ll have to leave with him still occupying the place. Which means Maja will see it for the first time in whatever state he’s left it. I just have to trust he’ll do at least something of a decent job before he leaves. He’s been a good housemate and friendly enough, but he’s been pretty much been a keep himself to himself kind of guy so there are no tearful goodbyes. Or goodbyes of any kind as he’s out at work early and will be leaving while I’m out. So that’s that for Elvin. Good luck on your travels mate. On a scale of depth of feeling, it’s the equivalent of one of your goldfish dying. Probably your least favourite one.

The flight’s due in at 6pm but it can be a bit of a trek to Heathrow. And I have a few things to check out once I get there. I’ve also got one or two errands left to run to cross and dot the final i’s and t’s before Maja’s arrival, including a trip to Ktown to pick up some essentials for her that she’s asked if I could sort out. Coffee, orange juice, fresh fruit and the like. Nothing major because she’s barely been eating in Sweden over the past few weeks I’ve been hearing. All that done and I’m on my way to the airport by around 2pm quite confident of getting there in plenty of time to find the arrivals gate, and then to make sure I know the route from there to the coach station. But oh dear. I get down into Ktown tube and it takes a while for me to discover that the train I want has got issues today and there’s a substantial waiting time for it, rather than the usual zero to four minutes you can normally expect. Not cool. That almost never happens, but it’s happened on this particular day. Balls. Very reluctantly I leave the tube station to go back up to the street to catch a bus to Kings Cross, where I will catch the train to Heathrow. Disaster up here too as a whole bunch of buses aren’t running for some reason and I have another wait of 15 to 20 minutes when again, a maximum of four is to be expected. So, having given myself an extra hour for the journey, I’ve already lost most of the grace of that time. Then, when the bus does finally get here and we set off, I discover that Ktown is undergoing a whole bunch of roadworks and these cause even more delays. This really isn’t going very well at all. If I’d left in what I thought would have been optimal time and had this lot happen I’d probably be looking at arriving late by now, and Maja walking out into London with no-one to meet her. That just would not be an option. As it is, by the time I finally get on the Kings Cross to Heathrow train the timing is looking at least half respectable and I arrive at the airport a little before 5pm. 

Then I discover I’m already very close to the arrivals gate, and then that the coach station is also very nearby to that. Cool. I think I deserve those two mini breaks. All I have to do now is buy a couple of coach tickets and I’ll be at the gate ready and waiting by 5:30. Perfect. No. Problem. There was nothing about this on any website I saw but the Heathrow coach isn’t running due to Covid. And no other buses from here are remotely suitable. Balls again. OK. Let’s just get to the gate to be ready in situ and make a new plan from there. I park myself in sight of where the people come out and have a look at the tube plan I keep in my bag. Yep. This will do nicely. We can get a tube to Piccadilly Circus where Maja will be able to get her first look at central London. Then it’s a really cool but not too long walk from there to the bus stop by Oxford Circus station to catch the 88 that will go all the way to our house, or we can get off it a little earlier if Maja still wants to have that walk she was talking about before having to start that 10 day quarantine thing.

Now I’ve done this and I really am ready, I have a chance to fully take in my surroundings and to see how people are behaving. First, the good news is that there is no sign of any TV cameras. And people are allowed to come and meet friends and relatives; a sign says that only one person is allowed to greet arrivals. That’s fine. I counted myself on the way here and confirmed that I am indeed one person. The place is weirdly empty though. You’d normally expect to see whole families all milling around arrivals. But no. Just a few individuals dotted around, possibly also reflecting the fact that there will not be many people arriving at arrivals. This should be quite quick. I wonder how Maja’s flight is getting on. We’re very much edging towards 6pm now. It should be just about landing. And yep. There it is on the screen. Landed and on it’s way in. My phone pings. ‘Just landed. Waiting to get out. Woooooooooooooooooooooo!!’ ‘Welcome to London,’ I shoot back. This really is it now and she asks what our strategy for meeting is. She’s very pleased that I’m able to report we can just behave normally. With masks on, of course. She should be coming through soon, but no-one emerges from the gates at all and time starts to drag on. And on. And on. Then I start to hear people coming through the gates furiously complaining of waits of up to three hours. Oh dear. That’s not good. Neither is the fact that they seem to be coming out in very intermittent groups of three. And Maja’s talking of hundreds of people out there waiting to come through. I think I should settle in here. But after an hour she messages to say she’s near the end of the queue. Great. Then a message a few minutes later. ‘After this queue, do you know what they got?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘A new queue.’ Oh that’s a good one.

I’m clearly not the only one waiting far beyond what I expected but I think I can see the most uncomfortable person in the room. Someone thought it would be a really good idea to turn up at arrivals wearing a dinosaur costume. Yep. Full on tyrannosaurus rex thing. I’m sure it was such a laugh to arrive and anticipate the delighted shock of their friend. I wonder how that’s all working out now. I can see the costume over there this whole time. The poor guy, or girl, in there, has been waiting at least an hour and a half over the odds. And I’m sure that when whoever it is they’re meeting comes out, their mood will be quite different to what it was when the plane landed. Unfortunately I don’t see how that little drama plays out because I get a message. Only eight people in front of her now. Then two. Then.

I see her walking through arrivals all on her own, pink jacket on just like she said she would have, as though we wouldn’t have recognised each other. But then, maybe we wouldn’t have with the whole mask thing going on. I’m looking straight at her but she hasn’t seen me as her eyes dart side to side looking for at least a semi familiar face in this country she’s never seen before. I take a step forward and our eyes lock. Oh yes. Here we are now and we both walk to close the distance between us. All I want to do is hug her hard and let her know she’s OK now. And that’s exactly what happens as we say hello and pull each other tight as we finally find ourselves on the same little patch of ground. Then I tell her the bus is out but we have a new route. First, the lift, and arriving there we’re on our own. So our masks come off and we see each other fully and up close for the first time. Cool. Another hug, without talking, then the doors open again and a few people walk in so the masks go back on. After the lift I take the lead as we head into the tube and it’s really bizarre that there are hardly any people here. She asks where we’re going and I say it’s a surprise but that she’ll like it. She accepts that and on we go. When the train arrives and we find a carriage, we’re the only people in it. So once seated, we take the opportunity to remove the masks again but still neither of us speaks. Instead, she removes her right hand from her pocket and shows it to me, holding all the fingers up to give me a clear look. Oh wow. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? I don’t actually ask the question but it’s clear in my eyes. She totally receives the unspoken, incredulous words and nods slowly. With that she takes my hand in hers and leans against me like the weary traveler she is. As she does so I get a much closer look at her ring finger with that white band of skin circling it where a wedding ring used to be. I put an arm around her and we both snuggle in, hands still holding. But really, it feels very innocent. She’s tired and I’m just comforting a friend who’s had a really tough few weeks and more, and a bit of a journey today followed by an uncomfortably long wait in arrivals, all while traveling in the time of Covid. It just so happens that we only met for the first time a few minutes ago. It’s often too loud on the tube to talk comfortably so she waits patiently and trustfully until I announce that it’s time to get off. We’re in Piccadilly Circus and, with me carrying her suitcase, we walk up the steps and into the famous plaza with its overlooking motion and colour-filled advertising screens. Here, I get her to stand in front of them as I step back with my phone. Snap. Maja’s first photograph in London and we are right in the heart of it. She has truly arrived. Phone back in pocket and I lead the way again, heading off to Regent Street. In my left hand I have the handle of Maja’s wheeled suitcase. And now, in my right hand, I have Maja’s hand. We look at each other and smile. She isn’t letting go. And just for the record, neither am I.

We walk down Regent Street then I direct us down a side street to the right, then left to continue walking in the same direction. We’re now on Kingly Street and I ask if she has any idea where she is. She doesn’t. We continue a little way, and then she lets out a little oh wow, of recognition as we arrive in front of Ain’t Nothin But…The Blues. London’s world famous blues bar and a major venue in the jam world of Mark’s Diaries. We stop here for a selfie, chat for a little while, and then we’re back off on our way, talking about everything, nothing, and just generally laughing a lot. And in this lockdown London world, there are times when it feels like we have the city to ourselves, at the very least we are totally alone in these side streets. Yes. Right now, London is ours so much that it feels as though we’re wearing it. We walk past the famous Carnaby Street and its imposing sign and back onto Regent Street where we cross the road at Oxford Circus and go on over to the bus stop for the 88. We wait there, still holding hands and talking for five minutes or so and then Maja asks if it’s possible to walk back to my house from here. It is. ‘Can we do that?’ she asks. Yep. We will. And so we walk. Hand in hand all the way. She’s fast, and I’m more than happy to keep this pace. As a result we heat up quite quickly and jumpers come off somewhere halfway between here and Camden town. All the way she’s marvelling at how old so much of the architecture seems to be and I delight in pointing out buildings that are hundreds of years old, yet sit perfectly comfortably wedged in between their modern cousins. Through Camden and Maja doesn’t know it yet, but we’re on the final strait as the road merges seamlessly with that of Kentish Town’s high street. We’re still holding hands and are just past the main shops of KTown when a woman remarks on our T-shirted appearances. ‘Are you guys not cold at all?’ she asks as she approaches, walking in the opposite direction. ‘Not at all,’ I answer honestly. ‘You should try it. It feels lovely.’ ‘I think I’ll leave it to younger people like yourselves,’ she says. ‘I’m freezing.’ ‘Walk a bit faster, it works for us,’ I call good naturedly to her as she starts to disappear into the night. She laughs and politely declines again. Next to me, Maja is almost in shock. ‘You talk to strangers over here?’ ‘All the time,’ I say laughing at the clear awe in her face. ‘You should try it.’ ‘No thanks.’ Give it time.

We’ve arrived and we take a left turn into the Carrol Close estate. For the past 10 minutes or so she’s been asking if some of the houses we’ve been seeing look like ours and I’ve been saying no, and she’s also been asking if our house looks like the gingerbread houses she told me earlier that she saw from the air on her London approach. Again, no. Then we’re in the estate and she sees the row of houses we’re heading towards. ‘Oh, they’re totally like the gingerbread houses I saw from the air,’ she says emphatically. OK. I guess we do live in a gingerbread house then.

I open the front gate and go to open the door to the house but Maja stops me. ‘Not yet,’ she says. ‘Can’t we wait outside for a while? I’m not ready to go in and meet a load of new people yet.’ Fair enough. I suggest leaving the suitcase right inside the door and going for a walk but she doesn’t want to walk anymore either. So we sit down on the small front garden step. There, still holding hands, we talk quietly about nothing in particular.

I’m sure you’re wondering if I’m feeling the slight stirring of something here and the answer is very much yes. And for the Jenn situation, it’s about time I say here that we’re just friends, just very close friends who happen to have lived together for quite a long time. Going on 12 years in fact. I might as well get this bit out now as well. We were in a relationship very early on, and that lasted a year give or take. The joke back then among our Madrid friends was that we split up and then started dating, which is actually a pretty fair take on what happened. And we carried on living comfortably together. It probably helped that the Hamburg jaunt with Drunken Monkees straddled the two realities of couple Mark and Jenn and friend Mark and Jenn. Hamburg was my pop punk band’s German adventure when we tried to emulate some foursome from Liverpool and set ourselves up there as a band that really could have a chance of doing something. It didn’t work out and I returned to live in Madrid with a girl I’d broken up with on the phone while in Germany. It was pretty much mutual to be fair and we made it quite clear in the subsequent years, through a few more moves together as well, that we were both free to pursue other avenues if something came along. She even once said the words, ‘Don’t think we’re going to grow old together.’ However, nothing really did come along for either of us, so we settled into a really quite comfortable pattern around each other which included living in the same room in this house in Kentish Town where we’ve been for the better part of five or six years now. I don’t really know about her, I don’t think she has, but I haven’t really been properly looking for anything to replace this. Not seriously, except for the odd mild dalliance here and there which I’ve always told her about. Over the years I’ve quite got to like our cosy friendly, companionable-but-apart comfortzone. Why look for anything else? This works. 

Well now Maja’s sitting next to me and our chat has subsided to a very comfortable silence with her looking the other way to me and out towards the far end of the close. I start to let in whatever it is I’ve been feeling and holding back over the past few days as I realise this could actually be something and I suddenly realise I’m in one of those moments in life you just can’t let pass you by. You think you’ll get another chance some other time but you really don’t and you have to take this one. This one that I’ve arrived at completely by accident. Alright, I deliberately said the words, ‘You could come here,’ but they were just words to help out. Nothing more. But then the seriousness began and I became a very virtual shoulder to lean on. Now I’m a very literal shoulder to lean on. If she chooses to, which she isn’t right now. Yes. I’ve opened the gates to my thoughts and feelings. I had them locked so tight, I thought, but they’ve suddenly turned into floodgates and become overwhelmed. With that, I know I really do have to do something right now or regret it and forever wish I had. But she’s suddenly so physically far away. She starts to say something, I think. But I cut her off. With my left arm already over her shoulder, I gently but firmly and quite quickly direct her head so that she now faces me. I can’t allow for heistation now. I just can’t. To hesitate would be to stop. To stop would be…I don’t want to think what it would be. I just follow on through with the movement, but then suddenly realise that she’s completely going with it. We meet in the middle and kiss. It goes on for quite a long time. With that, everything comes together. We part and I realise all my mental energy just went into making that moment happen and I have no idea what to say now it has actually happened. But there is no silence. She immediately jumps into it with a big smile and a wide eyed exclamation. ‘I can kiss Mark.’ ‘Yes you can,’ I say, with what must be a pretty stupid looking smile as I try to act cool. So she does. And I do. Again and again. Then abruptly she stands up. Did I say stands up? She doesn’t. From a sitting start, she breaks into an immediate run, still holding my hand. ‘What the h…’ I say to the open air of the street. But I have no choice. All I can do is launch myself upwards, pulled by her own force, and run with her. Together, still holding hands, we sprint to the end of the close. Then we turn and sprint back to the house. With that completed she turns to me and takes both my hands in hers. Ever so slightly out of breath she says,  ‘OK. I’m ready. We can go in now.’ 

