Category: The London Diary: The First Move

Day 18

Tuesday March 9, 2021

Mark:

We’re chilling at home when Sarah calls me. ‘I’m going out for a bit so if you want I can give you the keys to the apartment. But I’m leaving pretty much now. So, if you’re up for it, say 20 minutes at Tufnell Park station?’ I don’t even bother to check with Maja. I just say yes we’ll be there. I go to the kitchen to find Maja having a good chat with Cris. Apologising for interrupting, I say, ‘Maja, we have to leave right now.’ I explain what’s happening but my words clearly come out too fast because once we’re out of the house she says, ‘Where are we going?’ Oh dear. Sorry. OK. I tell her properly this time and get a much more excited response to the fact that we’re now getting keys to the apartment and are going to babysit Sarah’s two cats. Moving day will still be maybe Thursday, to be confirmed, but to be about to get the keys makes it so real because, frankly, the thought of getting this place for free has seemed a bit too good to be true, but now it’s actually happening. We get to Tufnell Park tube just two minutes before Sarah who gives us a huge greeting before handing over the keys. Then she’s gone into the night and we head off to the apartment.

We’re hanging out just chilling there a few hours later when Sarah calls. ‘Guys,’ she says, ‘I’ve decided I’m staying out tonight. Do you mind staying there and I’ll see you in the morning?’ Maja hears this, we nod to each other, then I confirm that yes, that will be alright. I hang up and then me and Maja have a moment. Oh, we think simultaneously. This is it. We’ve moved in now. Just like that, it has happened.

With that, thoughts turn to how we’re going to have dinner here, and the fact that we have to get a little something extra to mark the ocassion. We decide to order in from a local Greek restaurant which I’ll pick up while taking a detour to one of the finest wine shops in London which is right around the corner. When I leave, I can’t help but to take a celebratory sprint to the end of the street. Me and Maja are in sight of having our actual own place in almost central London. A three bedroom apartment in view of the city. And there’s no rent or deposit to pay. All we’re being asked to do is cover the bills. We’re literally on the verge of being given a free apartment, but even before it becomes our whole own apartment, we have a room. Again, for free. This is also us moving in together, and into what will be a totally musical place, just two and a half weeks after we first met at Heathrow airport.

Maja:

I can’t believe we’ve just managed to do another impossible thing. It is impossible to live rent free in London. It’s just impossible. And it seems beyond wonderful to live in this musical collective. Cheers Mark. To us and to our bright future.

Day 19

Wednesday March 10, 2021

Mark:

When Sara arrives at the house this morning she’s absolutely delighted to see us there. We all live together now and we get to talking about musical plans. Sarah really wants the two of us to join her as essentially her backing band and she has big plans for us to really go to town on rehearsals now we’re all in the same space 24/7. There’s talk of reshaping the main living room area into a studio/workspace, but that will come later once we’ve got the apartment into a bit more order. To this she says, ‘Guys, this is your place. I’m not going to be staying here much longer so whatever you want to do, just do it. Treat it as your own home because it is.’ While we will be working together, hopefully a lot, Sarah’s fast moving on with her plans to be moving on and out of London. And with that, she gives us an even bigger surprise than she gave us last night when we discovered we’d accidentally moved in. She wants us to have her room. ‘It makes sense,’ she says. ‘I won’t be living here much and you guys will, and eventually the whole place will fully become yours anyway, so we might as well get that started now.’ Anyway, she reasons, we’re two people and she’s just one so it makes sense that we have the big double room and she moves herself into the single room. No, we were not expecting this at all. I’ve long known the single room was for storage of things for her friends and was not to be touched. There is another large room in the house at the front looking out over the street and we assumed that was where we would be calling our own. But no. The whole place is to get an overhaul and we’re to play a big part in that. And all while staying in the big double bedroom which actually has a view of parts of central London. Very much a partial view, obscured as it is by the local rooftops, but our very own central London view nonetheless.

To make this all happen, there is a hell of a lot to do so we do the only thing there is to be done. We get started. This new place is a 15 to 20 minute walk from the house we’re leaving. So, while Maja cleans and organises, I get busy with making shuttle walks between the two places carrying all our stuff. This is, indeed, moving day.

Maja:

Under the bed are a couple of drawers in which mens clothes are stashed. I carefully place them in a box for the cupboard as I ask Sarah, ‘Who do these belong to?’ She explains that they belong to some TV celebrity that apparently everyone knows the name of, but I, a Swede, have never heard of. I’m not sure if it’s a good or bad thing not knowing, but the bed I sleep in is the very same bed a famous person has regularly slept in. And I now know where his ties are. If you happen to be the celebrity in question and you’re reading this and want them back, I put them in the cupboard above the plates close to the ceiling. I’m sure you know where that is.

Mark:

Once we’ve got to what we can call a conclusion for the day, we settle in at the window and pour ourselves a massively earned Orange GnT. We have to do that in our room because from being really the party animal, even in our rehearsals, Sarah has very recently decided she doesn’t drink anymore so would like to not have the temptation, but she’s been emphatic that we shouldn’t let that stop us, as long as we keep it to our room please. No problem at all. And well, with a view like that as well to share between just the two of us, that’s actually just fine. More and more this is all getting too good to be true.

Maja gives actual action to that thought as she tells me she’s going to continue paying rent on the room in the house we’ve just left. ‘Incase things burn here.’ Why should they burn, I think. I respect the decision and don’t say anything, but really, why should they? This is a beautiful situation with the beautiful soul of Sarah and us two. What could possibly go wrong? But yeah sure. Nothing wrong with having a little back-up plan.

Maja:

As we finally lie down, we’re in a celebratory mood. We live here now. Sarah has settled down in her room and now this is the first night for all three of us to be here. Mark quickly falls asleep next to me and I remain awake for a while, reflecting upon the weirdness of all the things that have been happening lately. My former life and my future life. I’m getting sleepier and sleepier. I’m close to really dropping off when I notice a strange sound. It’s coming from down the hall. From Sarah’s room. I quietly sneak out of bed and peek into her room. Next to her is an enormous speaker, but it is way too far away for me to dare to go in and turn it off or down. So I sneak back into bed and try to accustom myself to the new sounds I’m going to have to listen to tonight. ‘Aaauuuumm, aaauuuummm, ching, aauuuum’. Some kind of meditative chanting. I hate these kinds of sounds. I find them terribly unnerving. As the tracks continue on I realise that I’m stuck in an infinite playlist of Youtube hell. 

Mark:

We won’t find out what this all is until morning, but what’s happened is that Sara’s fallen asleep listening to something soothing on Youtube. Whatever that was has finished and now the continuation playlist has been activated. Either the video she was listening to was very quiet, or the next one was very loud. In any case, what’s happening now is that the whole apartment is filled with eerie, extremely unnerving Gregorian chanting. It feels like we are inside and living the soundtrack to a horror movie. We’re totally encased in it and sleep is impossible. It goes on and on and we have no idea what to do. We don’t want to intrude on Sarah’s room and turn it off or down. Instead, we comfort each other and endure in varying levels of desperation and exasperation. This goes on until about 8am when it suddenly gets turned off with Sarah waking to do so. We still don’t intrude. Instead, relief and benign gratitude washing over us, we go to sleep. But it’s somewhat of a qualified relief because we’re left thinking if this kind of thing is normal around here and something we’re going to have to live with. I feel our first little chat approaching. We have to know what the hell all that was about.

When we’re all up and about and I bring it up with Sarah, she says, ‘Oh, if that ever happens just go in and turn it off. I just fall asleep and never know what’s going to come up next.’ Oh. That was easy. A horrible, horrible and very unsettling night, especially given it was the first one, but really, we can leave it there.

Day 20

Thursday March 11, 2021

Mark:

New Bass Day for Maja and she’s totally thrilled with it. A Washburn, the exact same model as mine, but a different colour and just a few ever so slightly different specs, but essentially the same bass. And it plays wonderfully. It’s ridiculous to think two new, high end basses were sent back to the shop in disgrace, while this second hand number has turned up, costing about a quarter of the price of either of them, and is just out of the box brilliant.

As Maja’s joyfully contemplating and trying out her new acquisition, for some reason I decide to look at the serial number of my bass, something I’ve never done before. I am stunned beyond to discover that the first five numbers of it are 92102. Maja’s birthday: 1992, October 2nd. Even Sarah, with all her tuned in spirituality and encouraging words that the two of us are meant to be, is struck into total silence by this revelation. 

After all this, me and Maja have a few drinks then, at 1am, we decide to go out to the local town of Archway and continue out there. We fill a backpack with selected bottles and cups and take off. It’s in some state of enthusiastic exuberance that we bounce along the road, coming across a shop protected with a purple shutter and adorned with stylish graffiti. Maja is wearing a purple raincoat. It is far too good an opportunity to pass down. The resulting photographs are every bit as spectacular as we hoped they would be.

We continue right to the end of the high street. There, opposite the tube, we find a late night kebab takeaway place. Across the road from that is a very attractive and socially laid out group of benches. Just perfect for a party of two. 

Day 21

Friday March 12, 2021

Mark:

Another trip to Camden Market. This really is becoming a thing and that’s the main item on the agenda today, alongside the continuing huge job of cleanup and organisation of the room and apartment with Sarah enthusiastically joining in. She really is going for it now, saying that she expects us to be there for anything up to five years as she keeps going on her travels. She says once again that she’s only ever considered this a temporary base anyway and had long been looking for someone who could come and take the place over, but no-one she knew quite fit what she was looking for. Then Maja came along, the two of us needed a place, and Sarah saw a perfect fit in all directions. And now here we are. I told Maja things happened in London, but within less than three weeks of arriving here, she’s landed a relationship, what looks like being the beginnings of a full time band with one of the most connected people in town – I’m talking about Sarah here – and a free apartment. By any standards, this is just ridiculous. 

As for all the other stuff, this time I really have solved it by not thinking about it. I’m kinda walking around in a daze of denial and delusion that somehow, magically, the obstacles in front of us will just fall away. After all, we’ve just landed a free apartment. Surely the rest of the stuff will take care of itself as well. Yep. OK Mark. You just keep telling yourself that. But really, I think I’ve boiled it down to, you’re OK today and that’s about it. It comes down to that. One day at a time, so today is just today.