We walk into the house to just a little bit of a social anticlimax. Given Maja’s hugely extended wait to get through security at arrivals, and the fact that we walked here from central London, we’re arriving a lot later than I expected. Neither Sam or Cris are still up, and Jenn is only around to say hi, to give Maja the bedding things and other sundries we bought, and then she pretty much disappears. That leaves me and Maja to have a look at what she has to deal with in the room that is now hers. Despite all I did to prepare her, she’s still stunned at how small the room is. Again, I did say but it really is super tiny; I will later learn that her walk-in closet at the apartment she left this morning is the same size. Now I take in the state of the place. By London house sharing standards it’s actually been left in an acceptable enough state by Elvin, but it’s not quite up to Maja standards. So although she’s had a long and emotional day, she insists we get busy with a full deep clean of the room before we can go to bed. OK. Let’s get started.

Saturday February 20

Mark:

We barely move from the room today. Maja’s at the very beginning of a journey which is all about recovery. I know that she’s felt tense and almost emotionally hunted for a long time. She’s now out of that situation but the effects and feelings run deep and do not disappear just like that. But she says that last night was the best night’s sleep she’s had since she can remember. Actually the first time since she can remember that she slept all the way through the night. A notable event in itself. She was just restful and relaxed, for the first time since she can remember. With that she has a wake up call of just how much she needed to get out of her situation in Sweden. So yes. Right now is about rest with absolutely no obligations to do anything. For a full ten days. In fact, she’s essentially legally obliged to do practically nothing for the next ten days anyway, or at least not to go anywhere. It’s also about processing. Lots and lots of processing. I spend the whole day listening as Maja talks about what she’s been through over the past year or so. As she talks, it’s clear that she’s doing so to fathom things out for herself as much as engaging me in her thoughts. There are so many branches and avenues down which we can drive and I gently nudge her into a few of them, leading us to explore, in detail, quite a few smaller parts of the big picture. Through all this I basically just try to put pieces together and make sense of it all. It helps that we’ve spoken so much on the phone over the past week and I’ve at least got a handle on some of it, especially the more up to date stuff which I’ve lived or heard about more or less in real time.

We also touch on a few tiny details of our phone calls in the past week, including some of the little hints we dropped to each other which led to bigger hints, which have all led to where we are now.

In between, Maja gets to meet Cris, the leader and vocalist in Wild Child, the Italian heavy metal band I play and travel with, and Sam. The guys are massively friendly and welcoming to her, and when they talk I do my best to stay firmly on the sidelines and let their own conversations develop. Basically, I want these interactions to be organic, with no input from me, and they are indeed organic as Maja charms them with her enthusiasm of being in a whole new environment with new people to hang out with.

These little interludes aside, the two of us talk so much that we totally forget about eating until it hits something like 8pm and we realise we’ve made no plans. The last thing Maja ate was breakfast yesterday morning. I’m not that much different, although I did manage to grab a small thing at the airport once I realised the security holdup was happening. She asks if it’s possible to get takeout sushi at this time in London. Yes it is. But I have to leave now to get to Camden before the place closes. One mad dash later and we have something resembling dinner and the first thing Maja has eaten in almost 36 hours.

Maja:

I wake up alone in the small bed, looking around myself in dislocated confusion. Where am I? It’s hard to remember just what happened last night. I turn around and look at the room, it’s tiny. The walls are white and have specks of dirt on them, the ceiling is white and somewhat patterned, like someone’s been painting it with a drippy paint that wouldn’t quite stick on. There’s a closet that’s small, but proved to fit all my clothes without any problems. By my feet I find a little shelf, over the bed next to the window. Under the bed there’s three drawers. I rest my eyes a little more, squeezing my face down in the pillows, looking up again. Yeah. The room is the same. It’s not my room in Stockholm. This is a minimal room, that would barely be enough for a child’s room. But. It’s mine. The bed feels wonderful, it’s soft. And from it I can see out of the window. Outside there’s a beautiful tree, and it’s in full bloom right now. I feel exhausted, but also rested in a strange way. I’ve slept through the night for the first time in a long time, which is a noticeable event in itself. The room is small, but I don’t care; I’m so happy that I’m here.

I search for my toiletries, and try out the shower. It’s a nice shower, shared with all the other tenants, of course, but it even has a bathtub and I’m pleased to see that it is kept clean. Showered and dressed I go down to the kitchen, where I meet Mark.

Goodmorning, we say as we sheepishly look at each other, and soon afterwards we go back to my room to get to know each other a little bit better. 

In the evening, I ask Mark for sushi, and when he gets back with it I’m very careful eating only a little bit of it.

Sunday February 21

Maja:

I’m in London. It’s a surreal fact to me and every time I try to reflect on it, it hits me forcefully by surprise. I am quite excited about being here. I’m not really sure what life has in store for me here, but that is of less concern. Right now, I’d just like to rest and talk. I spend most of the day with Mark, staring at the ceiling, telling him about who I am and listening to his stories as well. All while looking out the window at the beautiful tree. We joke a lot, and one of our favorite subjects here is that since I can’t go out at all due to the enforced isolation, I could be anywhere. I could be in Brazil for all I know. And we continue to joke about how cold it is in Brazil this time of year. 

We have a garden I can use even though I am in isolation, which is lovely. So we go out there, just for a little while. But apart from that, we’re just in bed. Resting. Talking. 

Mark: 

Today, as we again hang out in the bedroom all day, mostly just staring at the ceiling, I hear story after story of Maja being held back professionally in her career and in music. Stories of people not wanting her to succeed or move away. Stories of her being bullied or ostracised at school. It all builds up a clear picture for me of people feeling they have to hold her down because they’re scared of her. Maja really cannot get her head around this concept. ‘Scared? Of me? Are you serious? How? Why?’ My explanation: scared of what they know she could really become if she was allowed free reign. Scared of her huge innate talent and intelligence. Scared of her drive to use both to their full potential. Scared that she could raise to levels they never could, thereby amplifying their smallness. So they hold her down, back, and discourage and psychologically beat her at every turn and opportunity. For many people, seeing anyone around them succeed only makes them feel more like failures. So rather than do something about this, they try to block any path to success for those around them. Or mock or denigrate their success or efforts with any verbal weapon they have. Basically, they’re terrified of anyone showing them what their lives could have been if they’d only tried and maybe believed a bit more. Maybe they never even had the opportunities to be fair, but that doesn’t mean they should try to remove those opportunities from others, but they do. In Maja I see an absolutely classic case of all of this. I’ve used the following example so many times when considering similar situations and it comes from a Counting Crows lyric. ‘It’s a lifetime commitment recovering the satellites/All anyone really wants to know is when you gonna come down.’ Yep. All I see is that people are terrified of Maja. I think that once she’s recovered from wherever she is emotionally and physically right now, and is able to direct her energies to where she wants to direct them, world, just get out of the damn way. This machine will be unstoppable. The people were quite possibly right to be frightened. They were every million ways wrong to try to stop it. I’m starting to see now that my job is to ensure Maja’s total wellbeing and to do everything I can to give her a safe space in which to relax and recover. To feel absolutely no pressure. And above all, not to tell her she can’t do something she wants to do, which is mostly musical endeavours after mentally breaking down and largely losing her professional identity in a field in which she continues to hover somewhere near the very top. This has been a really big part of how she’s got to this place in the first place – having to fight a constant battle to be who she wants to be. So hard that she’s lost the very sight of who she is. In just this second full day together I’m getting a growing sense that a big priority of mine is to make sure she discovers that again.

In between all this talking there is a little flurry of activity sometime mid afternoon as we remember, just in time for that day’s post, that Maja has to do the first of the two Covid tests as part of the legal requirement of her quarantine. It’s a good job there are two of us as it takes both of us to figure out how to do this thing, mostly how to put together the flat-pack cardboard box she’s been sent to post it all back in. In between this and intense conversations, we eat nothing at all until evening, totally forgetting to do so as the idea of food just slips off both of our to do lists. Again.

When evening time does come and we realise we should probably eat something, Maja decides it’s time she gets into the spirit of being in England a bit and wants to try something typically English. Hmm. What could that be? And given that it’s quite late by the time I’m going out shopping, options are limited. What is typically English food anyway? I’m really not sure. I browse the shelves of the supermarket and there they are. Supermarket bought so not fully authentic, but nevertheless, English. I bring back small individual pork pies, scotch eggs and a quiche. In case you don’t know, here’s a little introduction to all three. Pork pies are characterized, at least as far as I see it, by the type of pastry used to make them. So you have kind of minced pork meat in a dense crunchy pastry very rich in pork fat. Scotch eggs are a full egg wrapped in sausagemeat which is then covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried. So yes, these two things really do have quite high calorie counts. Then there’s quiche, described by Maja when I get back, as an egg pie, but sorry, no. But it is again a pastry based thing containing cooked egg and usually some kind of meat and cheese. And onions. So again, quite high on the calorie scale. I introduce all these to Maja along with that great cornerstone of all things British, brown sauce, a kind of rich, spicy vinegary sauce without which bacon, eggs and most types of British sausage are somehow incomplete. That might just be me, but you get the picture.

Maja:

By evening, I ask Mark to go buy me some English food, I think it is time for me to try something English. I’ve been here for two days now, and haven’t really tried anything yet, so it’s time. Off he goes, I fall asleep and when I wake up he is back. He’s bought a couple of things and is in the kitchen preparing them. When he’s done, he calls me down and we eat. For the first time today.  And we didn’t eat anything at all yesterday. We just had a little bit of sushi yesterday. What I didn’t expect is that English food is quite heavy. And I’ve been really bad at eating recently. So I sit in the kitchen and Mark serves me this decent sized meal, so the polite thing is to eat it, which is what I do. It’s good, the pork pie, scotch egg and quiche are all quite nice. Although not really any extreme flavours or anything which is great, but just quite fatty. I eat maybe half of the meal, and then I sit back, waiting for Mark to finish. Doing so, I can feel how my stomach starts to act up. It starts to cramp. Slowly at first, but soon more and more violently. I’m getting cold sweats and am really wishing Mark could finish up his portion so I can excuse myself. As soon as he does, I tell him that I want to go rest, and I hurry up upstairs and lie down. It’s painful. Really painful. I can’t remember what happened any further than this, everything that remains is the memory of pain. My consciousness must have faded away.

Mark:

I get back and she’s very interested to see what I’ve brought, and keen to try everything so we get to it. So far so fun, and I’m really quite tickled that she seems to really like it all, especially the brown sauce which many foreigners really don’t understand or remotely like. Then, as soon as we’ve finished eating, Maja says she needs to sleep. This, I will discover, will become a pattern as her body recovers from barely eating for the past however long it’s been. But right now, I am in no way prepared for what is about to happen. Almost as soon as we’re in the bedroom the convulsions start. I ask her what’s wrong but she can barely speak, at least not enough to tell me anything useful. Her whole stomach seems to be contracting and as it does, her head flies back, her eyeballs also shooting up and back as it does so. In between is the most horrible, at times high pitched hyperventilating. I try to get her to concentrate on breathing normally, at least, but I get little reaction to that. 

Otherwise, there’s absolutely nothing I can do but watch, horrified, not even sure yet what could possibly have caused this. As I watch helpless, my hand is on my phone and I wonder at what point I’m going to just call it and hit 999. This goes on for about five minutes but it feels like 55. Then slowly everything starts to slow down, back to normal-ish. Her breathing slows and she looks at me like, ‘What the hell happened?’ Like she’s just arrived in the room to the aftermath of some dramatic scene she played no part in. With that she closes her eyes and falls into a sleep I’ll best describe as restless. But asleep she is. I am not. I stay awake for an hour or so until she wakes again, all the time watching and making sure functions are all normal. Or at least normal enough that I don’t have to return to my phone and thoughts of 999. Those thoughts are with me almost every second of that hour.

Monday February 22

Last night we didn’t speak much about what happened, but today we get into it, especially now I’ve seen first hand how bad things have physically gotten for Maja. I’d been told of course, but I guess I have to admit that until last night when I saw it for myself, I really didn’t understand how bad it all really was. I still don’t fully, until she reluctantly admits why what happened last night happened. The way I understand it is that she was caught in a double fix of not wanting to hurt my feelings and of genuinely wanting to try everything. For the past few weeks, along with insomnia, she’s barely been able to eat anything above survival rate, often going days or maybe even weeks of eating below the recommended calorie intake, and almost forcing herself at that. I also feel guilty at having introduced such fat-rich foods to her so soon, but I really had no concept at all of how much those kinds of foods could have affected her. That they could have caused such dramatic events was inconceivable to me. And I know what inconceivable means.

The one time we eat today, again quite late on, all we have is a super bland veggie soup – vegetables and water. Not even any salt. And some simply and very lightly fried white fish, after which Maja has another very tired reaction. It is this that triggers her to finally admit to the problems she has with eating, and I realise that I have to tone it down even more when cooking for her. No seasoning of any kind, and absolutely no oil. I really do have to treat her as though she’s properly sick with a body incapable of digesting anything beyond the simple. In that, this is like reintroducing someone to food who has been starved of it for so long for whatever reason. Within that, I’ve decided to eat only what Maja eats. It isn’t a wonderful diet but it really helps with the solidarity of the situation.

Talking about all this, today we focus on what stress has done to Maja’s body and general habits and the picture painted really isn’t pretty. We also decide that what she has isn’t an eating disorder. It’s more like the inability to be able to eat, which is quite different. And as she’s becoming more relaxed here, she is actually starting to want to eat and is even enjoying it a little, as much as one can enjoy bland boiled veggies and white fish. Although I have to say, I did do it quite well.

Maja:

I need to say, I love my family. I love my husband. With my whole heart. A lot of things have happened that have led me to where I am today. But this is one thing I am absolutely adamant on making clear. I can’t be angry at you, or blame you. I would never wish anything bad of any of you. I miss you. I love you so much it hurts my whole being not being with you. Every day. Always. I love you. 

I’m used to being seen as this strong woman that can do anything and never has any real issues, which makes talking about the issues I have really hard. I’m bad at talking about it. I am even bad at admitting any issues to myself. I’m fine. Nothing’s on my mind. Everything is wonderful. I am not vulnerable. I am strong. I am smart. I can handle myself. I can do anything.

Yeah, you get it, I’m that kind of person. 

This can sometimes lead to loneliness and isolation, even in normal times. Add to that, Covid, which has meant it even became frowned upon to meet friends and family. Meetings become sparse and, since I’m usually the one instigating meetings, they become practically non-existent. But I am not good alone, I need people around me to function. I get it if you don’t understand I can be both at once, but I can. I feel alone even when I’m with people but I am very sociable and need to have people around me. 