On a little wander out to the shop today I bump into Rafael, who lives above my bar. He says he saw us make all our trips the other day and says I should have asked him to help, as he has a big work van. I knew this, I just didn’t want to ask. ‘You idiot,’ he says. ‘Ask next time, please.’ I don’t know whether to thank him or apologise. He seems almost hurt. I promise I’ll ask if there ever is a next time. Of course there won’t be, but why hurt his feelings further?

Day 22

Saturday March 13, 2021

Mark:

Our first 13th of the month. Do bad things happen on days of 13? I don’t even believe that Friday stuff, but I can’t help but have a little muse first thing this morning.

If anything, today is a bit of a lucky day. It’s the first day we feel really in any way settled in our new place. All the moving has been done and a bit part of what we think is the first really big part of organisation and cleaning. Sarah’s never really seen this as a permanent place for her, so it’s fair to say maintenance hasn’t quite been top of the agenda so we’ve had it at the top of ours. But today, for the first time, we feel like we have something of our own space. Our idea is to just take that absolute relief at having landed somewhere and do very little. Maybe a little bass and music practice, but very much as and when the time and mood takes us. If we’re to be totally honest with ourselves and you, we fully intend to spend today doing absolutely nothing but chilling and thinking nice things.

With those thoughts and our very newly discovered domestic wonderfulness, we settle down for a simple lunch of soup and bread using the desk just outside the kitchen and next to the bathroom as we haven’t quite got round to fixing proper dining arrangements in here yet. But it all still feels fantastic. It’s a beautiful practically central London day and the vibe is untouchable. What could possibly go wrong?

There’s a little sudden furry flurry of excitement as Sarah comes running through to retrieve Ron, her younger cat who has just run into the bathroom. When that happens, it can only mean one thing. Ron has gone under the bathtub. It’s a frustrating process for Sarah to have to get him out and once she does, she says that the cat is possibly just feeling a little unsettled at having new people in the place. She often seeks refuge under the bathtub, Sarah explains, but she’s apparently been doing it a little more than usual lately. 

So Sarah says that it would be good if we could be extra vigilant for now and leave the bathroom door closed at all times. At least just for now until Ron settles down and hopefully starts to feel a little more comfortable with us. No problem. With that, Sarah goes back into the bathroom, emerges a few minutes later, and then leaves, without closing the door. Well, why should she automatically think that? It’s a brand new thing, right? I kinda notice the door’s been left open but I don’t really think too much of it. I’ll close it. Yes I will. In a minute. In a minute, I’ll get up and close it. No, really, I will. About two minutes later, Ron comes running back towards us and goes, yep, you’ve guessed it, into the bathroom.

Balls. I knew I should have shut that door already. I really don’t want Sarah to know the door’s already been left open long enough for the cat to get back in there. And kinda on our (my) watch. Alright, it wasn’t me who left it open, but I’ve been here with an open door all this time. All two minutes of it, at least a minute of which the door should have been shut. I know Sarah wouldn’t be too mad at this having happened so soon after it became a brand new thing. She might make a little thing of it like, ‘Guys, what did we all just agree?’ and fair enough. But I’d rather avoid even that, just deal with this quietly and quickly, and then make sure we don’t forget again. 

So I go into the bathroom, and there Ron is, faithfully under the bathtub, just two red eyes hovering and staring at me with benign malevolence in the darkness. Yes, she has red eyes. The eyes of the other one are yellow. That’s how you tell these two almost identical white cats apart. I reach in with my hand trying not to scare her, but still trying to make her uncomfortable enough to run out. With my own cat Toffee, who I’ve now sadly left behind with Jenn at the old house, the faintest of movement inside a hiding place is enough to have her scurrying out in fright. Ron is clearly made of sterner stuff and knows she’s perfectly safe in there thankyou very much. I reach further and further in, but she just isn’t having it. She’s now gone deep and I’m almost lying on my belly trying to reach in. There’s a bunch of semi damp rags under here and, as I reach for Ron with my left and arm, reaching round a bathtub support to do so, I inadvertently move the rags away with my elbow. I’ll worry about that later. I should be worried about that now. Very worried. 

Seeing something I haven’t, and very much realising something quite significant has happened that I have no clue of, Ron suddenly makes a dart for it. Great. She’s decided to come out. She disappears behind the support I was just reaching around and that’s it. She doesn’t emerge from behind the support. She just disappears. Down, it seemed like. Did I see that? Did she just suddenly lurch downwards? Surely not. It happened so quickly it doesn’t seem possible. Still not massively overly concerned, I peer in, up to and around the support pole. There’s no cat. She’s simply ceased to be. Just like that. Oh no no no no no. In a split second I realise what’s just happened and how and why. Those rags. They were stuffed into a hole in the floor. That cat, well, she’s gone through it. And is now, very most likely, on her way into the depths of this building. It’s one or two hundred years old and has been knocked all different kinds of ways into different apartments over a substantial amount of years. The walls and floors in between are nothing but impenetrable labyrinths, unseen by human eyes in generations. And I’ve just seen Sarah’s cat, no, I’ve just helped send Sarah’s cat, jump into that black void from which escape or retrieval may well be impossible. Did I mention today was the 13th? Oh balls.

There’s nothing for it now but to tell Sarah as soon as possible what’s happened. When I tell her, the look of shock and panic on her face is total. I don’t know it yet, but this has long been one of her worst fears and now it’s happened. Not yet having really taken it in and not yet fully ready to be rational either, she refuses to believe I didn’t do anything intentionally. I of course had no idea the rags hid a hole but, at this immediately early stage, she’s somewhat hysterical and convinced I pulled them out myself, exposing the hole and allowing the cat to go through it. She does the hand thing and says she can’t talk to me now but I’m not leaving it like this and insist that she believes my truth. Once she’s had a frantic look under the bath for herself, she sees how this actually happened. At the same time I’m also telling her I’m sorry but I didn’t want her to know the door had been left open just two minutes after a very specific conversation about keeping it closed at all times. This is all happening so quickly and is so bewildering. Less than five minutes ago all was bliss and fluff. And now we’re in this total chaos and rage panic. With that in mind I don’t add that it was Sarah herself who really left the door open almost the instant she’d insisted on keeping it closed. Somehow I really don’t think that would help matters right now. Having composed herself a little, but still very clearly shaken, Sarah tells us that this happened to another cat in here five or six years ago. She says that he was gone for two weeks and came back black. ‘That’s hundreds of years of tunnels and who knows what down there,’ she says. Yeah. The reality of that is starting to hit both myself and Maja. ‘Guys,’ she says sadly, pleadingly. ‘Please, you can’t be here right now. I think it’s more likely Ron will come back if it’s just me here. Can you just go to your room.’ Still totally stunned by this wrecking ball that’s crashed into our world, we comply without thought or hesitation. But as soon as we’re there, we look at each other with a realisation which I give voice to. ‘We’ve just been sent to our room.’ Maja nods sadly. ‘This is really not good,’ I continue. ‘That cat could actually die. It might already be dead.’ I’m thinking of so many scenarios right now, some of which I mention, others I don’t. She might never be able to find her way out and could starve to death in there with no-one even knowing. Essentially an indoor cat, she could possibly find her way outside. If she does that, she’ll have little to no idea of how to behave in this car filled central London area. If she survives that gauntlet, I don’t see how she finds her way back to the apartment. Even if she does somehow find her way back, it’s not like she’s going to buzz the downstairs intercom. She has no idea what number apartment she lives in. No. Sarah’s baby, the so-called light of her life, is gone. Disappeared, dead, or at serious risk of death, or with little chance of finding her way back if she somehow doesn’t get/ hasn’t already been killed. I might as well say it now. It will be me that will have killed/ lost her. Happy Saturday 13th.

Where the hell do we go from this? My first thought is that we’re going to be needing Maja’s insurance policy already. After just four days. How can we carry on living here if the cat doesn’t come back? I don’t see how it could be possible. But even if she does come back, that might not be until tomorrow. Or two days, three days, a week, more. How tense will the atmosphere be like in here all that time? No. I just don’t see it.

It’s with all those thoughts swirling round my head that Sarah comes knocking, enters the room and says, ‘Guys, I don’t want you drinking in here anymore. I just don’t.’ Then she leaves. That does it for me. It might seem trivial, but if she’d said at the outset no drinking in the place at all, fine. We could have taken or left it, and we would have taken it. But to let us in and impose a rule like that now, after one incident, I’m really not happy about that. Apart from anything else, what house rule is she going to spring on us next? And after that? My immediate thought is that I suddenly don’t want to live here anymore and I say so. Let’s just move back to the house, however horrible that might be. At least it would be our horrible. Maja says we shouldn’t make any decisions like that in the heat of this moment and she’s totally right. Above everything, we just have to get out to clear our minds for a bit and make sense of all this. Sarah couldn’t agree more that we shouldn’t be here right now. But before we leave, she makes a point of telling us that she’s spoken to a good friend and neighbour about this and has come to realise that it wasn’t my fault at all, that she should have told us about the hole being there, and she totally accepts I exposed it completely accidentally. She also apologises for coming slamming down on the non drinking rule, saying, ‘I’m sorry, I was just lashing out and looking for things to blame, but this is your place and of course you can do what you want.’ Lovely to hear and an equilibrium of sorts has returned. But none of that changes the fact that Ron is still gone and probably not coming back. We wish her luck and leave.

Out on the street, Maja says, ‘Wow. Our first crisis.’ Yes, no other way to put it. It very much is. We walk slowly to Hampstead Heath, all the while trying to take it in but we just can’t. I just say over and over again, ‘I’ve killed her cat.’ I don’t see any way back from this. We talk about the prospect of moving back to the house, which would mean moving back in to live with Jenn which Maja is not keen on at all. The two of them did not speak a word to each other all the time Maja was there and she does not want to return to that atmosphere. Option two is staying where we are and dealing with whatever fall-out that entails. Not a good secondary option at all. We really, truly, do not know what to do about this. The one thing we’re lucky about, Ha! Lucky?, is that the weather is nice. This is Corona, lockdown London. Once you leave the house, you’re outside and that’s it. If it was raining or cold, there would be nowhere to go and have a sit-down in. No cafe, bar or library. Nothing. We probably would have ended up riding the bus or tube just to get out of the weather, but thankfully we don’t have to think about that. Instead, we have the wonderful Hampstead Heath to roam about on. I’ve never enjoyed being here less. But there’s no escape. No matter where we go, nothing can change the situation or the crisis clouds that have now gathered all around us.