I’ve often felt alone and I have had a hard time to feel properly understood. So often I only tell maybe one person how I feel, or I don’t tell anyone. It’s hard enough to admit to myself if I have any issues, and if I tell someone and they don’t understand me or take it lightly, I find it so incredibly hurtful that I might not want to speak about it again. 

I always try to be openhearted and explain to people close to me what is going on, I would never purposefully hide my intentions. I just don’t have it in me to deceive anyone. Mark describes me as purehearted to such a level that I can’t even understand how people can have bad intentions. How people can want to hurt people. I can’t help but agree, I don’t understand how people would like to do that. I know some people do. I just would never want to hurt anyone. Ever.

I’m very selective about who I trust enough to talk about any issues, and I rarely even mention anything to anyone. Much easier on everyone. So the problem becomes when I can’t solve the issue by myself. That’s why I’ve been very stressed for a long time now. I’ve been very alone in a situation that grew worse, and I’ve not felt understood in why I’ve taken the decisions I’ve had to take by those I’ve confided in. Which makes me feel taken lightly in a bad situation, leading to further stress and isolation from the world around me. 

I hope that explanation of my personality makes it a little easier for you to understand why the story has come to where it is today.

I’ve been having a hard time recently, and I have had a hard time getting that understood. This has led to me feeling very stressed and I seem to be one of those people that have a problem eating if I get too stressed. It’s like I just can’t eat at all. Usually I am on the other side of the spectrum, alway having to control myself so I don’t eat too much and make sure I eat healthily. So during this period I’ve lost weight a little bit quicker than might have been advisable. I’ve stayed mindful that this is a problem, trying to not completely skip eating and I’ve drunk a lot of water to help me stay alert. A little habit I used to have from years back, is to take a bath when I’m cold, to heat up. I used to do this often, especially when trying one diet after the other. A lot of diets can leave you feeling really cold, so this time when I’ve had these problems eating I’ve taken a lot of baths to heat myself up.

Today I tell Mark about how it got to this place and that I want to return to ordinary eating habits as quickly as possible. He got really worried from what happened last night and I want to calm him down regarding that. I tell him about the stress and how that has made me unable to eat. And that this stress has been there for quite a long time by now, so my body needs to gently get back to normal eating habits. 

Mark listens. Actively. It feels nice to feel heard. I’m not sure how much he understands, but he is starting to puzzle together an image of where I’m coming from. We talk for hours and hours. Of how I feel both mentally and physically. A lot of the subjects I bring up seem to be outside of his normal experiences but he is a great speaking companion. It’s great that he actively listens and tries not to judge. 

Mark:

After dinner I cry in front of Maja for the first time. I have a chunk of my tongue missing. It got ripped off in a hospital accident when I was four years old and very much conscious. I’ve told the story many times, but have only cried once while telling it, which was during a counselling session when I was deep into my fibromyalgia years. Today I cry not for myself but for thoughts my mother and the ordeal she suffered as a result of my own trauma. She was only in her early to mid twenties at the time and what she saw would have mentally scarred the most battle hardened of people.

I was five years old, maybe four. For the purposes of this, I’ve decided I was four. I was in hospital for what was something of an experimental operation on a cleft palate which came as part of the deal of having a hare lip. This cleft is essentially a hole in the roof of the mouth, near the front. The idea to close it was to open up the skin up there, do the same to the end of my tongue, and then surgically attach the two together. The idea was that the two would become anatomically fused, then in a second operation, the tongue could be cut away, leaving the new skin behind, thus closing the hole. I was five, maybe four.

I naturally couldn’t talk much after this operation. There was some debate of me having a kind of signalling device for when I wanted attention. My mum suggested a whistle. I suggested a trumpet. We never got that far.

Although it was an NHS operation, I had a private room. I often did when I had operations at Booth Hall hospital where I was very well known by most of the staff, at least on this particular ward. My physical progress since birth had been so good that there were pictures of me on the wall in the main corridor to show it. This was among pictures of many of the other young patients unfortunate enough to have to frequent a place such as this. My surgeon was the legendary John Lendrum, known to me even deep into adult life, only as Mr Lendrum. His work in the treatment of hare lips and cleft palates was revolutionary and experimental and I believe he spent some time working in developing countries in this very field. I never saw him again once my time in his care was over, which was probably around the early teenage years, and he died in 2015 leaving behind a considerable legacy.

I think this is an excellent opportunity to post up my own selected excerpts of this tribute to him which I found on the website livesonline.rcseng.uk

He was appointed as a consultant plastic surgeon to the North West Region, at three widely separated hospitals – Booth Hall Children’s Hospital, Withington Hospital and Rochdale. It was a good thing that he enjoyed driving, usually fast, in coloured sports cars, with the top down. The stories of his car parking activities in the various hospitals were legendary. My mum said that this sounded exactly like the man she remembered. 

J L was a skilled surgeon. He taught all the time and enjoyed watching young surgeons develop under his guidance and inspiration. He hated management interference with his ability to provide the best possible service for his patients. He was not a committee man and never sought high office in any association, but was elected to the council of BAPS in 1984 and did much useful work chairing the manpower planning and development committee, shaping the future of plastic surgery. John was elected an honorary member of BAPS in 1995. He was an honorary associate of the University of Manchester.

John enjoyed painting and retirement enabled him to paint more. He described himself as an artist with a 35-year interruption for a surgical career! He was a member of the Medical Artists’ Association.

John was a colourful individual; he was loyal and generous, took great care of his patients and staff, but could be rebellious and outrageously incorrect! 

I have no idea what that last statement means, but I’m sure you get the picture. From what I take away from this, basically a man who knew what he was doing, cared deeply about it and what it meant to the people under his care – one of which was of course me – and had absolutely no time for people who had no idea what they were talking about interfering in any of his business in any way.

I was sitting watching TV – Lassie since you’re asking – when a nurse came in on her own. I was five, maybe four.

I didn’t know exactly what she wanted, but she was holding a syringe with a scary looking needle attached. I’d had all kinds of injections and needles since birth so the sight of a needle in the hands of an adult who was about to puncture me with it was already routine. It  held absolutely no fear for me. But this lady was alone and that did. She didn’t even say anything to me, just came towards me as though I was an object she could just stick things in. I wasn’t having that and moved away from her. She wasn’t having that and moved closer to me, at speed. I moved away from her again. She wasn’t having that and came again until the two of us were walking, then running round in circles around the room. Yes, a grown adult, in some petty state of thwarted authoritarian petulance by now at having been disobeyed by a small child, was chasing said small child around a hospital ward brandishing a needle. I started to say no, no, no. Then more. I was five, maybe four.

I screamed.

Yep. Everything just came apart.

I have no memory of that. I remember watching the TV, I remember her coming in, I remember the running round in circles bit. Between that and my mum and her mum entering the room – walking or running I have no idea – I have nothing. For what happened in between I have to rely on the memory of my mother, who wouldn’t even talk of this to me until almost 30 years later, such was the trauma it inflicted upon her. My grandmother never spoke to me of it and I can’t believe it’s a topic I would never have raised with her. What they encountered was me screaming, a bemused nurse, and blood. Horror movie blood. All in my mouth, all down my chin, and all over my white hospital gown and all onto the floor. Enough to slip in. I know that I was quickly sedated, then anaesthetised and operated on again to tidy up this mess. Within that, I lost the end of my tongue and the roof of my mouth was significantly collapsed and similarly scarred. The hold that they were trying to patch up was worse than it had been when it started, although over the years it has mostly closed, just by dint of my growing, so they could have just waited for that to happen and spared us all the – quite literal – pain, not to mention the, again quite literal, sweat blood and tears.

The nurse, I have no idea what happened to her and don’t want to speculate. The operation was abandoned as far as I know and, due to my own selective amnesia of the episode, I was spared the trauma that affected those two female generations. So I’ve always been able to tell the story with a bit of a jokey demeanour. But today I tell Maja of it from the point of view of my mother. It’s too much to think of and I’m barely through it when the tears come. Another little thing that brings us that much closer together.

Maja:

After getting back after dinner, Mark approaches me with what I think of his harelip. I tell him that I don’t really think that much of it. He continues with asking me, you must think something of it. No, not really. I mean, I can see that your upper lip is mainly scar tissue, and it feels a bit strange kissing you. It’s not like kissing anyone I’ve ever kissed before. But I’m OK with that. Mark is really happy that I seem to be so unbothered by it. I mean it was a big shock when I first kissed him, it just felt a bit off. It’s stubblier than usual. Yes, that’s a word now. Since there’s not much of the pink lip tissue, and the stubble starts just where the lip ends, the stubble kind of cuts into my lips when he needs a shave.  And also, his tongue is significantly shorter than normal, which kind of threw me off balance the first time, before I knew what had happened. 

When I’ve thought about this, I’ve seen and noticed the scar tissue, but things like that are deeply personal, so I haven’t been wanting to pry. I decided that I’m going to wait until he wants to tell me the story and that seems to be now. So he talks. And talks. And I get the opportunity to ask questions.

To me this story is worse than I could ever have imagined. So I just listen, and I feel with him, and hug him tightly as he cries. He cries, violently. For the loss of part of his tongue. For the hospital abuse that left him forever mutilated. For the trauma inflicted upon his mother and family seeing everything happening to him as they arrived in the immediate aftermath. For the time and time again of broken promises of surgically fixing the face. For the hope those promises gave, that continued being crushed. Time and time again.

To describe how it looks, his upper lip is almost nonexistent. The lower lip goes outward as a usual lip does, but the upper lip doesn’t have much of that soft pink lip tissue. There is a ton of scar tissue that seems to be connecting the lip tissue with the nose. And that tissue is so tight he has almost no movement there. And the nose is completely surgically made as well, but that story is for another day. 

Mark:

Let’s make this the other day. I was born without a nose. How did I smell? Terrible. Bum bum. Somehow, I have no idea how, it was constructed in the first days and weeks of my life. I think. Apparently it’s ridiculously hard. Or at least Maja says it is. She thinks it’s really funny. 

Maja:

My nose is soft and moves all over the place, I can make the tip touch my cheek, but Marks. Come on. It doesn’t move. At all. Hard as a stone. And quite big. Stone nose. Iron nose. 

His tongue looks like someone has chopped off maybe an inch or so and tried to sew it back together, so the tip of the tongue is missing. The whole thing is short and still has visible signs of where the stitches were. Honestly, if you just look at him, you won’t notice much of what I’ve been talking about, but I am still impressed by how well he manages to do everything, especially with respect to the many missing teeth, most of them being the upper ones.

Mark:

About those missing teeth. It’s not all gaps and stuff, like a boxer’s missing teeth, or the teeth of someone who’s really badly neglected them. They do all meet in the middle. It’s just that there are certain teeth most people have that I just don’t. Like the two little bunny teeth at the top in the middle. You see, I have no gum there. I just don’t. I know. I’m getting more attractive by the second.

Maja:

Just saying, I find Mark quite handsome. We’ve been discussing some of the drawbacks for a while now, so I thought it ought to be said.

I guess he has thought of the horrific tongue incident many times, but today he, for the first time in a long while, re-lives it once more. I feel honoured and happy that he wants to share his stories with me. It’s also nice to not be the only one that is talking.

Tuesday February 23

Maja:

Another day, another good look at the ceiling. There’s really not that much possible to do, when the room is too small to even stand up and stretch in. Not that we don’t try to do that at times. It’s quite refreshing, now that the stresses around me have started to reduce themselves. I can just be here. I don’t have to do anything else. And the view from the window is great. 

For me, it’s not like I have any big purpose for what I am going to do here in London. It’s not like I came here to do anything touristy, or even to work. I’m just here, right now, right here. Without plans, without purpose. It was hard enough to get to where I am right now, and I don’t really fancy going anywhere else.

Mark:

I’m supposed to have a rehearsal/recording session with Sarah today but she gets in touch asking if I wouldn’t mind putting it off for now. No problem. 

Which means me and Maja can just continue as we are. She’s now started speculating that she could be anywhere in the world; all she’s seen for days now is the ceiling of this room, and the inside of the house. She hasn’t even ventured out to the garden yet, or at least not for anything more than a little look. Brazil, we say. Yes. We could well be in Brazil. Why not? As for me, well I’ve not seen much more since she’s been here. The furthest I’ve ventured is out to the shops, so I’ve only been out of the house for around fifteen minutes at a time, and often even less with the most basic shops just right across the road.

Our thoughts are turning more and more towards music and the possibility of her playing with me and Sarah. I admit that Sarah suggested first that Maja play with us and I nixed that idea saying she wasn’t experienced enough, but now I’m starting to think it could be possible; with me and Sarah being a bass only affair, there are all kinds of more simple lines Maja could play below my lines to give more depth to things. At first, we start to talk about rehearsing on our own in the house to have ideas and sections to present to Sarah. This then quickly and seamlessly morphs into, ‘why don’t we do our own thing as well?’ Oh, we really are going and getting excited now, and we start to talk about songwriting and our relevant experiences here. Maja became the main songwriter in Mad Box and I have my own adventures deep in the past, but nevertheless, they are there. Could I be about to start revisiting my songwriting bits again?

 It looks like that could very much be happening. Soon we’re talking about getting started with writing lyrics and wondering what kinds of songs we would write. We’ve been having little silly conversations supposing all kinds of nonsensical scenarios out of nothing. Today Maja starts supposing how you could get someone to love you and we started to think about how that could magically happen, and how a magical object could be developed from that. Before too long we come up with the beanie hat you wear and an idea is born. From that, we have a lyrical concept. Time to get working on it.

Maja:

OK, Mark. Enough crazy talk here. This is crazy. Me, who is just starting out, starting an originals project with you. I’m just not good enough. But it’s not really like there’s anything else happening right now, and I might just be crazy enough to entertain this idea. 

It’s a fun idea, and there’s nothing really that beats lying in bed, joking and writing down the silly thoughts that come out of our jokes. Like, what’ll happen if you put a magical hat on someone, so make them fall in love with you. But it’ll have to be a beanie. In my head I hear the melody of baby love as I sing, Beanie Love. 

Today I also call a couple of my friends in Stockholm to tell them I’m not around anymore and why. They turn out to be very emotional and hard phone calls to make, but nonetheless necessary and good to do. I’m met with sympathy, and albeit happy for that, I feel kind of strange. I’m not used to that kind of behaviour. 

Mark:

Then, how to realise all this? I have my bass and Maja will of course be buying a bass soon, but maybe we need a guitar. Then suddenly it comes to me. ‘I have a guitar. Or at least I think I do.’ I’m sure I bought one especially for songwriting a good while ago, then somehow I left it with Dan. I think. Why the hell I might have done that I have no idea, but I could put a call into him and see if I did and if he still has it.

Now we’ve decided we might actually do something musical together, I take a walk round to the shop and come back with three notebooks. We now have something to get started in. And we do.

I guess this is the point in the story where it could be written that the guy and the girl are in their room all the time just doing drugs. But we don’t do anything like that and know by now that that’s something neither of us is into at all. Yes, alcohol is a drug but in these four days we haven’t even had a drink. Neither have we watched TV. Not even so much as a Youtube video. No music either. Playing or listening. If we have anything you could call a drug it would be just ourselves and being with each other. And we might just both be starting to become addicted.

Maja:

I think there’s a song in that. Addicted to love.

Wednesday February 24

Maja:

So I’m married, and that fact makes everything so much harder. When I first got kissed on the porch, the first thought that flew through my mind was, I’m not going to be able to go back. And do I really want to go back to what I have over there? I’ve tried to ignore the fact, and I’m not really ready to take any decision, but I hate even the thought of me cheating. That’s not who I am. Period. So what in the world am I doing? I’m leaving something behind. A marriage. That’s what I have to give up to continue on this path, and I’m not fond of that. It makes me really sad. The only thing I wanted in the beginning was to be myself and make music. And that is leading all the way to this, slowly, slowly but in the end, that’s where all the “you can’t do this” leads to. 

But I can’t think too much about this today. I just can’t handle analysing everything that happened. I just know that I’m falling in love. I want to be with Mark, and I really enjoy talking to him, being with him. Right now, that’s everything I want. I just want to be here. Right here, right now. Is that really that bad?

We’re definitely more than friends now, right?

Mark:

We have no choice. We have to acknowledge that we’re in some kind of relationship. Or that we have something. We have no idea what, but there is definitely a something here. But yes, Maja is married and very much just on a break of which she’s vaguely said would be in the region of two months. When I suggest that she can just go back when she’s ready, if that’s what she ultimately decides to do, she says that with all that’s gone on between us just in these past five days, she can’t go back now. So where does that leave anything?

It might seem like there’s been a whole lot of serious analytical chat going on and that would be right. But in between, sometime right in between, there’s been a whole lot of laughter. I’ve laughed with Maja more and harder than I’ve ever laughed with anyone. And by now we’re also starting to realise that we react the same way to a lot of situations. Some of that Maja knows from reading certain Diary episodes. But also, in all kinds of situations we’ve spoken about and been through over the past six weeks or so, professional and very personal. And of course we’re learning a lot about each other within these four walls and under this ceiling. The biggest of these we’re learning about is the many parallels we have in career trajectories and the breakdowns we both had.

I was a journalist and rose very quickly – once I finally made it in. Journalism is ridiculously hard to break into, to the point that it starts to actually seem impossible. And indeed, most people do give up. I didn’t, although I didn’t get my first break until I had just turned 23. But within a year I had doubled my starting salary, and before I turned 25 I was a magazine editor and foreign correspondent. I carried on for quite a few more years, continuing to progress and loving it loving it loving it. Then, as I approached 30, I realised I was declining physically and mentally on the job until I just simply couldn’t function anymore. A low point came when I was called into a management meeting – really. Me, two editors and an executive – and told in a diplomatic roundabout way that I was slacking and letting myself and the team down. What I kinda remember them actually saying was that if I had some idea of what would work best for me and if readers really liked it, then they would pay me more. The other side of that coin was the hint that what I was currently doing wasn’t worth what they were paying me. I think this could be called a professional intervention. A few weeks later, I was done and out of the media game.

Maja:

It’s interesting to get to know a little bit more about the Mark from before his diaries, and he shares many stories which I listen to intensely. I can’t help but discover a lot of similarities between our professional lives. What’s extremely telling is that we both entered very highly advanced fields, worked and thrived there for years until we ran face first deep into the wall. We both know how it feels to have our head a foot length deep into the wall, not knowing that it was there, and then the inevitable crash that comes afterwards. You don’t realise when you’re well past the point of no return. At least we never did. You go forward, doing everything you used to do, perhaps adding a lot of training to take care of yourself because you notice that you need something. But apart from that, completely oblivious of the damage your stressed out lifestyle is inflicting you. 

Mark:

Oh yes. The training thing. When I first realised I was deep tired, I was already training twice a week with a semi professional rugby team, plus playing in their third team. But my response to being tired? Not cut back on training. No. It was just obvious to me that I was tired because I wasn’t fit enough. So the response – more training. Maja laughs quite bitterly when I mention this.

Maja:

I never knew until it was too late. Neither did he. I continued to work, train, do band rehearsals and meet friends, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I planned every minute of my time, trained 11 hours a week, band rehearsal maybe 7 to 10 hours a week and I was home after 10 pm almost every day and out around 7 am. All the time. I was emotionally available to anyone needing to talk, and took good care about everything. On top of all this I always did my absolute best at work, and had a top salary for my age, with huge responsibilities and a good reputation.

It’s special to talk about this with someone that experienced the same things, albeit in a slightly different way. For him this was years ago, and he found his way forward through yoga and music. He never returned to journalism. For me, this is right here and right now.

I’m still stumbling. 

Mark:

I hear today that the big story in the Diaries that really resonated with Maja, and which confirmed her thought once and for all that we shared very similar wavelengths, was the day me and Paul rescued the young girl who was lost, desperate and on the verge of being homeless at Euston Station, one of the very last places in London you would want to be a young girl who is lost, desperate and on the verge of being homeless. As she read that, she realised that she would have acted the same way as I did pretty much from the beginning to the end of the episode. That is, I was initially cynical yet open minded, which gave way to acceptance, openness and help, and then I stayed with her with Paul until it was just me and her for the last hour or so until I finally saw on a train to the house of a relative of hers who I’d been in communication with since the first few minutes of the encounter.

Maja:

For me this story proved an important judgement of character. I actually have a similar story, helping an eight month pregnant lady asking people for help in a supermarket. I still think of her at times, wondering how she’s doing. I hope she’s well. I can’t remember the exact circumstances but she’d been at a house viewing, forgot her wallet somewhere so she couldn’t take the train home to another town, her phone ran out of battery and she was hungry. I was sceptical at first, but then realised her situation, we got into my car and drove home, and I gave her some leftovers from the night before, let her rest and charge her phone and gave her money for the train. She was immensely grateful, and I felt a little bit guilty for not believing her at once. Everyone she asked looked the other way. I was also so sceptical I was almost not helping her. I’m really glad I did though. So reading this story about Mark, really made me feel like he reacted in the same way as me. It felt honest, but not riskful. Wise in a way. This little story he posted ages ago, made me feel a little bit like this is a nice guy. Probably trustworthy.

Mark:

Since Maja arrived, we haven’t left the tiny room together for any sustained period of time. Most of it has been spent in there with just bathroom and shower breaks, punctuated only by trips to the kitchen for food. But even there, eating has been ridiculously sporadic and mostly still taken place in the bedroom. The weather hasn’t been great to be fair, but it’s sunny today and Maja really wants us both to go out and sit in the sun. So out we go and join Sam, who Maja joyously chats with. There have been one or two chats with Sam and Cris and when it’s been one on one with Maja and one of those guys, I’ve pretty much stayed out of it, allowing them to get to know each other without my input. I’ve spoken enough to all of them. It’s the same now as we lie back in the deckchairs and take in the February sun. This is something Maja is really having a wonderfully tough time to process. February sun. Back in Sweden they’re still up to their waists in snow and battling temperatures touching minus double figures. Now, here she is wearing sunglasses and the bare minimum of clothes, reclining in what she was jokingly referring to last week as tropical London. Well today it really is something of a dictionary definition of tropical as far as anyone in Sweden would be concerned. 

Cris joins us now and it’s clear that him and Sam have been starting to come to the same conclusions the two of us have been coming to, with Cris revelling in jokes about the lovebirds. At this, me and Maja just look at each other and laugh. The whole scene gives way to a really warm garden hang with us providing the tunes from Maja’s phone for an early summer soundtrack.

Maja:

It’s been nice hanging out with Sam and Cris a little bit as well. I like them both, they’re great. I don’t think Sam is out to be good friends, with him a feel more of a nice flatmate vibe. Which is very nice as well. I’m a bit more curious about Cris, who is the singer of one of the bands Mark plays with at times -The Wild Child. He is teasing us a little bit, calling us birdy birds. But he is rarely at home, and I look forward to getting to know him better at a later stage.

Mark:

Inspired by the music, when we’re left alone, Maja turns the conversation round to basses and suggests we start looking at what she could buy. For the first time, we’re looking at the same screen as Maja starts thinking about what her next bass could look like. Then she surprises me by asking, ‘What kind of bass would you like to play? I’m now thinking of buying two.’ Her reasoning is that if this is the case, she might as well buy at least one I’d really like to play. I’m good with just my Washburn to be fair, but I’m happy to give my input here and start to think about something I would also like to work with.

It takes a while, but we finally settle on a Lakland and a Sadowsky and both pretty much mid to top of the range. Of course we’ve not been able to try either out, but they look beautiful, very classy, and it goes without saying that the actual quality of them will be right up there with the best. Will they be nice to play? Impossible to say but I’m sure we’ll get used to whatever little differences we find. Maja hits the buy button with complete confidence. With names like these, you really can’t go wrong. Worst case, she reasons, if she doesn’t like one, she’ll at least like the other. Then I can make myself like the other one.

Maja: 

Before I was going to England, I played a lot of bass and was just starting to get serious with it, so I decided that I would buy one to have while I was here. I had kind of decided on a decent budget for this already. Since last autumn I’ve been eyeing the Fender professional II J bass. I played it in the music store, and it was just something else. So I thought that I could use the money for that bass to buy something in London instead and bring that one back with me later. 

So we start to look at music shops, and I realise that instead of buying one bass, I can afford two decent basses, so I could just buy one that Mark would like to play as well. Maybe. Looking around I find a Shadowsky and a Lakland that look really nice, so I decide to go for both. Since I can’t test them in the store because of covid, I could at least send one of them back if I’m unlucky. But they are great brands, so I’m sure it’ll be fine.

London, day six

Thursday February 25

Maja:

Mark is supposed to have his rehearsal with Sarah today. Apart from that, we haven’t been playing much music since I got to London, which means it’s time to start now. Mark has a riff he’s been playing with Sarah that he needs to remember for today. It’s a simple enough riff; it’s just that internalising the phrasing is kind of hard. So is there a better way to internalise new melodies than to teach them to someone? That’s the thought when he starts teaching me the riff for the song white rabbit. It’s simple enough, but the repetitiveness of it makes it easy to get lost in it, and that is why he needed to rehearse it some more. And for me, it’s quite amazing to be able to be of any kind of help. And I finally get to try the iconic Washburn that Mark has been using for all these years. It plays beautifully. It feels so special to have it in my hands. The bass that’s been accompanying him for all these adventures during all these years. Playing it, I feel more connected to Mark.

Mark:

Yeah. That White Rabbit thing. No idea why. It has just refused to stick in my head. This is where listening, listening, listening comes in but it still refuses to stick. No panic. I’ll get there.

In other, perhaps more significant news, Maja stops me cold and short today when, somewhere in the middle of chatting, she asks me if I’d be up for having kids. ‘I’m not saying I want them now,’ she says, ‘but if I’m to start a relationship with anyone, I have to know this is something that could be a possibility in the future.’ I get it. But the crazy thing is, not only do I not think there’s anything strange about the question, but I say yes straight away. Again, not now. But sometime in the future. I’m saying I would not rule it out and that’s the closest I’ve ever come to even entertaining the idea in my whole life. Since I was little more than a child I’ve said that I would never have kids and I’ve never come close to changing that viewpoint. Until now. And it feels totally natural to say that. What the hell is happening here? Apart from anything else, yesterday we were talking about not knowing where we were, and now we’re talking about kids. And a relationship? Well, this is certainly a something.

Maja:

I’m enjoying the time we spend together, talking, reflecting on life. And before any commitment, I’d like to know how Mark stands on some of the big things of life. Like kids. It’s only natural I ask. I’m relieved when the answer of yes comes back, with full confidence. It’s just such a shame that we don’t have that much longer to talk about it, because it is time for Mark’s rehearsal. Good luck.

Mark:

But, more than just a rehearsal with Sarah, today is the day we’re going to do a full recording of our show to see what we have and maybe have a template to start to show people.

As usual I’m taking all my gear including amp, so Sarah is coming here to help me carry it to hers. Yes I can manage it all myself but this is a nice little regular gesture from her and it does make things a little easier. But she has a slight ulterior motive this time which she has not been at all shy in hiding. She wants to meet Maja. But Maja very much wants to meet her as well. Afterall, this will be her first encounter with any of my London music friends, and so her first real encounter with the actual scene.

Maja:

I’m a bit excited. I haven’t really met any people since I arrived apart from Mark and our flatmates, and rightly so because of the quarantine. I’m still allowed to be on our premises, which includes our front porch, so I’ll be OK to go out and say hello to Sarah. When I hear the knock on our door, I follow Mark upstairs, getting all nervous. Mark opens the door with a key, wait what, he uses a KEY??? I don’t have a key yet. Does that mean I can’t get out? What kind of house needs a key to get out? This is all very strange.

Mark:

Oh yeah. I’ve forgotten to tell Maja about this key thing, or to get one cut for her. What if she really does need to get out for any reason? But even apart from that, without a key, she’s not just willingly in quarantine, she really is actually locked in. Oops. I’ve accidentally kidnapped Maja.

Maja:

Outside, a very excited and giddy girl awaits us. She looks so excited to see us. Like a little child she is bubbling and bouncing with excitement. Hello hello hello. I get all shy and try to act normal, say hello and everything. It’s obvious that she wants to say hello with a hug, and who am I to resist? We do some small talk, and then it’s time for them to leave for rehearsal. Both say goodbye and they start to leave. Wait what? Just like that?

‘Hey Mark, can you come here?’ Mark comes back to the door, I grab him by the collar and kiss him. See you later. I can see how he turns all flustered and red as he says ‘see you soon’ and locks the door.

I walk downstairs, to my room. I’m quite tired so I take a nap, but I can’t stop thinking: What kind of house needs a key to get out of???