We walk around like this for four hours, never quite leaving our dazed, bewildered, slightly scared state. It’s around the four hour mark that Maja says, ‘I think it’s time to go home.’ Home? I suppose it is, but for how long? With foreboding, we make our way back, each step taking us closer to whatever the hell we’re going to find upon opening the door. We arrive at the street and I pull Maja back for a few pep talk words. ‘We’re about to walk into the fire,’ I say. ‘We go in there together, and face whatever we come up against together.’ She nods with defiance. We’re going to front up to this and we’re going to do it now. We pause for a few seconds to individually steel ourselves and then turn and deliberately walk towards a world of doubt, confusion and possible retribution. Chaos, grief, anger? We have no idea what we’ll be met with. But we’re about to put ourselves right in the middle of it all and accept whatever comes our way and whatever that could mean. Our minds are blank. We have no idea of any of this so can’t even see a way to the immediate future, that future being just seconds away and behind one single door. We enter the apartment block and walk up the stairs, heads held high but stomachs brought to a ridiculous low. This is climbing over the top of the trenches territory. We’re in no-man’s land now and any moment the machine guns are going to open up. Will we make it through? At the front door I turn the key and look at Maja. ‘This is it. Let’s go.’

We enter the apartment and it explodes.

‘Guys, guys, did you get my message?’ We didn’t but this is not at all what we expected. Sarah’s happy, jubilant even, that we’re back. She runs out of the main room and calls to us from the end of the corridor. ‘She came back. She came back.’ She’s almost crying with relief as she says the words. ‘Half an hour ago. I sent you a message to tell you. Oh I love you guys. You must have really been through it.’ Oh, we have. Her relief shoots through us like a wave of lasers and we run to her to be enveloped in the hugest of group hugs. Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. It’s over, it’s over.’ From what we can gather, and no-one can be really certain anyway, Ron never went very far into the hole and so the nightmare scenario of her becoming irretrievably lost in the labyrinth of Victorian architecture never happened. And when she was ready, she just jumped back out again and into the arms of a disbelieving, hysterically jubilant Sarah who is now full of joy and how wonderful she thinks the two of us are all over again. In short, it’s like the whole episode of horribleness ever happened. But me and Maja look at each other and we know. We’ve been seriously tested today. We’ve stared at the fire, held hands and walked, together, right into it. And here we are on the other side. All happy again and harmony in the apartment once more restored. Oh, and while we were out, Sarah and a friend did the underside of the bath and plugged the hole up properly with tiles. So, no more hole, and no more mystery damp rags under the bath hiding a mystery in the hope no-one would one day push them aside while a cat was under there.

Day 24

Monday March 15, 2021

Mark:

Sarah doesn’t have a fridge. She’s vegan and doesn’t use conventional milk so doesn’t really have things around that can go off. Cooking, for her, is mostly a big pan of vegetables and beans and things that just sits there on the stove for whenever she wants it. She’s shared it with us, and told us to help ourselves to it whenever we want, and it really is very good. In fact, this is kind of how the whole experience here is developing. Food is just there for anyone to help themselves to whenever they want. Actually, just about anything is. It really is developing into a kind of communal living right down to the three of us all now feeling comfortable enough to walk round the place naked at times. This very much is not the conventional house sharing situation. Even down to just pretty much wandering into each others’ bedrooms for casual chats. Privacy is very much respected, but if we’re in the ordinary run of the day, whatever passes for ordinary around here, it’s totally fine to wander into any room at any time with or without clothes on.

Fridge. Oh yes. I was talking about the fridge, or non existence of one. Well, me and Maja have decided we would very much like the existence of one. In London, many people, if they can help it, don’t throw anything away. All kinds of items either get put out on the street for people to come and help themselves, even sometimes with electrical items having helpful labels like, ‘This works,’ stuck to them. When we were arranging our room here, there was a big black, kinda broken couch in it that didn’t quite fit the room or anywhere else in the apartment so we put it out on the street. The next day it was gone. A ridiculous amount of furniture and kitchenware in our old house came from the street. Apart from street donating and scavenging, there are also websites where people will post stuff for sale, or also often for free if you can pick it up. I’ve registered with one of these to see what we can get, and yes, I did do it with the hope of seeing a free fridge. That crazy idea stops being crazy today when we do indeed see a free fridge on offer. We make the call and it’s still available and we can pick it up tomorrow.

Day 25

Tuesday March 16, 2021

Mark:

The lady who has the fridge is called Marcella and she lives in Holloway, two to three kilometres away from us. We’ve talked about hiring a car for the job, but I have another ridiculous idea which is that we can take the trolley I’ve used to carry amps all over London in what now feels like another life, and put a fridge on it and wheel it all the way back home. Will this work? I have no idea. We’ve decided to get there, see if the trolley thing works, and if it doesn’t, see what we can to sort out some kind of hired transport from there. We’ve figured that even if we pay up to 50 quid or more for a hire car, or man with a van or whatever, it will still be a lot cheaper than buying a new fridge, which is what we’re basically getting here for free. 

We get to Marcella’s house and she’s delighted to see us, to see that the fridge is going to some people who need and will really appreciate it. We’re also helping her out because she had no idea how to dispose of a fridge. Why it’s being disposed of we don’t quite get to the bottom of, but that’s none of our business. Marcella is lovely and wants to give this thing to us, well, somebody but that somebody has turned out to be us, and we are gratefully receiving. But this is not a little thing. It’s a full on fridge freezer, one of those things that’s taller than the average person. Incredibly, we discover the trolley can take it. Which means that now we’re about to set off and wheel a person sized fridge through a few London neighbourhoods and down Holloway High Street, all the way back home. This means going very slowly with me pushing the thing, totally blind to where I’m going while Maja walks in front, gently guiding me left and right as obstacles appear. The most notable of these is a full sheltered bus stop full of people right in the middle of a London high street that we slowly, and quite literally, have to negotiate our way through. Oh, for a photograph of that. Then, when we do finally make it all the way home, we have to carry it up two flights of stairs. Oh, that is fun. Then, once in the apartment – what a lovely triumphant moment that is – it’s back on the trolley with it for the final leg of wheeling it into the main room to place it lovingly in the corner where it quietly and joyously hums away. Sarah can’t believe it when she comes home and marvels at our resourcefulness, effort and determination at even being able to find such a thing in the first place, and then the sheer force and energy required to get it all the way here. The next day, in something of a celebration, I write a set of lyrics commemorating the event, called Marcella’s Fridge. I really hope we can do something with it one day.

And this really is what we do now. Live life and write about it. In here and in our songs. Or, at least in our lyrics which we fully intend to turn into songs when we finally get the time and space to sit down and really look at full on songwriting. We keep thinking we’re going to get to that, but then something else happens that demands our attention. Songwriting. It really is the thing that happens when you have nothing else to do. For whatever reason that is. Yes, I know, there is the avoidance issue that even some of the most successful have. Sting says he avoids it like the plague and even Paul Simon says it’s never fun. For us, at least as far as lyrics are concerned, we write write write all the time. We’ve taken the David Bowie approach of just writing everything down. All of us, we’re surrounded and blessed by genius. We just don’t write it down enough. Think about it. You don’t sit down at your kitchen table and think, ‘I’m going to think of something devastatingly funny now.’ No. It just happens when you’re with your friends. The same goes for genius observations, and just comments in general. And of course it’s not just what you say, but what your friends say and also what you overhear in the world around you. All. The. Time. But it all gets lost to the ether. Well, we’re going round and trying to gather some of that ether up. Or at least catch it before it becomes so. For this, we have pens scattered all around the apartment and we take notebooks everywhere we go. A conversation on a bus, a daytrip, and chance encounter, an image of London. It all goes in. And what doesn’t I know will stay with us to emerge at some later time. This has led to some bizarre situations. Meeting friends in the street while one of us is walking along head deep in a notebook writing. And in supermarkets while one of us has continued shopping while the other stands deep in thought in the middle of an aisle. Clean up in aisle five? For us it’s write up in aisle six. Just a few sheets of paper and our writing sticks. It’s all we need. Never in my life have I seen notebooks fill up with lyrics as fast as ours have been in the past three weeks or so.

But here’s the other thing. As a songwriter past, I have written plenty of lyrics as pieces on their own, with a thought to using them later but very very few of those pieces see the light of day as actual songs. By this I don’t mean that I don’t try. I do, it’s just that while I usually think it will be an easy, almost lazy thing to do to just put some chord together and sing what I’ve written over them, I almost always end up writing whole new lyrics to what I’m coming up with melodically and rhythmically. But it’s still great of course to have all these lyrics as a resource, and just great that we’re writing full stop. Even the concepts of them, and individual lines, of which I’m certain there are many great ones. Which is another thing. Apart from whole sets of lyrics in those books, we also have individual lines from things we’ve said or heard, and sometimes simply just concepts. As for what we’ll end up doing with them, who knows what Maja’s approach to actual songwriting will be when we get there? And I’m sure I can have a go at some of these, or maybe at least be able to incorporate what we have. But even then, I do write a song and come up with a whole new set of lyrics, well, the well will have been left untouched and its levels will remain constant. Absolutely no harm there.

Maja:

We’re finally off for a little outing. Since it’s deep into covid times, London is in lockdown and meeting people is not really that common. You can’t really go into a bar or anything, so we decide to meet up in Camden and have a couple of beers by the riverside. It’s fun to get to meet Matt, he is a very lively person with a ton of positive energy bottled up in his chest. As we stand in the winter cold, cheeks bitten by the wind, I get to hear a ton of lovely stories. About a city that was once alive. A town that was bursting with musicians, tourists, and the people that used to make out the, until recently, music capital of the world. The city I missed. And my heart hurts knowing it will never be the same again, so I will never get to experience it. The before Brexit and before Covid London. 

But I am happy to hear the stories from the people who were there. By the musicians that made up the tourist attractions that people would travel to see. To hear about playing at the Blues Kitchen, Ain’t Nothin’ But… and of course the 100 hour jam. Who gets to hear that? 

That’s what I think while I let these talkative guys go on and on. Sipping my drink. Enjoying the atmosphere. Of the empty canal next to Camden Market. Where it’s never empty.

Day 26

Wednesday March 17, 2021

Maja:

I’m woken up by Sarah entering our room in some state of lovely excitement, bringing me a present. When she woke up that morning, she was a bit chilly, so she got dressed in a jumper. That jumper is an official Gorillaz jumper from their tour a couple of years ago, which lead singer Damon Albarn personally gave out to only musicians and crew. The character on the jumper is Murdoc, the Gorillaz bassist. I’m beyond happy about it. What a way to wake up. 

Gorillaz is the band I’ve been listening to the most this last year, so it’s very fitting. And of course, Murdoc. The bassist. Of course, I play the bass, and Mark is my bass mentor, so what could be more fitting?

Mark:

After a wonderful morning, we’re hit again by reality in the evening as we sit down to really go through visa possibilities for Maja so that she can stay in London. All it pulls up is despair, despair, and despair. The two options we seem to have are by marriage, or something called the global talent plan. We spend three hours forensically going through both, and whenever we feel we can overcome one obstacle in the scores of requirements, we come to another which cannot possibly be met. The whole thing is just looking totally impossible. In fact, we conclude that both routes are deliberately written to set people up to fail. One piece of information in particular that keeps coming up is the need for a sponsor, with no clue at all as to what would constitute as a sponsor, no matter how much we research it.

The marriage road looks like this. 

Maja has a six month visa as it stands right now. She has been here just about a month.

We discover you have to formally announce an intention to marry, and then can’t get married for at least 70 days after that. If we do this tomorrow, that would take us more than three months into the six. But you also have to have a venue booked so even in this hypothetical scenario, that will probably not happen tomorrow. Especially not when you throw Corona regulations into the mix.

Once married, you can apply. 

The application process takes up to two months to receive a reply. That’s five months right there. Oh, and before any of this can even begin, Maja first needs to get a divorce which also has to go through the courts which will take at least another month. If it begins today, which it won’t. So there’s your six months. Minimum. And it’s not even a given that a visa would be granted on those grounds even if we managed to jump through all the hoops and tick all the boxes within the available time.

In a moment of clarity, we decide to solve the Visa problem by deciding we’re not going to depend on it. We’re going to do this by simply not living in the UK. With that we start to look at countries where it’s easier for Europeans to go and live. This leads us to seriously consider a few countries in Asia, South America, to be left for us to look at more closely another day.  

As we’re discuss this and I’m considering an option or two, Maja suddenly stops me cold. ‘Oh, I have an idea,’ she says breathlessly, wild excitement in her eyes. Oh wow. This sounds like it could be something. I exit my train of thought instantly. We’re in a desperate state here and her entire expectant face tells me she’s just about to unleash the magic thunderball that will blast the whole thing wide open. I take a mental step back to allow full space for whatever she is about to say to wash and crash right into. She hits me with it. ‘Will you go traveling in a camper van with me.’ Wow. I didn’t see that coming. But I don’t hesitate. ‘Yes.’ ‘Wow,’ she giggles. ‘That’s a bigger commitment than agreeing to get married.’ Yeah. I guess it really is.

Maja:

I’ve been thinking about camper vans for a long time. As a way to travel around and still keeping my life with me. So why not now? Mark can be in Europe for 180 days a year and I can be in UK for 180 days as well. So we can travel and live that way together. We just can’t work that way, but that is a different problem. Maybe we can solve that in some other way. Only this way, we can stay together. I hope. That’s really everything that matters to me right now.

Mark:

Instantly this has become our fallback option and we’ve now decided not to let the visa thing stress us out at all. If it happens it happens. And even if some circumstances arise which miraculously facilitate a visa solution, we might just follow through with all this anyway. Because, as we talk more and more about it, the whole thing starts to make more and more sense. Almost seamlessly the conversation coalesces into an actual plan for what we really want to do now and what we are now going to do – write songs, tour internationally with them, and write about it.

So far since we met we’ve spoken about kids and marriage. We’ve moved house together. And now we’re committing ourselves to working together as internationally touring, diary writing musicians and songwriters. Can I please remind you, we first physically met less than four weeks ago.

Day 27

Thursday March 18, 2021

Mark:

We tend not to talk about Sarah related stuff in the apartment, good or bad. Today while we’re out and about, we agree that while we love the touring idea, we’re not just going to look at upping and leaving as soon as we can. We’ve been given this opportunity of our own apartment based on Sarah needing someone in it and to take off anytime in the next few weeks would be a bit of a betrayal of that. And besides, should the visa situation be sorted, it would be no hardship to stay here in London for a while. I kinda had the same thoughts when I first came to London with that office job Paul had got for me while I was still living in Madrid. The boss there really came through, giving me the job on Paul’s say so and on the strength of a one minute phone conversation with me. Although I was itching to dive into London’s music scene and really start my journey there, I decided to commit to that job for at least six months, maybe even a year, and maybe gently work myself into music at the same time. As it happened of course, it all fell apart after just two weeks which blew all my good will apart. As a friend said at the time, when the hurricane was still at its fiercest, that was the best thing that could have happened to me as it left me free to follow my London path. I had already begun to harbour such thoughts myself and did my best to agree, but damn it was hard to do so.

Maja:

So if I’m going to stay in London, I need a visa. And our lovely friend Sarah is very well connected so she decides to help me have a look at that. First things first, she asks me to write up a CV so she can send that to her lawyer friend so he can have a look on how to make this happen. I do and she has a look and she’s mighty impressed. She discovers now that I’m an engineer and not some kind of damsel in distress that she had imagined. She still sends it off to see if I could get a visa in some kind of way, but the reality is like this, I could get a visa. A working visa. 

So why don’t I just do that then? Honest answer, I am not ready to do that. I am going through a divorce and that has put tremendous pressure on me, so I don’t feel like I could do that right now. 

I might do that later, but also, if you take that route you get stuck in the same job with a lot of terms, and I might want to reduce the amount of time I work to get more time doing the things I value in life such as doing music. And with a working visa I would get stuck in the same squirrel wheel everyone is in, and I am right now dying to get out of. 

I might want to take a freelancing job for some money, or work half time or something else, but I don’t want to commit to working full time right now. I just can’t commit to that.

So for now, I continue to look for a situation to coexist with Mark. And Sarah, with her newfound knowledge of me not being a damsel in distress as she previously thought, is starting to change her attitude about me… 

Mark:

Sarah’s met a guy around the local area called Dee. She had him round the apartment a few days ago for a bit of a social and really liked his vibe and where he seemed to be going musically. He’s into production and rap and she thinks he could be a good fit for us, whatever ‘us’ means. So we settle on a rough rehearsal time – all times are rough around here, and around 6pm, all four of us are in the main room and ready to see what kinds of sounds we can make. Me and Maja have been rehearsing a little by this point and have worked out something of a system for jamming and this is our first chance to try it out. It works quite well and there really is something of a special vibe with the two of us playing together. Bass is all about feel, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about here. We settle on something simple with Maja playing single, steady root notes and me playing grooves and solos over them. Well, I’ve never had such a feeling playing over such a simple beat. All the emotion is in those single notes and I’m able to feed of that and produce some really great feeling grooves that have Dee moving all over the place and singing and rapping like it’s the most effortless thing in the world. This feeds back into what we’re doing and we hit a new level, which Dee takes up to move himself even more and so the cycle goes. As it builds and builds, Sarah starts to sing as well, so we have the two of them really going for it as me and Maja keep things burning here, with Maja holding the full bottom rhythm as I play off the two singers while keeping the groove going for them at the same time. As this continues, as the dual basses pump and rumble, the dancing starts and we feel the start of something really special coming together. We jam through a few more bits and pieces for twenty minutes or so and then stop to collect our thoughts. Sarah has seen enough. ‘This is serious,’ she declares. ‘The power and vibe of the four personalities in this room is just huge. This is on. We all look at each other and agree. Myself, Maja and Sarah already feel like we have a massive collective personality, like we could take on anything and Dee has just come and fitted right into that, while adding a whole new dimension of positivity. Apart from anything else, he loves the vibes and positivity given off by me and Maja, loves the whole feel of the two of us playing bass, and, as a particular fan of bass, really likes the way I play individually. There’s so much more that can be tried as well. This really looks set. ‘Guys, we’re doing this,’ says Sarah. Twice a week, maybe three times a week, in here for two hours at a time, no messing about. Yeah?’ We all look at each other and smile. Yes, it’s on. This is happening. On top of everything else, Maja is now in a band. But there’s more. A member of an international chart topping band has expressed an interest in joining us. But not just that. This is someone from one of Maja’s favourite bands. Sarah tells us about this, but warns us that if it happens, this person might well try to take it over as their project. We look at each other again. No. This is ours. Don’t care who it is, no thanks. Maja leads the charge on this. So now, not only is she in her first London band, she’s now also turned down the opportunity of working with someone from one of her favourite bands. This is all getting a bit surreal.

Day 28

Friday March 19, 2021

Late morning and we hear strange voices in the apartment. We don’t bother to go and see who it is, or what’s going on, but we don’t need to. After about ten minutes, we hear whoever it is leave, and then Sarah comes into our room, barely able to hold onto herself through the tears of laughter. ‘Guys, you’re not going to believe this,’ she says. ‘The neighbours downstairs have just had their ceiling fall in. It has to be because of the bass frequencies and the dancing from last night. We might just have to tone it down a little.

Day 30

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Maja:

I am new in England. I’ve never been to England before and in England they have their dishes they are very proud of. Such as the English roast dinner. So as a welcome, Sarah decides to cook one for us. Sarah loves to cook, but recently she hasn’t had that many reasons to cook living alone and being a vegetarian. So she offers to cook us dinner, a wonderful pork roast with crackling and roast goose fat potatoes. Brilliant, thankyou very much. 

Me and Mark go about our day, having a lovely walk, writing some lyrics, and time flies. As we return home Sarah greets us with the most lovely roast dinner, and it is amazing. Absolutely brilliant. Roast pork with a thick layer of crackling. Yorkshire puddings. The most amazing roast goose fat potatoes cooked from scratch, golden and crispy on the outside with the softest inside you can imagine of a potato. Of course served with roasted veggies and gravy. 