I know I’m gonna get one, it’s just been forgotten since I’m self isolating. But still, what if a fire started or something? I just don’t get it, what about guests? You lock them in with you? What if you were creepy and the guest wanted to leave, they need to ask permission from the host that they’re trying to get away from. This is just not OK. How can they build houses like this? Is it only this house that is like this, maybe it’s the landlord that’s exceptionally cheap and hasn’t installed a proper door? But still.

Why do you have to lock people inside the house?

Mark:

These are all very good points and I have never thought about any of them, although it’s quite normal to have doors like this in the UK. Don’t ask me why, it just is. As a result of this system I’ve found myself locked in the house plenty of times, when I’ve been just about to leave and not able to find my key. And yes, then managing to make myself late, or even very late for whatever it was I was about to leave for. Very relevant digression. I once stayed over at a friend’s house – the house had a double lock so it could be locked from the outside but could still be opened from the inside. Unless someone actually did lock it from the outside, which my friend kindly didn’t do when they went to work. However, the housemates didn’t know I was in the house so yes. When they went to work, the door got locked from the outside. Cue a very embarrassed Mark having to call the office to say he can’t get to work today as he’s managed to get himself locked in a friend’s house and can’t go anywhere until someone comes back. Oh well. It was a nice day off.

I’m all packed and ready by around 5pm when there’s a knock at the door. ‘She’s here,’ says Maja. Indeed she is. We walk upstairs, I open the door, and Sarah’s standing there, all totally expectantly. ‘Are we hugging?’ We are. With that, the two of them are out in the small front garden hugging and talking excitedly like sisters who haven’t seen each other for too long. I leave them to it and go and get the rest of my stuff from downstairs. When I come back up, they’re still there and still both talking a hundred miles an hour. Finally, Sarah says, ‘OK Mark, are we ready to go?’ Yep. Once again, Maja tells her that but for the quarantine rules she’d love to be coming along. Next time, Sarah promises. Yes, of course. Next time. I’m kinda playing it cool with Maja, not wanting to be too ‘public’ in front of Sarah, so I just say goodbye and Maja goes into the house and we start to walk away. Then Maja calls me back to the front door. Oh, OK. I go back and she gives me a goodbye kiss right there in front of Sarah who, as I turn back, is looking on open mouthed, in stunned, delighted shock. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’ Yes. With that she goes off on a celebratory skip down the road before returning, giggling like someone 20 years younger, to help me with the gear.

On the way I tell Sarah how me and Maja have been talking and I think we could incorporate her into the act in a way I didn’t think was possible a few days ago. Sarah is well up for the idea, saying it is much more about attitude than playing, and that if Maja has one thing, based on what she’s just seen for the first time, it’s attitude. ‘And you guys are just right together,’ she says. ‘I could see that straight away. Now, if you can take that chemistry and turn it into music, you have gold, no matter what levels of ability you’re talking about.’ That sets off a spark in me. Yes, this really could be something to think about. And with that, me and Maja have a project. And definitely something to talk about later.

But oh dear. With everything that’s been going on over the past week, I am woefully underprepared for today’s session in which we intend to do a full, recorded rehearsal of our short show, which is five songs all segued into each other. I’ve barely touched the bass all week. I had a tiny little play today just as I realised this, just to make sure I could remember the rhythmic parts of what we’re doing and how each song goes into the next one. But as for the solo I have to do, I am way out of practice and am just going to have to make sure I’m warmed up, and fall back on what I’ve actually come up with rather than trying to improvise a bunch of cool stuff around it which is what I usually do. This is not a time for risk-taking in my playing. While I’m on the subject of practice, I really should address my Players Path journey, or lack of. Yes, I got right to the end of level nine, with a video for every track. But what I really wanted to do, right from the beginning of it all, was to record a single video of all the tracks, kind of like making a recording of a live show. To do that, I was studying some of the theory related to soloing and improvising within them and wanted to nudge myself onto that next level before moving onto this stage of the project. I had one tiny window to record that, a Sunday a few weeks ago when I had a few hours alone in the house when I could have got this done. But I hesitated, thinking I still wanted to check out just a few things before being ready. Then all this started kicking off and I’ve not fully been back to it since. Now by this stage, I’m really out of practice with it all. Gone totally backwards to be fair. Forget nuances, I would need to totally relearn whole sections of songs before even thinking of details of theory within them. As such, this project has to be declared on ice for now. But hey, I still managed to record a video for every song.

As it is, when we get to working with Sarah today, I’m barely holding on to what I can play with her stuff. But that’s alright. Sarah isn’t in great shape preparationwise either which lets me off the hook actually. It looks like we’ve both let ourselves go a bit, but we do each have a lot of experience and technique to fall back on. All this means it takes six or seven takes to get a full one take recording of our show. In between we just go with it and have a laugh at our own little hiccups and mistakes which we pretty much equally share which means I can feel a little less guilty at not being as prepared as I would normally be. Of this, Sarah is totally understanding given what’s been going on this week. More, she loves it and loves the story of where we are.

Just as I’m about to leave, I realise Sarah has an acoustic guitar. Of course she does. We’ve been using it to get a few concepts together, and there it is in the corner of the room. Could I possibly borrow that please for me and Maja to work on? Of course you can, she says. Brilliant. With that, we’re sorted.

Maja:

I fall asleep soon after Mark leaves for rehearsal, and I really need the rest. It’s wonderful to spend time together, and I’d rather do that, but if I’m alone, I want to sleep. All of a sudden, I’m woken up by someone walking down the stairs, and opening my door. Yes! He’s home! I sit up as quickly as possible and say hello.

In his hand he has a guitar, I wasn’t expecting that. Cool. I guess he plays the guitar, and has a plan about this, but I don’t know that much about this yet. But it’s always nice to have a guitar around, especially for songwriting.

Mark:

Oh yeah. Maja, I can play guitar.

Maja:

We soon make ourselves comfortable and continue talking. I’m not that good of a musician and I know that Mark pretty much only ever works with very skilled musicians. So when he opens up with the possibility of me working with him and Sarah, I’m shocked. You can’t mean me, joining you guys? Doing what? What? I was kinda expecting to maybe be able to join to watch a rehearsal, but really, I wasn’t even expecting that. I’m a beginner, and I play bass, the same instrument as Mark. So what am I going to do? Mark has been thinking that we both could play bass, he has some kind of concept that he is starting to build up in his mind. A concept that wouldn’t be too advanced for me and would support what he’s doing. Amazing.

Apparently, I’ve moved to London, without any set plans, and within a week I’ve joined my first band. I could even say my first professional band, since we’re planning shows and Mark and Sarah are, well, professionals. Just, wow. Or, wowsers, as Sarah would say.

I start to talk, going on about why one would go to London. No-one would go to London like I did, not after Brexit, not during Covid. I just continue to talk, just putting words on the thoughts that come out of my head, like a stream of running water. 

Mark:

It’s with some excitement that I return home and bring the guitar into the room to show Maja. And with it, the news that Sarah loves the idea of the two of us playing together with her. So it’s game on. We’re starting to reach whole new levels now. We’re talking about having kids, playing together in the same band, and also thinking about our own style and songs, which we can write on this new guitar we now have. Maja came to London to get away from something. Now she’s starting to feel she also went towards something. ‘What do you come to London for?’ she asks. ‘For the music scene, which doesn’t exist, but here we are talking about music. There are so many other reasons to come. But I just didn’t expect to come to London and fall in love.’

What now?

She continues talking, musing quietly to herself really, with me as an incidental audience. But I’ve zoned out. I’m thinking about what she’s just said and thinking how I should respond. Afterall, we’ve spoken about this being something of a relationship, and just a few hours ago we were talking about having kids together, or at least whether or not we were open to the possibility of it. And all the while we’ve been becoming closer and closer in every other way. As friends too. As close friends. As even best friends. Yeah. That’s how it feels, with the depth with which we talk, and the highs as well. Filled with the kind of joyful spontaneous shared laughter I’ve experienced with very few people before, or maybe even no-one before. And she’s said the word now. I think it’s my turn. She’s still talking but for once I’m not fully listening. She can see that because she comes to a faltering stop around the same time as I interject saying, ‘Maja…’ ‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’ A breath, a pause. It’s out there now.

‘I love you too.’

Maja:

All of a sudden, when my thoughts and words finally slow down Mark says:

‘I love you’.

I look him in the eyes, wondering where this came from all of a sudden. I stop to take a breath, to allow myself to think for a second. 

‘I love you too’.

Mark:

No more words are needed. No more words are spoken. This is almost too much to take. It kind of really is too much to take. I think it’s really happened. The magical, elusive formula, the ideal of countless books, movies and songs. I’m in love with my best friend. And she’s in love with me. To hopelessly paraphrase and misquote the movie Notting Hill, ‘There are billions of people in the world and you’re sent out to find just one of them that you love. Not only that, but they have to love you back. The odds of that are millions to one.’ Yes. It really is something that seems impossible. Now, here we are. To steal again, this time from Jason Mraz: ‘Lucky I’m in love with my best friend/lucky to have been where we have been/lucky to be coming home again.’ As we settle blissfully into our new reality, I play this song for Maja. And for me. For us. And yes, as it plays, I cry in front of her for the second time. Oh Mark, pull yourself together.

Then reality comes back to us. ‘Mark,’ she says. ‘Yes?’ ‘You do realise I’m still married?’ ‘Yes.’ And I have Jenn, immediately below us downstairs. Different situation but even so. Maja stops and ponders all this, then explodes in a whisper. ‘Boy, we’re in trouble.’

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.

London, day eight

Saturday February 27

Mark:

The basses arrive, along with a few accessories that were also ordered and it’s like Christmas. They look as beautiful as imagined. But all of a sudden, the tiny room has got even tinier. That’s OK. It’s for the sake of new basses. However, when we each have a little play of them, it’s fair to say we’re a little underwhelmed. This unpacking business has taken quite a while so we put our reservations down to high expectations and decide to leave them for now and come back to them when we have some time to really have a good look. Afterall, it could just be setup issues which could be easily fixed but which need a little more consideration that we’re really willing to give right now.

Instead, for the first time since we met we do something called TV watching. It’s kinda fun and we don’t do it for a great amount of time. There’s some discussion about what exactly to watch and we settle on Maja showing me Melodifestivalen. This is Sweden’s show to decide what their entry to Eurovision will be and it runs over several episodes and kinda looks like the final stages of The X Factor or American Idol. And it’s all set in Stockholm with location links from the presenters, which gives her a little revisit to her city and an opportunity to give me a virtual introduction. As we see the presenters in various locations, she talks to me a little about the sights, most notably those of Gamla Stan, the historic old part of the city.

Maja:

It’s fun to be able to introduce some things from my country to Mark. And if there’s one thing we both enjoy, it’s music. So why not take the opportunity to watch something live from Sweden, which encapsulates the best and worst of Sweden in the same short TV program without having to focus on really watching it? And we can have our own little guessing game. Perfect for tonight. 

Mark:

But mostly we concentrate on the songs and, as with all other things Eurovision, have a great time making our own selections about who should be going through and who should be going home. And also with all things Eurovision, we have great fun seeing our favourite selections completely ignored while songs we thought were total duds get the go ahead. Oh well. Songs eh? Everyone’s an expert and no-one knows anything. In fact, Ireland’s top music TV and radio personality Dave Fanning once spoke to me about the minefield of trying to gauge if a song is any good or not, saying, ‘No-one knows anything. There are no geniuses in this game.’

London, Day nine

Sunday February 28

Mark:

The day before the last day of Maja’s quarantine and excitement is mounting at her finally being able to get out and about. Out to see London, maybe out to see a friend or two of mine, because outdoor meetings of small groups is allowed. And of course, the possibility of the two of us getting out to rehearsals at Sarah’s. 

Maja:

I’m way too excited about this. I’ve not seen anything of this new country that I am currently residing in. Not anything apart from the calm neighbourhoodly view from my window. My feet are itching to be used. The weather’s been mockingly nice these last couple of days with the air bringing me a delightful spring taste. How will I manage to stay put during these last couple of days? Maja. Keep. Calm. You will get out. Soon. 

Mark:

But also, with Maja still not being able to go out, the priority is to really have a look at these basses and to see if we hadn’t been too harsh with first impressions. I’d had a look at the Lakland and Maja had mainly concentrated on the Sadowsky, but I think there’s been just a little bit of not really wanting to know because we didn’t want to have to admit the reality. But we have a look now and quickly conclude the truth after the excitement of New Bass(es) Day. These are objectively terrible. Not that we don’t like the setups or feels, but they are actually bad and should never have left the factory, let alone the shop. Both are full of fretbuzz for a start and no amount of tinkering with the action of either solves this problem. Then, the Sadowski’s frets, all the way down, protrude sharply to the side, meaning any playing up and down the fretboard would start to cut your hands apart. So no. Unplayable. The Lakland has similar issues and one of the screws in the body is rusty. Yes, actually rusty. If that’s what it looks like on the outside, what the hell is going on on the inside? No, we have no confidence in these basses at all. There are little physical alterations we could make to both, including truss rod adjustment, to realign the neck and eliminate fretbuzz, but if any adjustment doesn’t work, especially anything like attempting to file down frets, no refund would be issued as it would be argued that the basses had been physically meddled with. So they just have to go back. And not for resetups either. No. Nothing but a full refund will do. This particular shop will not be getting repeat custom from these quarters. 

Maja:

These new basses are just a disappointment. I can’t believe how bad they are. I thought buying two would reduce the risk of this so we would at least end up with one that we liked, but this is just ridiculous. Beyond.

Day 10

Monday March 1

Mark:

On the phone to the shop and very little resistance is met. They will send a van to pick up the basses and, once they’re happy we’ve not damaged them in any way, a full refund will be issued. OK. Fair enough.

We ‘celebrate’ Maja’s last night of quarantine and anticipate tomorrow’s London odyssey by ordering in pizza and going for what has become a real treat. Takeout cocktail bags from Ladies And Gents, the underground toilet cocktail bar in Ktown. Basically, they give you six cocktail measures in a large sealed plastic bag, and in another bag, you have the little bits of dried, seasoned fruit they would put in them. Then at home you put them together yourself. This is all a perfect accompaniment for our second attempt at watching any kind of TV – Maja’s favourite – Doctor Who. We get 20 minutes in and give up. It seems TV really doesn’t work for us.

Maja:

I’ve really, really looked forward to watching Doctor Who, because I haven’t been able to watch the latest seasons in Sweden. No streaming service owns the rights to it in Sweden right now. So when it comes to things I want to watch here, Doctor Who is my highest priority. But we just can’t seem to focus. 

Come on Mark. You’re just too much fun to be with. How are we ever going to get anything done?

Day 11

Tuesday March 2

Maja:

What a beautiful day. At least I think so, I haven’t really been able to compare the days to anything, being in self isolation since arrival. I wake up energetic and positive, sending a text to Mark, “Good morning, I’m up now!”. He is already awake waiting on me. Today is the day we’ve been looking forward to, it’s the day of the non-quarantine life starting! I’m quick about showering and getting dressed, since I really wish to get out as soon as I possibly can. And I am going to experience London today.

Shoes are located, and they almost look dusty from not having been used in ages. Or as dusty objects untouched for 10 days get. 

• Mark, I’m ready to go now!
• How do you feel, for your first London walk?
• It’s amazing. Come on, let’s go now!!!

I got my key a couple of days ago, and now for the first time I walk up the staircase and put the key in the keyhole and open up the door to lockdown London. My London. My mood rises even higher as I step out the door, and take a deep breath of the outside air. It tastes like freedom. I grab Mark by the hand, use my other arm to point in a vague direction of the town.

• Today, I want to go in that direction.
• Sure, today, you lead the way.

I’ve never been in London, and don’t even have the slightest of concept of where things are, but that doesn’t matter. When I get to a new place, I like to just wander and see things as they come. I’ve done it so many times, in cities all over the world, at times alone, at times with someone else. One of my favorite things to do as a tourist is to go on the underground to a station somewhere and when I get up from the station I just go in whatever direction seems the most interesting. One thing I am careful with doing this, is not to read any direction signs or definately not any maps, since that is going to reduce the amount of surprises I get. If you are going to do the touristing in a Maja way, avoid maps and signs and just go. I recommend it, you might find something you otherwise would never find if you only go for the big attractions. But if you do it like this, you might miss all of the big attractions though. 

So off me and Mark go. In that direction. It is sunny but cold outside, a wonderful spring day. We find ourselves getting back to the Kentish Town area, where a lot of people are walking around. Many of them wear face masks. I find Kentish Town a bit too busy and crowded. And it is all filled with strange people. People who look old. And scary. I’m not that fond of the place, and I can’t really understand the depth of the wrinkles in people’s faces. How can they look so worn out and old?

We walk into Kentish town, where there is this huge bridge, and I take a sharp left turn, walking onto a smaller, calmer street. It’s nice to walk in the calmer areas and I am fond of how the air feels a little bit easier to breathe and there aren’t as many strange people to look at anymore. Being in crowds makes me feel a little bit suffocated, especially right now. So it is perfect that I am experiencing lockdown London, and not full on tourist London. I am needing a little time to adapt. 

The town has turned into a little cute residential area, where just after walking a little while I can see Mark shine up like a little excited tomato. 

• This is the first real apartment I lived in when I moved to London. 

He points me to an apartment complex. It’s cool that the first place I manage to find is his first apartment. And it isn’t really in a place you pass by that often. Mark stops by the local store next to the apartment to buy some fizzy water. I wait outside not to crowd the store, and as I peek in I can see him searching for something. It takes quite a while but soon enough he comes out with 2 bottles of fizzy water and some chocolate. Galaxy coins in a bag. I love that chocolate, Galaxy. It has rapidly become my new favorite chocolate. And he also brought us a crunchie bar. 

• I know this chocolate! My friend bought it for me once, when I was young. It’s really good and tastes like caramel, right? I saw you looking around in the store a lot, what did you search for?
• Oh, they didn’t have it. I’m going to buy it for you later. 

I’m happy with what we got and enjoy my chocolate and fizzy water breakfast, continuing down the road to wherever. 

We walk around a lot of smaller residential areas as I keep turning around at unpredictable times, but I think we are getting ourselves closer to London. Mark has promised me that he won’t tell me any directions. Today it is I who takes him around London, not the other way around. We get to a little open cafe where they have moved the cashier to the entrance door, so you are able to buy a drink for take away. I buy myself a latte and Mark goes for tea, of course. Like the incurable Englishman he is. 

Mark:

While we’re choosing and paying for our drinks, I have a little casual chat with the staff. Just the kind of little pleasant exchanges that happen in places like this. And I tell them we’re off out experiencing Maja’s first day in London and that this is her first coffee shop. As we walk away, Maja again reacts to this. ‘You really do talk to each other here,’ she says. Yes we do. I guess it’s in these little differences that you know you’re in another country. That and the bridge right in front of us which has ‘CAMDEN TOWN’ painted all over it.

Maja:

We take our drinks and continue along, and I see Mark kind of squeaking when he realises where we are. I lead us on a little road that doesn’t look that special, but on the left side of the road there is a little shop that Mark takes interest in. I go closer and realise I’ve found my way to the bass gallery. The famous bass gallery is just here. In front of me. When I’m just casually walking around, expecting to find nothing. Wow. Just amazing. It is closed of course, we’re in lockdown London, there are no stores open here. Expect pharmacies and food stores. We stand outside the store for a while, pointing at the different basses that we’ve looked at online. I really wish the place was open. Oh well, there’s no point in hanging around here for too long. We continue along, into Camden Town. 

Camden Town, oh my what a place, and I have BigNIC to show me around. BigNIC stands for, Big Name In Camden. 

Mark:

I was given this very flattering name in my first year in London by the bar staff at The Oxford. 

Maja:

He is known in every bar, every club. The kind of guy that just can go anywhere and always have people to talk to. Mark really knows his way around here. The town of the crazies. With a neverending nightlife. Everything is closed, of course, and it is really eerie on the streets. When all the cool people have retired to their fancy houses in the countryside or other countries even, it is only the crazies left. The people I wouldn’t really like to talk to, but they just keep on chatting to Mark. The place has a rundown feel to it, it isn’t really that nice right now. All bars, if you look into the windows even the chairs are put away. There’s nothing there. At times even the windows are barricaded shut with wooden boards. It’s a sad sight. This once very lively ghosttown.

We walk around Camden, and get to a big building site at the edge of Camden, so instead of going there I choose to turn around on a little street, which just leads me right back to where I started. So we get to see a little more of this town of the crazies. One thing I quickly notice is that Amy Winehouse is a big theme around here. I find pictures of her just about everywhere. Largely painted on building walls, and just about anywhere. I have to ask Mark.

• Where do you get out of this town, we seem to just go in circles. Do we have to go to that building site over there past the cat building?
• Yeah, that’s the way to town. 
• OK, let’s go then.

We continue on our walk and arrive into an area with a completely different feel to it. Now the buildings aren’t that rundown anymore, they feel more like the modern buildings in Tokyo, a place I know very well and compare to a lot. We go into a building which Mark points out that we are currently next to. 

• Come on, I’d like to show you where we are right now. 

We walk in a huge building with row after row of shops inside of it. All closed and dark giving of an eerie feel. There is almost no one around. One or two people around the place, and everyone wears masks of course. It’s a train station, and when I go up the stairs to the second floor I realise immediately where we are. This is Kings Cross. We stand looking at the international railway departure hall. And I’ve seen this place before, the first place I’ve actually recognised before. It’s from the scene when Hagrid disappears after giving Harry his ticket to the Hogwarts express at platform 9 and ¾. I know that they should have a tourist attraction with the entrance to platform 9 and ¾, but it seems to be nowhere around here. Oh well, maybe we’ll find it another day. I’m going to have Mark show me the way next time. I guess I am just that nerdy. I love the Harry Potter books. To me they are a big part of my childhood and I love them for all of the wonderful days I’ve spent sucked into the magical world of Harry Potter. 

Kings Cross is a train station, and thereby the only real place where they seem to be allowed to have toilets open. So we take the opportunity to use it, since it doesn’t seem to be the case for the smaller stations. That’s also a handy piece of information for you to put into your box of information you are probably never going to use again, in case you need a toilet in a pandemic, go to Kings Cross. 

We soon find ourselves hungry and tired from walking, outside the empty British Museum. It’s around lunchtime, and it would be great to find a bite somewhere to grab. But everything is closed. We’re now in the centre of London, which means the area that people don’t really live in. So there’s just not that much demand for takeaway restaurants during a pandemic. Takeaway is often not even an option, many of the open restaurants are delivery only, which doesn’t really fit when you’re on a long walk. We’re close to the Marquis so Mark tries to give his friend Tommy a call, but he isn’t available. Mark had an idea it would be cool to meet him up, but anyways it might be best not to. So we need to find something to eat now. We go sit down on a doorstep in a back alley in front of the British museum and rest for a little while. Tommy didn’t answer, so we need to find somewhere else. It’s cold and we’re tired and hungry. Let’s go search for a supermarket or something that’s open. We go and after a while we find an actually decent sized supermarket where we go in to buy lunch. They have a sushi desk in it with store made sushi. For us, that feels like hitting the jackpot. We buy sushi and some mango pieces, and look for a place to sit down to eat it. We settle on a beautiful railing outside a building, finally resting a little bit. 

• Mark, say aaaah.
• Aaaah.

And I put a big chunk of mango in his mouth. 

• You know mango, it’s bass player food. If you’re a bass player, you can’t get nutrition from anything else.
• I didn’t know that. That must have been why I’ve been losing weight recently. I haven’t had any mangoes!

After our wonderful meal of enough mango to keep us bass players healthy and some sushi for good sake, back up on our feet it is. We’re somewhere central right now, and I have no idea where. It’s not many people out and about the place, but we manage to find a couple of cafes that are open. There is one selling bubble tea which seems popular, but I want to go to the ordinary coffee shop next to it, which is a wonderful fairly big shop where the barista Dario is working. Mark strikes up a conversation and we talk about the different coffee types and I go for a nice brazilian blend. It turns out there really aren’t many customers coming around here, and I suspect we might be his first customers today. And it is afternoon. Not long until close for a coffee shop. We talk about everything from me being new in London to his country in South America. Talking for a while and he says:

• Would you guys like some pastries?
• Oh, yes please.
• There really hasn’t been anyone buying pastries today.

He talks while he starts loading croissants and pain au chocolat into a paper bag, one, two, three. Oh wait what, how many is he going to fill them up with? He fills the bag to the brim, I think it is with about maybe 10 enormous pieces. Thankyou very much Dario. It’s well appreciated. 

We can’t be standing there holding the shop busy for too long, so off we go, continuing left. I’m feeling the left direction today. That’s the way to go. We walk for a while and then Mark informs me that the big building we see in front of us is St Paul’s Cathedral. Oh, cool. I found a famous place! We take some photographs and move in closer, to an almost completely empty Paternoster Square. Or as it looks like now and as we call it, Apocalypto Square. It is perfect for photographing while doing weird poses.  

The cold is biting us, so it is best to keep moving, but stopping for some nice photographs is a must. But I actually don’t feel like I need to photograph everything all the time anymore. I mean, I’m not here as a tourist really. I live here now. At least for now. So I can go to central London whenever I want. Which feels so cool.

We find ourselves walking into Shoreditch, where there is on the sidewalk a little sign saying that they sell wine there. This sounds very much like a bar, so we simply just must go inside and see what they sell. It’s a very nice little wine bar where you can actually buy bottles of wine to bring home. It’s so nice to see a place like this, it must be so cozy here when it’s open. The owner is really nice and sociable and seems so happy to see customers in the store. We ask if we could try any of the wines, and we’re lucky, because we can. So we get a couple of options of the already opened bottles presented to us, the bottles have been open a couple of weeks, but they’re still fine. It’s really fun to be able to try wine like this. This just isn’t a thing for me, I’ve never really done it like this, which makes it all the more special. We end up buying a nice bottle of wine from the owner’s home country, Hungary. They are currently renovating in preparation for the opening up, and at the same time they stay open as a wine store. They even do home deliveries of wine in the Shoreditch area. I can’t really grasp that concept, home delivery of wine. That’s just too good to be true, or am I just too fond of drinking?

Excusing ourselves and going out again, it starts to be time to return home. I’m just too tired. We hop on a bus, and I finally get to try the double decker London buses for the first time. After you get in, beep your card at the reader completely covered in the driver’s plastic cube, then you see the staircase leading up to the second floor. We go up there, and we’re alone so of course we sit in the front. Watching people all around town, going around in the bus that seems impossibly big for London’s narrow streets. It’s like an illusion, a magic trick perhaps. The buses are simply so big I can’t understand how they can drive them on these narrow streets. It must be magic. Like that bus in Harry Potter that magically changes size fitting all kinds of narrow openings. Yes. I’ve decided. That’s how the London buses work. That must be it. We sit and rest and watch the people on the street from the front window on the top floor of the bus, and I see this guy dressed kinda bad with an acoustic guitar without a case in his hand. He jumps on our bus and sits down on the lower level and I can hear him start playing. After a while he jumps off and we’re alone again. I guess these things just happen around here. How cool is that?

Mark:

It’s been a wonderful first day out in London for Maja and I’m not entirely sure who’s shown who around. But really, with the newbie leading the way, we’ve seen a whole different London than we would have done if I’d been in front and brought us to all the usual sights, which I’m sure we’ll see in due time anyway. 

What we can’t do so much anymore is talk about it. We’ve done it so much in the past week or so that late in the day our voices just start giving out. It happens to me first, and then when I mention it to Maja, she says that yes, her throat isn’t feeling quite right either. I know what to do about this and when we pop into a shop for water, I leave Maja to get that while I go hunting for honey and a small bottle of lemon juice. Out on the street and we both have a little of each and instantly feel the relief of the rough throat disappearing and something like voice normality resuming. But really, I can barely talk anymore. I don’t think Maja is that far behind me.

Off the bus and we’re into Kentish Town, getting off a few stops early to essentially walk the rest of the way home through a street that Maja has only seen before at night, on the walk here on that first day from the airport. But there is an ulterior motive here as we use the walk through town as an opportunity to have a look in the windows of estate agents to see what apartments are available around here and what we would be looking at for rents. I have an idea of course, but Maja doesn’t. More significant than the ridiculously high prices is the fact that we’re even considering this at all less than two weeks after we first met, but that seems to be where we are now. Yep, we haven’t even spoken about it, but here we are looking for our own apartment, like something we’re just taking for granted.