I would have loved to have share this meal with all three of us, but Sarah says that she’s so happy to have made it but would never eat something like this. But that we should enjoy it. So she leaves the apartment to hang with one of her guys and we are left alone. With this feast. It’s one of the best meals I’ve ever had. Me and Mark enjoy it fully and after we put things away, we go to sleep. Blissfully unaware of what will happen next.

When Sarah comes home, she can’t resist having some of those incredible duck fat roast potatoes that she had made, and it just doesn’t sit right with her. They just don’t fit with her new strict healthy living regime so she decides to fast for three days straight to set things right for herself. Not long before we came here, she’d also decided to stop smoking. Other things have gone too, and all good, but now on top of that she’s having a three day fast. It’s just too much. She is trying too hard. This just does something to her personality, making her fragile and unpredictable and ready to pick any argument even if you’re agreeing with her. There will still be moments of fun and togetherness, but all punctuated by too many down moments. This quickly marks the beginning of the end for us here, and no matter how much we try, things will never really be quite the same again.

Day 31

Monday March 22, 2021

Mark:

The Lord Palmerston sends out a group message, through my friend and assistant manager Duran, to ask when we’ll be available to be back. I answer I’ll be ready as soon as needed. This is the first sign that the furlough, which I’ve been on since mid December, and which even made this thing with Maja possible in the first place, could be coming to an end but there’s no indication of when that could actually happen which would be nice to know. Alright, it’s supremely frustrating not knowing but I suspect even the company doesn’t know exact details yet so I’ll just have to leave it for now.

There’s more frustration as Sarah tells us we can’t shower anymore as water is now dripping into the apartment downstairs following the ceiling collapse. We have no idea what is going on structurally, but there are some large holes in our bathroom walls, and it seems drops of water are going through them, collecting then dripping downstairs. We are told we have to have just baths from now on. Bugger. Far from ideal, but we’ll have a go.

Maja:

We try to have a bath while Sarah is out. Sorry for not being more grateful with the whole free rent thing, but it’s the most disgusting bath ever. There’s mould everywhere, and you have to sit in the tub trying to get clean. After getting up from the bath the water is black with mould and dirt. It’s making me sick. And apparently I’m not allowed to do anything about this situation. 

Mark:

It could just be that the bath has been filled up to and kinda past the overflow and maybe that’s not the best idea as it seems that’s where everything comes from, and I’m sure Sarah doesn’t have baths in this black stuff so maybe we’ve done something wrong. But no. Not ideal.

Day 32

Tuesday March 23, 2021

Mark:

Wow. There have been a few brief re-openings of the bars but today incredibly marks the one year anniversary of the announcement of the first lockdown in the UK and here we still are. But it’s also fun(?) to note that yesterday was the day we got the message that we would be opening up again, again. 

Meanwhile, our daily experience really is going up and down. It goes up this morning as Sarah stakes another claim for best housemate in the world by bringing us breakfast in bed this morning. And I mean the full real deal. Bacon, duck eggs, toast, tomatoes, and beans. And of course, obligatory by law when providing an English breakfast, steaming cups of tea which keep coming as required. 

We get all that down us, chill a little while longer then, with the apartment’s milk supplied depleted courtesy of Sarah’s breakfast teas, pop across the road to pick up some more milk. Almond milk, mind. It’s really lovely and sunny and we are very well fortified so we feel like staying out and getting a bus into town. So, back at the apartment building, Maja waits outside while I run the milk upstairs. We’re just going to get the first bus that comes along.

Here it is and we see it takes us to Victoria, which means I get to surprise Maja with a walk down what looks like a nondescript street along a mysterious barbed wire topped wall. What’s behind that wall? She discovers when we round a corner and there it is. Buckingham Palace. A walk from there, then up the mall to Trafalgar Square and once there, we simply have to go round that corner to give Maja her first look at The Marquis, sadly closed, but there it is. Also round this area, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus up a little to Carnaby street and then a general walk around. A few hours of this and we’re almost done, but then just as we’re thinking about taking a bus back home, we come across Fortnum and Mason. Means nothing to Maja, but I’ve never been in here and I really think we should, so we do. What we find is the most spectacular food and drink shop, complete with its spiral staircase going down to the most colourful fruit and veg display I’ve ever seen. Through all this we find the whiskey and brandy section and we simply have to have a look through all that. This is kind of like a mini Harrods. Like a Harrods but just a big food and drinks shop which happens to have a bottle of brandy that goes for 23 thousand quid. Shop assistant Andrew takes us through their ranges with Maja really keen on finding a good peaty whiskey. She settles on a high range bottle of Ardbeg which you would definitely not find in your average supermarket. After this, it’s onto the cheese section where she finds a perfect Gruyere to accompany a bottle of red wine sometime. 

Then it’s onto a sunny bus home. This really feels like the first day in a long time where there have been no events to bring us down at all. Everything is just fine and stress free and here we are having a lovely walk round Londontown. 

Day 33

Wednesday March 24

Mark:

Sarah continues the breakfast theme and wakes us this morning with toast and tea. We will really have to be careful to not get too used to this.

She tells us she’s decided that if we can patch the shower up so that it definitely, definitely does not drip anywhere, we can use it. This is something of a relief so we get to work. We go out to the local hardware store and buy what we think we need to do a patch up job. With different types of cut out parts of bin bags and shopping bags and a lot of tape, we fix the holes around the bath where water has been leaking through. It isn’t pretty but it sure looks effective. It looks like we’re back on.

Maja:

Well. As long as I don’t do anything permanent I should be able to find a way of making the shower usable again. So I drag Mark to the hardware store. I’m going to fix this. I’m not allowed to actually fix the cracks with grout – that has to be done by the council that refuses to come – so I’ll have to find a solution that works without doing anything permanent. 

I pick up three of the cheapest available shower curtains, and some tape. With which I fully waterproof the bathtub area so you can shower. As I finish, it is once more usable, and no water will fall on the floor and drip to the neighbours. This is a big accomplishment for me. Only one thing. The bathroom is left looking like one of those rooms that people use for murders in horror movies. 

Mark:

Through this job we’ve discovered a couple more things that we could get on with. One of them is to maybe replace the lino in the bathroom. This seems like quite a big change so I think it’s prudent to ask Sarah if it would be OK. She’s almost offended by the question. In a weary tone, bizarrely managing to snap at the same time, she says, ‘Mark, I’ve told you. This is your place. Do what you want. I couldn’t care less what you do. Stop asking.’ Despite the tone, I guess there’s a kind of love in that response.

We haven’t heard at all from Sarah’s lawyer friend, but she says he can be a bit like that and not to worry about it. Then, standing in the centre of the main room, she says, ‘Hang on a minute.’ She closes her eyes, goes into deep concentration mode and faces her head towards the ceiling. When she opens them again, she looks at us with total confidence and says, ‘I just asked my guys and got the answer back. You two will be fine. Maja isn’t going anywhere.’ Two words. O and K. When I speak to Maja about this later, she rationalises it, saying that what Sarah is actually doing is concentrating and going on gut feeling and claiming, or actually believing, that that is coming from some other place to give her a message. 

Since it was declared that we would rehearse two or three times a week, no messing, we haven’t yet managed one follow up. There’s an attempt at it tonight with a rehearsal declared, but with no explanation, we later learn it’s been cancelled. Oh well. We take the opportunity to instead take a bottle of red wine up to Hampstead Heath to sit on our favourite bench on the top of Parliament Hill and look down on the beautiful and spectacular city centre view with some Gruyere as a perfect accompaniment. A wonderful escape from what is increasingly feeling like a chaotic, ever changing and unpredictable lifestyle. Oh yeah. Dee apparently lives with us now. We’ve not been working with him so much but he has been spending more and more time here. That was cool, but then today Sarah announced that he’s moved in. Fine. We guess. Whatever she keeps telling us, it is of course her place and she can do what she wants with it, but what’s happened to the thing where she was never going to be here and it was to be our place to do what we wanted and then she was going long term travelling and leaving it all to us? This is increasingly looking like not being a thing. She hasn’t even been away once yet. Instead, what we’ve experienced is being told a whole bunch of times that she had plans to go away, then those dates have come and gone and have been completely unobserved with no mention of any kinds of plans or cancellations. Again, totally her prerogative of course, but it is all a little strange, slightly unnerving, and starting to veer ever so slightly off course from the brochure message we received at the start of all this.

Day 34

Thursday March 25

Oh dear. Sarah’s on the unpredictable path again. She comes into our room today, pretty much unannounced – fair enough; that’s how it goes in this communal, walking round the apartment, into each others’ rooms naked, food sharing thing we have going now. But it’s far from a friendly visit. Out of nowhere she says she doesn’t want to work with us anymore. The reason? We read her some of our lyrics yesterday and she’s latched onto one line, totally misunderstood it and put her own interpretation on it. She’s saying that it was our subconscious way of telling her we didn’t want to work with her so she’s deciding now that we won’t. Er, what?

The offending line is. ‘With others it’s not the same.’ This is a line comparing our relationship with the way we, or most people, are with other people; external stimuli are usually required to hang out – TV, drinking, music, video/boardgames, sport, whatever. We’re saying in that song, and it’s quite clear, that for me and Maja to hang out with each other, we often require absolutely no external stimuli or diversions. Remember that first five days? The two of us and the ceiling. No TV, music, reading or alcohol. Nothing. There’s no-one either of us has ever spent time with that way. With others it’s not the same. Most people need activities to do when they hang out. Even the best of friends. We often don’t. With others it’s not the same. Without even talking to us about this, Sarah has decided it means that we work well when it’s just the two of us, but when others become involved it’s not the same. Meaning, in her world, we think that when she’s involved it’s not the same. Who would deliver a message like that in such a subliminal way and expect it to be understood? This is totally twisting words we’ve actually written down and read to her. This is not the last time she will get angry with us for something we may or may not have been thinking. The difference is that this time we’re able to persuade her that she’s got it all wrong. She eventually leaves the room having been convinced of that, saying she loves working with us and hopes it continues and continues. Well, that’s what she’s saying now. But working with us? We’ve done one 20 minute rehearsal and had every other rehearsal since then cancelled. But at least we’ve averted a bad atmosphere. For now.

Maja:

An artist comes over to leave some art supplies and Mark says hello. I spend the time singing. Afterwards, we talk a bit more to Sarah, who has been talking to a female friend of hers who is currently living in Scotland. This friend wants to live in London and Sarah says she’s offered her a room here so she will probably move in with us. So now, from being offered our own apartment, it’s gone to Dee has moved in – although we’ve yet to fully see evidence of that – to someone else might be moving in. At this rate, even if Sarah ever does go away saying it’s ‘our’ place, at any given time we feel there could be a knock on the door and it could be someone we don’t know saying they live here now.

We feel a little unsettled about all this, but are still resolved to make the most of the opportunity. We go back to our room and decide to practice some easy singing. This is where Mark puts on some music, plays along to it on the bass and I sing along to what’s playing. First we go for a couple of Jack Johnsson songs, then we try Laleh which Mark totally doesn’t get, then we go for RHCP. I’m used to singing RHCP, so when I do that, I can finally get some power in my voice and it feels more like it used to. We’re trying to make out some parts of Californication and feeling pretty good about it when Sarah comes into our room, saying she wants to film this great vibe we have going. But all we’re doing is singing along to famous songs. This really isn’t something we want recorded and put out there. This is also totally destroying the flow we’d got into. But OK. Mark decides to go for what she wants and says A1 – we’ve developed a few shorthand codes for playing together. A1 is a particular type of simple groove that I play and then he solos over it. So I have to grab my bass, tune up and find a groove. It doesn’t go well and it completely breaks our flow. I end up just playing A. Mark tries to solo over it, but his concentration after having his own momentum broken as well isn’t quite having it. We both feel pressured and frustrated over the situation and we have to tell Sarah it just isn’t happening and to please not use whatever she’s just recorded. She says, ‘No problem. Deleted.’ Great. Then we try to get back to what we were doing before she barged in, but with the frustration in the air, it just isn’t happening. We look at each other with a sigh and just know. So we stop, take a shower, and go on a walk just to refresh our minds. It’s lovely outside, but with the frustration in the air, it just doesn’t feel nice. All we can think is that we had finally started doing something and it felt good, and then that feeling just got stolen from us. And put onto virtual videotape. That, along with everything having changed from what we were originally told when we first moved in, has really taken the shine off the whole thing. Exactly where is this all going?

Day 35

Friday March 26, 2021

Mark:

Early today we go out on another of what Maja calls our panic walks, or at least crisis walks, as we continue to take in the thought of yet another person being offered a room here in what we were promised was going to be our own place. What is going on? We were told that this would be ours. Fine, Sarah can do what she wants with her own home, we totally get that. But please don’t promise something that isn’t going to be delivered. Rent and deposit free? Damn yes. That was unbelievable enough. With that, we would have completely accepted that other people would be around as well. But that’s not how it was sold. We were told she would be travelling and we would have it all to ourselves. For years, she’s even said on a few occasions. 

This is all starting to feel like it’s kind of falling apart around us. No, we definitely did not sign up for this.

Downstairs is leaking again. What we did should have been good enough, and Sarah thought it was, and even agrees that it looked like we’d blocked all the possible leaks. But there’s so much going on with these walls it was clearly impossible to catch them all. She requests we stop using the shower again. With that bath we had the other day, just not happening. We will sort this. There has to be a way. Maja comes up with it as she has the idea to first buy more shower curtains. We do that, and then return to put them up around the whole inner bath area. So now we really have created a fully sealed, totally unleakable shower. A skeptical Sarah comes to have a look and loves it, which is a big relief because it’s one thing not being able to shower, a whole other thing to think of the prospect of that bath we had the other day.

The fact that we have a shower again feels like something of a new start. Our space isn’t quite as much our own as we thought it would be but it could yet get there. However, our time is our own. With that we come to a conclusion and make a decision. We decide to cancel time. No more clocks. We’ve realised we really don’t need them.

Day 36

Saturday March 27, 2021

Mark:

This cancelling time thing is seriously cool. We really are going about our day with absolutely no idea what time it is, which is incredibly liberating, if a little frustrating when you inadvertently catch sight of a clock – which makes the big one in the main room a tad inconvenient. I’ve been on furlough for a while now, on and off but even so, and have generally got up when awake, slept when ready to sleep, and ate when hungry so time hasn’t been a massive factor in my life for quite a while. But now, we really are working to the rhythm of our own clocks with no idea even of how long we’re doing a particular activity. It should be acknowledged right now that this whole thing is made easier, or even possible, by the fact that we’re very central within London; just about all public transport, apart from the latest or earliest of hours, comes within ten minutes, usually within five, so there’s no need to check or observe timetables. Even night buses can be as little as 15 to 20 minutes apart, especially when you’re looking to get back to Camden from Trafalgar Square. Easy.

Well, it is all easy until Sarah knocks on our door at 1am and says, ‘You guys have cancelled time and that’s all really cute and fun and all that, but the people downstairs haven’t. Did you know it’s one O’Clock? And you really are being a bit too loud.’ Oh sorry, we really didn’t have any idea. OK. Fair enough.

We might have to think a bit more about how to do this. We conclude that if it’s light we can assume we can be as loud as we want, but if it’s dark maybe be a bit more mindful.

Day 37

Sunday March 28, 2021

I made a full English breakfast for me and Maja yesterday while Sarah danced and sang in the main room. This will be the backdrop to the greatest disaster in the apartment yet.

First, Sarah’s been doing a lot of dancing and singing in the apartment lately. Brilliant. It’s added a greatly energetic vibe and we’re very happy to be living within it, even on a day like yesterday when she dominated the main room with it. Great. Go for it. We’ll stay out of your way and do our thing, inspired by your thing. And it really has worked so much the other way with Sarah saying we have inspired and lifted her mood so much just by being here and by being us.

So yeah. Yesterday. Full English breakfast. Me and Maja eating that in our room at our window overlooking our part of central London. Just brilliant. The kitchen, as you know by now, is tiny. So Maja walked back to our room and past Sarah while I carried on in there while Sarah danced away to her music while checking out her form in the full width mirror. On the way, Sarah caught Maja’s eye through that mirror. The wrong kind of eye apparently. I’m about to find out just how wrong.

It begins to unfold first thing in the morning with a disaster we already had in waiting that we had no idea of

I’m up and going to the toilet and Sarah, all warmness and blessings, calls me in. I ask her to hang on, pay my visit, then come back and pay my visit. Sarah’s temperature has dropped about 10 degrees. She is no longer all warmness and blessings. She’s all fine with me though, she assures me. Oh yes. All fine with me. It’s Maja that’s the problem, she says. What the hell is this? ‘I received some feedback from some friends this morning about your video,’ she says. What video? What friends? ‘The one I recorded in your room a few days ago.’ Oh. OK. Not a great start. Didn’t we agree that was to be immediately deleted? Didn’t Sarah herself say it was deleted? While she was standing there holding the phone in her hand? Well apparently not only had she not deleted it, but she sent it to people. By all accounts, very influential people. Her people. That she says she’s been hoping to work with with us. Maybe even get funding from. Yeah, this has been a thing that has been mentioned a lot and I have absolutely no idea what it means. ‘They’ve come right back and asked what the hell I’m doing letting that negative energy in my house. They’ve told me I should not have that energy in my house.’ You’re talking about what exactly? I don’t say anything. Sarah calls up what she now knows as the clearly offensive video on her phone and shows it to me.

‘Look at that,’ she says, zooming in on Maja’s face – Maja, who at the time was being suddenly filmed deep in concentration and in some mild distress while she was struggling to come up with something on the spot to jam. And yes, feeling intruded on while we were very much in the middle of something. ‘Look at that scowl. That negativity. In my house. People have seen this and said this is a bad vibe that I should not be having or allowing in my own home. And do you know about yesterday morning?’ I do not know about yesterday. Yesterday Sarah danced and we had breakfast. Please tell me about yesterday. ‘It was the same again. Maja walked past me as she came through the room and looked at me in the mirror like I was some piece of dirt or something. Just a look of aggression.’ I have no idea what Sarah’s talking about and I just know that if I mention this to Maja, she will have no idea either. I’m in a state of disbelief. To deny anything would just be to admit there’s a problem. To apologise would be to admit there’s a problem. To say I’ll talk to Maja about it would be to admit there’s a problem. To tell Sarah she’s imagining it all would cause a problem. If I say nothing, I’m kind of admitting it’s a problem. I say nothing. So Sarah continues to talk, confirming that yes, there might just be a problem here. ‘Maybe living here isn’t the best thing for you guys,’ she says matter of factly and suddenly with a hint of sympathy in her voice. Maybe you’d like to think about looking for somewhere else.’ She speaks that last sentence with something approaching compassion, like she’s doing us a favour. It’s not kicking us out. It isn’t even remotely asking us to leave, but it’s the first time anything like this has been remotely suggested. And once a conversation like that has popped up, it really doesn’t go back in the box very easily. Where exactly? Wasn’t getting this place the impossible? For the first time I have the realisation that Maja was totally right to keep the rent up on her room in the house to keep it open. But surely no. We won’t be needing that. This, whatever the hell this is, can be worked out. I gently tell Sarah I don’t really understand and that I’m sure things are all good. She smiles sweetly and says, ‘I’m sure they are darling. I’m sure they are. Yeah. You go and talk to Maja.’ I’m grateful for that hint that the conversation is over and I leave Sarah’s room and head back to ours. Which, until very recently was Sarah’s. Until she gave it to us and she came into this tiny room to sleep on a mattress on the floor.

Back in bed and Maja of course wants to know what I was speaking to Sarah about. Is there a problem? Hmm. I really don’t want to cause a panic here so I say that things are fine, but there may just be something of a misconception that could be cleared up. Maja’s listening now. I tell her about the mirror incident. Get me. Incident. Damn. She’s stunned. It wasn’t something she’d even thought about. I’ve already decided I’m not going to mention the video. I think that on top of everything else, that could really cause a blow up so I’m keeping that to myself and Sarah. For now. Maja says she’ll go and talk to Sarah now about whatever this misunderstanding is. Before long, I hear them both giggling away and talking affectionately. By the time Maja returns, it’s clear that all is sweetness and light again. But for how long?