Maja:

It’s interesting taking a look at the real estate postings, to see how the reality of living London life will be like. We need at least a two room apartment, so I will be able to work in the mornings in my home office while Mark is asleep and also that he won’t have to disturb my sleep coming home at 3-4 am after playing the bars of London. It won’t be cheap, but is totally doable if I get myself a new computer engineering job here. It’s something to keep in mind for the future, but as of now I have a couple of other things that are more important. Like the impossible list. And also I want to feel a little less sad before looking for a job. Let’s just live life in the moment for a while, I think I deserve that. I want to spend some time looking at options, and see where life leads me. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Day 12

Wednesday March 3

Mark:

Rehearsal at Sarah’s today, and with quarantine over, it means Maja can finally go too, which essentially means that, on only her second proper in London, she’s about to have her first session with what will be her first London band. But physics intervenes and we don’t make it.

Pretty much our whole house has been furnished with things found on the street. In London, if people buy new things and don’t need their old things, which are often not even that old, they just put them outside somewhere. If it’s an electrical item, there will often be a note saying, ‘this works.’ Our whole garden was kitted out that way, with a little help from the Palmerston regarding the parasols and deckchairs which Maja has come to love so much. This is how we have come to have an office chair as one of our kitchen chairs. She’s sitting on it now and I’m kind of milling about doing stuff. Until I decide to sit down and have a little close time. So there we are, Maja sitting back in the chair, me sitting on her facing the wrong way. All’s going well and fun until we slightly adjust our balance and the adjustable chair does what it does in these kinds of situations and adjusts. That’s not normally an issue at all. But then, it normally doesn’t have someone sitting backwards on it. And that’s the way I go now. Full on backwards, launched out of the chair. And Maja can’t do anything about it because she’s been thrown totally forwards. So now we’re both going. This might not be quite so bad, except Maja was facing the radiator, which means I’m now unknowingly heading towards it at quite frightening speed. Or to be more accurate, the back of my head is about to hit it at quite frightening speed. And, according to my sources, with a particularly frightening sound. 

Maja:

As the chair disappears from beneath me and we’re thrown at a terrifying speed, I hear one of the worst sounds I’ve ever heard. Not quite a thud, more of a bash which is then followed by silence. Almost like a kickdrum. And just after that my forehead hits the radiator as well. It hurts, shoots right through me, but soon afterwards I feel OK. It’s just a small bruise. But Mark, on the other hand, falls down. Not quite immediately, but I see him losing a bit of power as he half sits, half leans on the radiator. It doesn’t look good. A second or so later it’s like he has regained some kind of control and tries to sit up and repeats “I’m alright, I’m alright” weakly. Oh no mister. You’re certainly not OK. Lie down now, and I accept no resistance. I gently but strongly push him down, holding my hand under his head to soften it. And there I let him lie there for a while, checking that he is OK. I think he’s got a concussion. Almost definitely. 

Mark:

That all happens and I crumple to the floor, my crumpling considerably hastened by Maja projectiling on top of me as she suffers her own fall. In this fashion we very messily complete our undignified drop to the floor and that’s where the similarity of our journeys end. She’s immediately up and I’m not. I’m kind of half sitting, half lying there on my back, head very clumsily and uncomfortably propped up by a hard, white slab of metal. My eyes are closed in pain and a little bit of shock, causing considerable alarm in Maja who’s now looking down on me asking with some deep concern if I’m alright. With that I think I really should open my eyes and let her know I’m at least not dead. This proves a little harder than I was expecting and it’s not too long before my eyes are more or less half closed again. ‘Stay there. Do not move,’ says Maja, her medical experience and knowledge kicking in. I do, and she makes sure no serious damage has been done before she gives me the all clear to stand up, where we do another cursory check to make sure all things are working as they should. They are. More or less and I’m insisting that I’m alright. ‘No you’re not,’ she says. ‘That was a heavy fall. You have a concussion.’ Concussion schmushon. I’m fine. But no. She insists that we go upstairs and I lie down in bed, at least until we can confirm that I am absolutely alright. 

Very quickly after lying down, I start to suspect she might actually have a point. My head is hurting. A lot. It feels thick and heavy and I’m dizzy. So much so that the room isn’t quite spinning, but it is at least moving backwards and forwards a little which it certainly wasn’t doing before so it must be me. Maybe it really was a little bit more than an innocent knock on the head. I do hope the radiator’s OK. Maja says nothing for 10 minutes or so and just lets me recover my senses (a questionable exercise at the best of times to be fair). Once I’ve come round a little more, enough to admit that yes, she’s right, I say we should probably get in touch with Sarah and cancel today. Well, duh. So, instead of going off and having a musical session round there, we stay here and Maja sits by the bed, passing the time in my de facto absence by singing along to a whole bunch of her favourite songs. Which is how I discover that she can actually sing pretty well. For now I’ll file that away for future use as I lie back and continue to be useless for most of the rest of the day.

I’ve really got to confess that not everything in these accounts is quite as I remember it, but I was concussed so what the hell do I know?

Maja:

I’m glad I’m stubborn, because he is certainly not OK, I very much realise this when I help him up the stairs. Then, once upstairs I have him lie down while I check online for what to do if you suspect a concussion. I decide that he is not in any danger and will be fine if he just spends the day in bed until he feels better, so I keep him there. He’s not in danger, but he will certainly not be able to move around much today. Oh, what a bummer. We had all of those grand plans of going to Sarahs for rehearsal, and enjoying the second day out of self isolation and here I am having to stay in this room all over again. I feel a bit bored after a while, not really having anything to do. So I default to doing something I like to do while bored. Singing along to songs I like. Right now I’m into Red Hot Chili Peppers and Gorillaz, so I mainly sing tunes from those.

Thursday March 4

Mark:

I’m on a little trip out to the shop for milk and other basic things when I see a nearby house has left a whole bunch of garden stuff outside their front garden. I don’t register any immediate interest and walk past it without too much of a second look. But then, just as I get to our garden I glance back and see that there might just be something of interest. Not anything actually in the display, more what a portion of it is actually on. I walk up to it all and see that this section is arrayed on a two level trolley. A very dirty trolley, but quite interesting nonetheless. I wonder what this would look like cleaned up, I think. Only one way to find out. I have no idea what this kind of thing could be used for, but I think it’s something worth having a look at at least. My idea is to take it into our back garden, give it a good clean, then chuck it back out into the front garden and then show it to Maja who can decide if it’s worth keeping or not. I really expect her to say no but that’s OK. Apart from anything else, it would probably be just more clutter in a tiny room. It might not even comfortably fit. 

Oh well. Let’s see. It really cleans up quite well and I can now see it in all its silver and gold newness. Now it also finally looks like what it is. A cake trolley. I take it upstairs and place it in the front garden. Now to go and get Maja and see what she thinks of it. She comes up the stairs mildly curious and, before I open the front door I say, ‘Feel free to say no. I’m really not sure myself.’ I open it up and there it is. She’s not hugely impressed but she’s not dismissing it either, saying, ‘Let’s bring it in. You never know.’ I didn’t see that coming to be fair. But OK. In it comes. We now have a cake trolley.

Maja:

After receiving the perfect little gift of a cake trolley, which sits perfectly as a little wheeled table in my room, it’s time to go out. Out to explore the world. Or more like: out to see Camden market. Yes, I know, everything is closed. But that is not stopping me. Let’s go and see what we find. The streets are, well, not quite empty but almost. There’s not that much movement around. We start walking down the highstreet, where most of the people are walking around. It’s a nice walk, the weather is fresh and the cold is slightly biting but not too much. Actually very comfortable. After a while we reach Camden again. It’s a town filled with empty bars, and there’s almost no one walking around. Mark keeps pointing out all bars, with trivia in the style of, in this bar this and that famous band started out, but it seems to not have survived the pandemic. And, I played there with the Insiders, and other stories. I listen and can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed. It’s a lot. Just… A lot. 

Walking for a little while we reach Camden Market. It’s a famous place that tourists usually go to. A sightseeing spot. It has restaurants, bars, food stands, boats and shops. Everything you can possibly imagine a sightseeing spot having. Expect people. And everything is closed. Except for the food stands. London is currently open for take away catering, which means that food stands are allowed. But there is a catch here. You’re not allowed to sit down, or stand at one place and eat. So you need to eat while walking. We see this getting enforced by security officers walking around the area, and if they see someone sitting down for a little while on some steps or something they walk up to the person and ask them to walk along. I never saw them enforcing it any stronger than that, but this really makes it impossible to rest, even for a little while. Since the food stands are open we walk around to see what they have open. It’s a lot of different food options, Chinese, Mexican, all kinds of food from countries I can’t remember and of course, fish and chips. I want fish and chips. I don’t think I’ve ever actually had it before. It’s just not something we eat in Sweden. We don’t have a culture of deep frying things, so everything fried is quite new to me. I want to try it. We order one serving each, and we get this wonderful fish and chips with a nice pink sauce to it. It’s really nice, and feels very very British. Mark starts a little chat with the chef in the food stand. It’s obvious that these places have had a rough time, but it is always interesting to hear a little more detail about what’s happening. A lot of the places around here that have a possibility to be open look like small businesses and they seem to be some of the more lucky food places. And of course, Mark and the chef soon start bonding over something specific to northern English people. I think it’s about curry sauce with pineapple in it. Whatever they mean by that. I’m not quite sure. There’s so many kinds of curry in this world that I can’t even begin to guess.

We want to stand there and eat our fish, but the chef asks us to go stand by the railing of the river since they can’t have people there. We do, but soon a security officer comes and tells us to continue along. So we do. Trying to eat the fish while also trying to not let it cool down too quickly in the slightly icy wind. 

It’s still a very good fish. 

Time flies when you have fun, and we realise it starts to be time for us to return home to get our gear and walk over to Sarah’s for our first rehearsal. Halfway home Mark gets a phone call. It’s Sarah, cancelling the rehearsal once again. Well, it’s fine, we’ll just do it another day.

I’m not really complaining, it’s nice spending time with Mark. We have a couple of stories to tell each other today as well. And the ceiling is starting to get a little bit lonely since we’ve not been there to watch it.

Day 14

Friday March 5

Maja:

I don’t want to leave. That’s the feeling I’ve been tackling these last couple of days. I really have started to like it here, and I don’t want to leave. But really, what is it I don’t want to leave? I don’t want to leave Mark. I don’t want to go back to Sweden just yet. Not now. Not when I don’t even know what I really want just yet. Please, don’t make me leave. Please. 

I’ve decided I want to stay. Really stay. Beyond the six months I currently have on my visa. But how in the world will I accomplish anything like that? How will I stay in London now after Brexit has happened? I’ve been looking at different ways of how to stay here, but I’ve not really reached any good alternatives just yet. I’m used to working in English, so getting a job in London would be a piece of cake as far as language is concerned at least. But even if I wanted to do that, I would need a work visa. For that, I would need to go back to Sweden, somehow get a job in the UK, and then apply for the visa from there. First, by definition, that means leaving which we’ve established I don’t want to do. Second, I came here in the first place to get away from my situation in Sweden, not to go straight back into it. And third, finding a job in the UK and then applying for a visa sounds like something that would take a long time. And after all that, there’s a fourth. The application could simply be refused. What then? So no. This is not an option.

But there is this one thing I’ve heard of called the Global Talent Visa. On the face of it, it looks like the perfect fit for someone like me. I’m a computer/cloud engineer, which is one of the most sought after professions in the world, and the number one sought after profession in tech. Honestly, I’m confident I could get a job anywhere with a good salary. I understand that a Global Talent Visa would allow me to stay without the obligation of going and getting a job immediately. It also seems to be a fairly quick processing period – three weeks give or take. So me and Mark start to delve into the details of how to apply for that visa. 

Balls.

It doesn’t take long for us to realise that the whole thing is just impossibly complicated and seems set up to fail. Also, there are too many bureaucratic requirement boxes I don’t tick. Actually, it seems impossible that anyone as young as me could tick them all. And there seems to be a lot of coordination to be done from the employer’s side as well. An employer I don’t even have yet. And they make constant references to ‘Your sponsor’ without giving any information on what qualifies someone to be named as your sponsor. We spend a lot of time just trying to find some clarification on just that one point and end up being taken round in circles. It’s here that we give up. No. This is just impossible. Even if it wasn’t, I have experience in applying for working visas and it’s just hell. There are also so many things that can go wrong and I really don’t feel that confident about applying for anything in Brexit UK.

But I want to stay here. Or more than that, I’d like to stay with Mark. I don’t want to leave him. I think I love him. 

OK. I can stay here for now and worry about the six month thing later on. Until then, I really just could be here, living off my savings which I happen to have because I never really spent that much, preferring to be able to travel. Like many young people do when they save up and go travel the world. I want to do that, or at least my version of it. But for now I would really just be happy renting a room and being with Mark. I’ve had a high salary for quite a while now so I have a good enough amount built up. And if I was to go for a slightly more modest lifestyle to make my savings last longer, that would be no big deal. I saved most of what I earned when I was doing well, and it’s not that long ago that I was a student and getting by on barely anything at all. Also, while I was far from deprived growing up, it’s not like my family had any kind of great fortune lying around either. This is all to say that tightening up would not be a major challenge for me.

Of course, savings are always finite, and I don’t know how long they’re going to last. But for now, I’d rather live a little time stress free until I feel ready to go back to an office job, or maybe I’m just going to feel like doing something else. I don’t know. I just know that right now, I don’t feel ready to go back. Not just yet. I want to stay with Mark. Besides, if it comes to it, there are always opportunities to freelance in my line of work.

Can’t I just stay here?

Does it really have to be this complicated?

Then it comes to me. ‘Mark, can’t we just get married?’

Mark:

By now we’ve decided that we’re opposite sex versions of each other, with each one also covering gaps the other has. An example. Maja really wants to do music but doesn’t quite have the skillset or experience. Hello. To really do anything in music, you need to be quite good at technology and computers for recording, and internet stuff in general for all the other stuff. Did you read anything above just now that fits into that? Come on. Even my WordPress wasn’t up to speed until she came along. We’ve also discovered we have very similar work ethics and approaches. With this, she’s been starting to call me Boy Maja, an almost overwhelming feeling of approval given the total awe in which I hold her achievements, determination and aptitude. I guess that makes her girl Mark.

The idea of Maja staying in London beyond her six months has really taken hold and we’re researching how she could get a visa. Her preferred route is through the Global Talent programme which basically means companies can sponsor people they believe have abilities beyond what are available in this country. We’re in the middle of a roadblock and Maja’s trying to make a bit more sense of that. She’s deep in thought and reading so I decide to go downstairs and make tea. It will be the most momentous trip to make tea I’ve ever made.