We get ready without any real hurry, then decide to go out for the day. We have no particular destination in mind, just catch the first bus that comes along. We take that bus to Kings Cross and then just get the first bus we see from there. Which goes to Elephant And Castle, quite a long way south of the river. Us north Londoners don’t cross the river too often – the South Bank doesn’t count – so this is a rare excursion into unknown territory. It’s just cool to be out and to take in some different streets and scenery. That area also boast the Imperial War Museum. It’s closed, of course, but the out front display is still there – an enormous double field gun, which we take time to marvel at.

After a few aimless wandering hours, we see a bus heading to central London so hop on that. From Trafalgar Square we walk all the way back home, but when we arrive at our street we just don’t feel like going in. So we carry on walking and end up going all the way to Holloway, where we continue walking aimlessly until eventually we see a bus coming towards us and heading to our area. Yeah. It’s time to go back. We’ve walked over 11 miles today.

Day 40

Wednesday March 31, 2021

Mark:

A reminder incase it’s needed, that with all bars in the UK being shut due to Covid, I’ve been on furlough from the bar since late December and so all the time Maja’s been here. And my furlough pay has been generous enough so I’ve been quite comfortable. Today I discover I’ll be starting back at the bar on April 11. This happens in the form of a text message for us to check the rota. I go and see mine and it covers two weeks of around 30 hours a week. When I tell Maja this she just goes quiet. I go and make a cup of tea, and when I come back I encounter a very pensive looking Maja. Something is clearly up. I don’t even ask, I know she’ll start talking when she’s ready. When she does, I’m totally stunned.

‘I don’t want you to go back to the bar,’ she says. What? How the hell is that supposed to happen? She reads my unspoken question and continues. ‘I have enough money for both of us to get by for a considerable amount of time.’ How long, she doesn’t exactly know but says that can be worked out. But she’s done the emotional maths, saying that whatever the hourly rate of the bar is, she’d feel much more value in that time if it was dedicated to her, to us and to what we’re working towards. As long as I’m not here, whatever I might be contributing financially, I won’t contributing in time. And time I can spend here, she’s decided, is worth so much more than whatever bar company economics has decided my time is worth there.

She really doesn’t like the idea of me being away for whole days or evenings, and is doubtful of how much time, focus and energy I’ll be able to bring to our projects when I’m not working. She’s done the equations and feels they really don’t add up. I start to speak, but she asks me to please not allow pride to come into it. ‘I know you feel it’s important for you to pay your way,’ she says, ‘But you will be. In the way I’ve just described. And I know you want this too. Please don’t fight it and just say yes.’ What can I do? I’ll see what I can do. But really, this is huge. Enormous. Game changing. And an unbelievable show of faith in my abilities and simply a show of faith in us. Apart from anything else, I’ve just been asked to quit the day job to concentrate full time on music, and been told the resources are there for me to do that. And also to spend this time with, and working with, the girl I love. But more. It’s all but been demanded – in the very best usage of the word – that I do exactly that. Isn’t this what I’ve always wanted? And so so much more that I could never have thought of. I mean, there’s a beautiful, practically identically minded bass playing girl in the equation as well.

Day 41

Thursday April 1, 2021

As yesterday’s chat settles, a budget gets done today and we estimate we can last 10 months with nothing else coming in. However, if and when the live music scene picks up again, with the reopening of the bars, Mark can be available for any gigs there. We have something of a plan, and it involves making what we do, whatever that really is, our full time job. Our life. Our everything. From now.

Day 42

Friday April 2, 2021

Me and Maja are aware that, as bad as the past year or so has been for society, we have all that and the subsequent lockdowns to thank for everything. I totally get that’s a controversial view given the pain, suffering and just pure inconvenience that has been caused everywhere, but really, it breathed us into being and has continued to breathe us to be. It was Covid and the resulting furlough from barworld which gave me pretty much 24/7 availability. And it’s this availability that allowed me to be there on the phone whenever Maja needed me while she was still in Sweden. And then I was able to continue to be around all the time when she got here. If I hadn’t been so available, our initial phone chats would never have the happened in the way they did, and I probably would never have even got to the part where I said ‘You could come here,’ let alone be in a position to deliver on the kind of support she needed in making such a move, both in the week before, and in the weeks after.

But as the resurgence of Covid has given, so its apparent regression always threatened to take at least a little away; our time together, doing what we want at any time of any day, has often felt like a bit of an illusion with a call for me to back to work and day to day reality always hanging in the background as an inevitability. Now that call has come, Maja has instead decided to turn the illusion into our reality.

When I tell Sarah of what we’ve spoken about and that I’m going in today to quit the bar job, she’s ecstatic and full of admiration for us taking this momentous step.

After being frustratingly unable to yesterday, I get hold of Moni, the bar manager, today, and arrange a meeting of just the two of us for this afternoon in which I will announce I’m leaving. Moni’s massively intrigued as to what I could have to say. I have a thought, which I have of course shared with Maja, that I will be asked and expected to honour the posted two week rota, although I also expect I will be given the opportunity to cover myself for as much of it as possible. Which means that any arranged cover will have to be organised by myself. So, my rota, my business. Do the hours or get them covered. However, as mine is a supervisory role, I can’t just blanket offer my hours out to anyone, it has to be a bit more considered than that, so not quite as straight forward as it might seem. I sit down with Moni in the bar and drop her my bombshell news, telling her about myself and Maja in the process, what comes back is exactly as I described above. What also comes back is a lot of happy thoughts from Moni about what’s happened and how things have panned out. And now Moni even goes a little further, as she offers to cover some of my more managerial type duties if I can get suitable people to fill the rest of those days. This gives me much more leeway, so as I said the other day, I’ll see what I can do. I think this arrangement will see me doing about half of what I currently had. But who knows? I might yet cover the whole thing. And it’s not like I have the deadline of April 11 to do this; any day after that could be covered a day or two before, so even if April 11 turns up and I still have a full complement, so much could yet change. 

I also say that, although I’ll be leaving, Moni can leave me on the rota if she wants, to call on me should I be needed in a real pinch. She really appreciates that but fast forward a few days later she tells me she’s checked this out with the higher-ups and I actually have to formally resign. This is because if I’m kept on the rota but not working, I’ll continue to receive furlough payments and the company has decided that is just not on. I hadn’t thought of that. Fair enough.

Once all the practical details have been covered, me and Moni continue to have a lovely personal chat as I fill her in with more details of what’s brought all this about, and I leave with her very best thoughts. Time to go home and tell Maja about all this. The process of me leaving barworld has begun.

Maja is delighted to hear me declare: ‘I just quit the bar job.’ Then of course I have to fill her in on how it’s actually going to happen. But no matter. It’s done, and I’ll take the days off I manage to fill and happily do the days I don’t. But when it comes down to it, I do genuinely enjoy bar work and have grown to love and feel a great deal of pride in the Palmerston, so I really do want to do a few more days in there. It would actually have been a little bit sad if it had just ended without ending. I’ve spoken many time the previous Diaries about the benefits of bar work to a musician trying to get on the ladder while still needing a regular settled income, and the Palmerston, and Moni, really have fit into that model of giving me enough hours to get by while totally respecting my need for flexibility regarding gigs.

But with today’s chat done, what we’re doing has now become truly real; there’s always been that reality check that all our time to ourselves is a Covid/ furlough granted illusion with the call of the bar and the real world there in the background. But once this next period is done it will no longer be an illusion. Our time really will be our own. But with that, we’ll have the responsibility of making it work. Which means financially. What we’re doing, at some point, has to become viable and self sustaining.

So, with me fresh from the bar talk, me and Maja have our first business meeting. Which is planning for how to really decide exactly what our thing is and how to monetise it.

What we do very much conclude is that, while we have to fully acknowledge that Brexit is not very helpful for us and accept the reality, we will not be restricted by it. If we have to get round the new visa situation, we will. We’re just not sure what that means yet. 

Apart from that, it’s acknowledging that, with our songwriting and diary writing in tandem, we have a music and writing career now. Which means we have to work out a way to really practically go forwards with it. Basically, how do we generate income and make all this actually real? First, we know that this will be no quick fix. But what we can do right now is come up with an actual plan of where we want to get as a first base and set ourselves in motion to achieving that.

The plan looks like this. 

Maja to complete Maja’s Diary – and me to edit it for English, and then get it on a public forum.

The same for Mark’s Diaries, although mine already have their public forum but they still need to be finished as we begin the process to merge what we do as we go forward with one joint diary.

Related to the above, we have to decide on what actual day The Diaries will begin. Will our own prospective stories end on the same day? How will they physically merge? We’re really almost there with how this will happen but not fully decided. There’s time for that. As long as we know it’s on the think about list.

As for the music side of things. we’ll need to get at least three full original songs ready for the package

Then there’s the thought of the presentation of our own, as yet untitled diaries. Whether this will be with a synopsis with teasers, extracts, we have no idea. But something to give it a good presentation within the package.

The presentation part of it will be incorporated in our website, which we will clearly need. Again, we’re not too heavy on the details of either just yet. But really, the overall idea is to present the three or four songs we will have, then both diaries, especially the parts where they start to merge towards the ends, then our joint diary. 

We don’t really come up with a truly solid idea yet of how this all gets monetised.

We both bring different things to the table in how to hopefully develop all this. I have my media background and network of London music contacts, while Maja of course has her vast knowledge of the internet and how to really utilise that

We may choose to look at agents or other kinds of companies for gigs, beyond what could generate ourselves, and then there’s how to get this thing into an actual book form. No idea how we want to do that, but it’s now on the table as a tangible goal to aim towards. 

Our professional flow of obligations now looks like this

Play music and write songs

Which creates opportunities to 

Have interesting experiences and live life

Which creates material to

Write diary

Monetise this. Somehow. Gigging and publishing are the main ballparks we’re aiming towards but really, the bottom line is generating the raw material, the bedrock of which will be our songwriting and performing. Without our own music to back up what we’re doing, which also has to viably appeal to an audience, there is no story and therefore no project. We absolutely must write songs and perform them well.

Within that, we have to develop our feel for playing together and really, to reconnect with our own instruments and musicality which have both been greatly neglected for the better part of two months. We decide to ease into this by identifying songs that are in our ballpark in terms of playing and singing. Oasis is high on the list for that, along with Kate Bush and Red Hot Chilli Peppers. 