I come back to see how she’s getting on, and kneel down on the bed in front of her to listen to the expected update. She looks us and all I see in her expression is exasperation. In a tired voice, she says, ‘This looks really complicated and undoable. We should probably just get married.’

Oh. OK. Yes. That’s it. That’s my response. I nod and say, ‘OK.’ Then I realise two things. First, the actual gravity of the situation and second, that I’m already on my knees. Alright, not one knee but I think you can see we’re already going about all this slightly differently to expected convention. My expression morphs to serious as I look deeply at her and she lets out a little giggle as she realises what I’m about to say. And I do. ‘Maja, will you marry me?’ Another giggle. ‘Yes.’ There’s no ring or anything. Oh, and there’s the small detail that she is actually still married. But just like that, two weeks after we first met, we’re engaged.

There’s only one song to play to mark the ocassion, so I dig it out. The Counting Crows’ Accidentally In Love. Seriously. When I went to the airport, I was going to meet a friend who was in a difficult time and needed to get away. I just happened to be able to provide a place to stay. Romance was nowhere in my mind, let alone the possibility that I was heading off to the airport to meet my future wife. But here we are.

This definitely has to be marked. This really is celebration time. So I go out and buy champagne, a purchase I augment with whiskey and ginger for cocktails. While I’m doing that, Maja orders in Thai food. A party for two, all set up on our wonderful cake trolley.

Maja:

I’m surprised when Mark, already on his knees, says, ‘Wait, wait, wait. That’s my line.’ 

He then grabs my hand and looks me deep in the eyes.

‘Maja, will you marry me?’

‘Yes.’

The rest of the day disappears quickly in happy hormones, champagne and Thai food.

I’m in love.

Mark:

So am I. Accidentally.

Day 15

Saturday March 6

Mark:

A gentle day after last night with a notable afterparty guest as our cat Toffee comes and joins us in the room for a while and hangs out on the bed. It’s her first visit so maybe she felt a change in the force. 

Maja:

Toffee is a little cat, with a peculiarly small head. I mean, her head is really small. Like too small to be true. But she is very cute, and I get to cuddle her a bit. But she is a scaredy cat. Any sudden movement and she’ll jump to the other side of the room in a second. It’s clear to see that she is very attached to Mark, who is an animal lover. Mark can be a little awkward around animals, but it’s clear that he enjoys them very much. I think he really wants to have his own pets. Toffee barely counts since she is practically adopted from the street, and mainly lives outside. But Mark is really happy to have her around.

Sunday March 7

Mark:

On Tuesday February 23 we decided we were going to start to try writing songs together. Since then we’ve written something everyday in one of the notebooks – that’s the three I bought at the beginning, and an extra A4 book. That something could be a few verses, or both of us writing whole sets of lyrics each, sometimes spanning up to four or five pages at a time. Translating the written word into a song is a whole other thing, but getting something out of a blank page is also progress, so the ideas are there. And what we’re telling is the story of us. Nonsensical conversations turned into fantasy lyrics, or just simply tell it as it happened lyrics, or say how you feel lines. All put together for a whole concept of what we see as just feelgood writing which we hope to turn into feelgood songs complete with singalong choruses. In short, we’re attempting to musically bottle up what we are and somehow, we have no idea how just yet, take it out to people.

Maja:

I love writing these little lyrics. Just me and Mark, with a notebook and dreams and laughter. Cute little happy rhymes, mixed with dark stories about what we’ve been through. There’s a lot of artistic freedom of course, I’m not saying that everything is based on reality, but it feels really good to put pen to paper and try to express feelings in rhymes. Wonderful really. I’ve never really done this, and thoughts just keep on flowing out of my head down on paper in little bucket loads at a time.

Mark:

With that, we get started for the first time today as Maja sets up a studio in this little room and we tackle the first issue of percussion, which I do by improvising different percussion sounds on the acoustic guitar we borrowed from Sarah. I manage to come up with something that sounds like a kick drum and a snare, and we record a kick track, then a snare track. And now we have drums. Or something like them. After this it’s down to experimentation as we try different chord progressions and break out some of our lyrics to see what kinds of vocals we can come up with. It’s all part of the process and I’m not expecting whole chunks of already written lyrics to end up fully formed in a song, but it’s great to have something to start with, and as I thought, once a line emerges, we really get hold of it and develop it to come up with something different. We both have a go at singing lines as they come, to see where they can be taken, but we don’t get a massive way into this as, not long after we’ve got it set up, we have to leave to go to Sarah’s. But that’s fine. We’ve finally started actually trying to do something with the lyrics we’ve been writing, and that is a really big deal.

Maja:

My room is impossibly small, but since we can’t hang out in Mark’s room because Jenn lives there, we spend all our time in my room. My bed is too small to sleep two people in, so Mark still gets to sleep downstairs. Being as it is, small, crowded, there’s no way that you could possibly even fit a desk in here. But we have the cake trolley that Mark found, so I could use that to set up a makeshift desk. Maybe. I search around in the room for anything usable, and behind the bed I find a couple of broken slits for the bed. Perfect. I take the slits, tape them with some gaffer tape and put them between the handles of the trolley. Voila, a table! The computer goes on the slits, the interface beneath and then we can connect the microphone to that. Perfect. Mark starts to do a lot of different things and all I can think is wooah. I have no idea what to do here, how to help. It’s amazing and a bit daunting at the same time. Especially when he starts to play the guitar and totally goes all out in his singing. How does he even do that? I just don’t know. How am I going to do that? I understand that even less. It’s a bit scary. And I get all nervous and flustered, not wanting to make a fool out of myself perversely managing to make an even a bigger fool out of myself.

Mark:

No you don’t. This creative thing is hard. Pulling songs and ideas out of thin air. The key is to not be afraid to be terrible. Everyone does stuff that’s terrible. You just do your best to not let anyone outside the room see your terrible stuff. But of course, sometimes things do slip through the quality test and make it onto the stage. But even then, when you think you’ve done good stuff, you’ve just kinda got to hope other people agree. Or even then you could be deluding yourself and making a mess 

strutting terrible stuff all over the stage.

Maja:

Looks like you have a lot of experience of making a fool out of yourself. That’s great.

Mark:

The very definition of an experienced person is someone who’s made a lot of mistakes. 

We get to Sarah’s and she’s all over Maja. Geisha Rising is the name of Sarah’s new pet project that aims to promote all kinds of different artists and she’s blown away that into her life has walked a girl who embodies quite a few qualities of the Geisha; not only is Maja adept with a sword, being a proficient practitioner of Aikido, she also speaks fluent Japanese. Add that to the possibility that she bears more than a passing resemblance to the logo that Sarah has had commissioned for her project, and Sarah, a deep spiritual believer, really feels a significant alignment of the stars. Not least where it comes to myself and Maja. ‘You two are the real deal,’ she says with absolute conviction. Me and Maja coyly look at each other and laugh. ‘Well,’ says Maja, ‘We have some news.’ Sarah takes a seat and looks at us. We look at each other again, each daring the other to say it. But before either of us has a chance to say anything, Sarah bursts out with what sounds like a one word sentence, ‘You’regettingmarried.’ We don’t even answer. We just laugh hysterically and Sarah launches herself from the chair to envelope us in a huge group hug. ‘I knew it, I knew it, I just knew it,’ she says in between what are almost sobs. 

Then, all of a sudden she gets serious. ‘How’s it going over at the house?’ she asks. My silence says it all, while Maja replies, after some hesitation, ‘Not good. Really not good at all.’ This part hasn’t been written about so much, more kinda being a between the lines thing. But I should break cover here and say that Maja and Jenn don’t talk. Not, aren’t talking. They don’t talk to each other. At all. They’re never even in the same room. As far as I’m aware, on the first night, they said hi to each other and the word count has remained the same ever since. As for me, well, Jenn hasn’t said a whole lot to me lately either and I’m now even knocking on the bedroom door before I go in. A room I’ve lived in for over five years. Which I’m paying half the rent for. But strangely, it does feel right to do that. To just walk in would feel like an invasion. Of my own room. But it really is different for Maja. I’ve been in this house for six years and known Jenn for 12. Maja is brand new in the house and didn’t arrive in the best emotional shape as it was, so the potential for her feeling awkward and generally unwelcome is off the chart. As well as not having written too much of that in here, it really isn’t something we’ve spoken about a great deal either.

‘OK,’ says Sarah, nodding sagely, wheels clearly really turning. She stares at us for a second, as if taking us in, then says, ‘How would you guys feel about coming and living here? Rent free.’ What now? Me and Maja don’t even bother to consult. An instant, breathless yes is all that comes out of both of us. I might even just make a sound that sounds like it could be positive. We rush to her and there are more exuberant group hugs. But Sarah isn’t finished. ‘That’s really great,’ she says once we’ve all broken away. There’s more. ‘I’ve been wanting to go away quite a lot for a while but I’ve not had anyone to watch the cats and I’ve wanted someone for a while to just be living here and there’s not really been anyone I know I would be completely comfortable with asking. But I look at you two, so much in love, and having a bit of a hard time of it with a difficult living situation and, well, Mark I know, but Maja, I feel such a great energy off you and the two of you together, well…

‘The thing is, it’s not just helping look after the cats while I’m away now and then. I’ve been thinking for a while of just getting away from London altogether. I mean, to live. I’ve always seen this as just a temporary base for myself and I’m getting restless to go back out into the world again. Where, I have no idea, but within a month or two, and it will be for a long time. It would mean so much to me to know that my home  and my cats were safe and that there was someone living here that I could really trust. And I just know that’s you guys. All I’d ask is that you looked after the bills. Everything else is taken care of. Would you be up for all that?’ We are now nodding frantically and totally disbelievingly, totally unable to take in what was being said as it was being said. It’s just unreal. This does not happen. Yes yes, yes and yes is all we can say. ‘My babies, that’s just wonderful,’ she says, grabbing us both in yet another huge hug. ‘I just know this is going to be amazing. You guys are perfect for me and for this place. Before I go off on my travels, we can also work together, play music together, anything. Whatever you want. And this place will be yours, so treat it as your home. Whatever improvements or anything you want to do, just go for it.’ She then says that she has to go out and meet someone now, so will we be OK if she leaves us on our own for a little while? And we can also take some time to think about it. Yes we will definitely be fine here, and no need to think about anything at all. With that, another hug and Sarah is out the door. As soon as it closes, me and Maja look at each other in complete, total incredulity. What was that? Did you hear what I heard? We have place to move into now? And in a short while it’s going to be just us? It’s going to be our place? In practically central London? For free? This is just too much. This just doesn’t happen. Really? Has this just happened? It has, but we really are having a hard time taking it in. So much that we’re convinced we must have misheard or misunderstood something. But we can’t figure out what any of that could possibly be, so we conclude that we did indeed hear and understand the same things. Wow. OK. Time to check out the place. Our new place. That we’ll be moving into in a couple of days. Only a few days ago, Maja said out loud, ‘I wonder what our place will look like.’ I pretty much shut the conversation down as didn’t seem to be something possible so I didn’t see it as being really worth thinking about. ‘I was only thinking about it, it’s fun,’ she said. So I played along and we thought and talked about this impossible, mythical London apartment we were going to move into. All the time I was thinking, ‘I’m on furlough, and will have to keep up rent here as well for at least some kind of respectable period. No. Impossible. Not going to happen, but hey, let’s play pretend. Well…

Sarah’s said the place is a bit of a mess and there’s a lot of work to be done, but that’s fine. We’re up for it all. And I know what our room will be. It has to be. Sarah of course has the main big double room with its view overlooking central London. Alright, let’s not get carried away here. It’s not the classic skyline and bright lights, but over and through the houses of north London you can see through Kings Cross to one of the prominent buildings of the city. You can see a tall building, you can see central London. That’s good enough. The place also has what we’ve come to know as the main room, which is where all general hanging out and rehearsing takes place. This is in the middle of the apartment, with the small kitchen off that to the left, and the bathroom off it to the right. From the main room we have a corridor leading to the front door with a toilet at the immediate right. Continue on and you have the door on the right to Sarah’s room. At the end on the left you have the front door. To the right of that is the door of mystery, which I happen to know is basically used as a storage room for things belonging to Sarah’s friends. Then to the right of that is what I suppose would otherwise be the front room, which overlooks the street. It’s a beautiful room and really quite big. This has to be what will become our bedroom. We go and stand in there for a few moments trying to take all this in, spinning round, arms outstretched, in what will become ours. This, then later on, the whole thing. And between now and then, we will be living with the wonderful, hugely talented singing Sarah in what will be just the most amazing three person house share. Me and Sarah already have our connection, personally and musically. And the way she’s been drawn to Maja is just huge and instant.

For so long, in my head I’ve still been solving the impossible list by not thinking about it, just living day by day in the delusion that solutions will just pop up out of the road as we come to them. Now, here we are with a few huge delusions realised in one hit. We’ve found an apartment in lockdown London which, despite all our optimistic noises to each other, seemed totally insurmountable. But now with this, we’ve also solved the financial/work situation of how the hell I would pay my part of it, and sorted out how I can keep paying my share of the room with Jenn. Just like that, the impossible is all taken care of; I can continue to pay my share of the rent I’ve been paying all along with the furlough I’m still getting and, er, that’s it. Job done, impossible ticked off the list. All it took was for someone to offer us our own central London apartment for free. Pretty obvious when you think about it.

Maja:

Eeeeeeh. Wait what just happened? I don’t think I quite follow. 

London, Day 17

Monday March 8

Maja:

Today we have nothing planned, which is perfect and it means that we can just walk around and talk about everything that just happened. Which I still just can’t believe. Nothing really makes sense to me anymore. We need time to realise what just happened, and how better to do that then to take a wonderful walk around the neighbourhood. To Camden Market maybe? We find ourselves a wonderful little coffee shop in a charming little record store where I’m finally able to satisfy my coffee cravings with a wonderfully made flat white with amazing coffee art in a takeaway cup. After wandering around and taking in Camden Market, we start to make our way home again. ‘Hey, Mark. I don’t want to go home just yet. Can’t we continue?’ And so we do, ending up in Waterlow Park where we see the ducks swimming harmoniously in the pond. Then we go and find a bench where we sit and enjoy the view of our London. We’ve been out for way over three hours, and return home excited about whatever is going to happen next.