That’s it. We have our plan. Where to go, what we need, how to do it, and what to do about it all right now.

All this new reality is coming at a very opportune time; just as we’re taking this time as our own, to develop as we decide, for the first time, we’re about to have the apartment to ourselves for a whole weekend. Sarah is off on a walk of spiritual discovery, from Salisbury to Stonehenge. As me and Maja conclude our first business meeting, Sarah returns to the apartment from her latest errand just in time to pack and go. While she’s doing this, she breaks away for a few minutes, curious to see how my thing went earlier on. She’s beyond thrilled when I tell her. This is it. The end of barworld is in sight. ‘Oh, I’m so proud of you guys,’ she says. ‘You’re taking your destiny and making it your own. You can’t ever do more than that.’ ‘And if I ever need to go back to the bar, the manager said I can call and…’ Sarah cuts me off. ‘Don’t even think about that. You’ve made your decision now and done something about it. Only be thinking about moving forwards now, not backwards.’ So that’s her position pretty clear. And yes, she’s right. If you’ve got a safety net you’ll be tempted to use it. She finishes saying, ‘Guys, as I go off on my spiritual journey, I love what you’re doing. And taking this huge step and commitment towards it is just so inspiring.’

After this brief chat, there’s just time for time for a group hug while she congratulates us again, and we wish her all the best for her odyssey. I think the feeling between the three of us right now is the best it’s ever been and we wish her nothing but wonderful vibes for her trip. Then she’s gone and the apartment suddenly falls silent as this scene of hopeful jubilation hangs in the air. It’s now Friday afternoon. Until sometime Monday, this place is ours.

Maja marks the occasion by claiming full rights to the kitchen and making lasagne. Cue Liam. I’ll pick you up at half past three/ We’ll have lasagne – Digsy’s Dinner incase the reference is totally lost on you.

I must have the official record reflect that that lasagne is great. 

Day 43

Saturday April 3, 2021

We wake to an apartment in which we are alone and really take it in. Sarah has stressed over and over again that this is our home and that we should do with it as we please. Things have even calmed down with talk of different people moving in. Dee certainly hasn’t for some reason, and the general feeling has veered towards Sarah deciding she wants to come good with her promise after all. Now, it feels like this weekend is a bit of a dress rehearsal for when the place actually becomes ours. After a wonderfully relaxing morning, me and Maja settle into our room and into our large corner window overlooking the city. Sunlight is streaming in, creating the most spectacular workspace. It is here now that we will create, write and rehearse. We also plan to supplement that by taking ourselves over various parts of London, and indeed the wider country, to do the same. We get to it now. A lovely joint writing session as we remind each other of the details and minutiae of various events, and then a really chilled little rehearsal as we continue to shake off the cobwebs of singing and playing. Yes. This is how it was supposed to be. Panic walks are a thing of the past. We’re on our way now. This feeling of liberation greatly inspires our thoughts as we exchange messages with Sarah throughout the weekend, both voice and text messages. We have our thing going on, and she’s on her wonderful, liberating spiritual walk. The connections and good wishes between us are at an all time high. We love encouraging her to keep going and she loves every idea and any random thought that emanates from either of us.

It’s in this spirit of getting things organised that Maja decides it’s time to rearrange the narrow hallway so we get on it. This includes sorting through the rack of clothes we’re brushing past all the time and moving the rearranged and tidied rack into the mostly unused front room. Surveying the finished results, we think Sarah will be delighted.

Day 44

Sunday April 4, 2021

We have to re-engage with time today because we have plans with Cris, and Maja’s going to have her first London car outing. This is a trip to Crystal Palace with two friends of Cris who I also have a great relationship with – Rob and Jade. Crystal Palace is an area in south east London named after an actual crystal palace that was almost unimaginably large when it was constructed in 1851. However, all we have of it now is ruins as it was destroyed by fire in 1936. Instead, we have the site markings along with a few surviving steel supports and ornate stone staircases which mark where the entrances were. And all around it, a large and beautiful park which is our destination for today.

We meet Cris at a nearby street to be picked up in his oversized and very comfortable car which is practically a van, and this drive takes us through some of the most exclusive areas of London and eventually – an hour and a half eventually, I had no idea – to Crystal Palace where we meet Rob and Jade. This is a little of an emotional reunion for me as I last saw them around 18 months ago when we all used to work together on building sites that Cris was in charge of. In that little period when I was so busy with bass gigs I had to quit my evening bar job and go get something in the day so that I could be available for the relentless schedule of rehearsing and gigging with five different acts, one of them the metal band Wild Child, fronted by Cris. So the four of us know each other quite well, and into this comes London newbie Maja who is warmly welcomed and embraced by Rob and Jade. Indeed, as the day progresses, I find myself more and more walking with Cris and Rob while the two girls walk a few paces behind us engrossed in conversation like old friends.

We meet by a housing estate in our respective cars, and then drive onto the site itself. As we start to walk through it I suddenly realise I am in a serious memory lane. I had totally forgotten about this. I used to come here every week in a whole other life. My second job in journalism was as the main writer and editor of the centre pages entertainment supplement for a series of 11 weekly local newspapers all around south east London. I was the goalkeeper of the paper’s five a side football team and we played in a league right here. As we walk across a high walkway, on our left we have the site of the football pitches we came to every week. I stop, caught in feelings of totally unexpected nostalgia and remember those days. Everybody else stops too and we hang out here in the sun for a while, while making tentative plans and fetching ice creams from a nearby shop. Below us is an interesting site and cool addition for the day. Remote control car racing round a mini formula 1 type track and it’s clear these guys are serious and really know what they’re doing. We watch this, enthralled, for something like half an hour, then we continue onwards.

After a while of walking through the grounds, at times in open, cultivated fields, at others through dense, enchanting forest, we come across a large open air street market. It has so many stalls selling food from all over the world and, as disparate as our group of five is, we’re practically guaranteed to find exactly what each of us wants in a place like that. So we go in and go food hunting, meeting up again on a hill overlooking the whole place.

Fed, watered, and all content again, we set off for another meander and wander, this time heading towards the ruins of the palace, where we can truly see and appreciate the dimensions of what this thing was. It’s a slow, summery, lazy walk and once through the grounds we make our way back to the cars to say goodbye and head on home. But Cris has one more thing on his mind as we set off. There’s a route we can take that will see us go past the site where Marc Bolan was killed in a car crash. It has become a shrine to his memory, visited by people from all over the world. Now it is about to receive another international delegation from Italy, Sweden and England. 

All through today, and over the weekend we’ve had a voice message thing going back and forth between ourselves and Sarah, including during our little excursion today. Relations between us have never felt so good and it’s really cool to be able to encourage her along in what she’s doing, and to hear how she’s getting on. Along with the bar decision, us finally being able to get our freedom and time to do what we really should be doing and jumping into that, everything feels like it’s really slotting into place after a very difficult and stressful period. Of course we don’t expect the difficulties or stresses to stop and other tests no doubt await us, but it truly truly feels like we’ve found some blue sky and green grass to rest and work in. And, with Sarah’s love, support and hope, along with her beautiful chaos, we have constant inspiration and motivation.

Day 45

Monday April 5, 2021

Mark:

Late morning, early morning, we have no idea. We’re back to cancelling time again. But somewhere in there we go out house shopping and buy a few bits and pieces that Sarah has been really wishing she had. Like a really cool set of knives that the kitchen desperately needs, and all in their own knife block. We also buy household items like washing powder and cat food. We’ve really got into that; as we’re paying no rent, only covering bills, we’ve been buying more and more things for the house to help out with this as much as we can. And we love buying things for Sarah, like these knives which we’re thrilled to have found. We were hoping to get out and back before she returned, but she beats us to it. Just. We’re about 10 minutes away when we get a lovely voice message that she’s returned, had an amazing trip that she can’t wait to tell us all about, and that she just loves the changes and improvements we’ve made to the apartment while she’s been away. We’ve been doing little things almost constantly, often with Sarah helping as well. But I guess when you’ve been away for a few days, little changes each day add up and become even bigger, even more visible changes.

We enter the apartment, all proud with our purchases and eager to hear from Sarah and to show her the latest few goodies we’ve found. I go to the bedroom to get a few things put away and organised and Maja goes through to the kitchen. When I leave the bedroom to go and join them down the hallway, I immediately sense that things are not right. No. Things are very wrong. There is no joyous laughter, only quiet protestations of innocence from Maja. What the hell is going on? I walk down the hallway and hear Sarah saying, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me but I was brought up to not do things like this. It’s just not something I would do. If you were brought up different, I’m sorry about that. I don’t know. Maybe this thing just isn’t supposed to work out. I don’t know how you guys feel.’  Maja looks down the hallway and catches my eye. She looks bewildered. I speed up my walk and get in there as quickly as I can to lend my support and find out just what this could possibly be about.

It’s the rack of clothes that we went through, tidied and moved. For all the talk that this is our place, we can do what we want with it, to the point of being agitated when I checked a few times if we could do this or that, Sarah is now furious that we took her at her word and went and did this thing unsolicited. Yes, right to the point where she says, yet again, that things might not be working out. Here we go again.

It’s fair to say that as soon as this conversation is over we leave the apartment for yet another panic walk. But there is something different about this one. Now we think we really should leave. In the past, especially in the early days of all this, we spoke about not letting Sarah down and taking off on our travels if we thought we were in a position to do so. There’s no talk of letting her down anymore. If anything, we’re feeling let down. Massively. Things are really starting to feel fragile, like they could totally burn at any moment. We’re now talking about having to get ahead of the situation before it takes control and gets ahead of us.

Well, we were already thinking about going off and touring or at least starting somewhere else abroad, although we had no idea where that would be. We decide the time has come to start doing something about that. Why leave here, go to another house in London, and plan to go abroad from there? Might as well just cut out the middleman and go for it. Not to mention the difficulty of even finding another place in London in the meantime.

My first thought, I tell Maja, as we tramp these familiar streets, is that we should call Rick. We might just be able to stay at his place in Madrid. It would only be a temporary solution, but it would be a significant move and, if he’s up for it, we could do it almost immediately.

We get hold of him and he tells us the timing isn’t great so that really isn’t an option. No problem at all. Oh well. With Brexit and all that, it probably wouldn’t have been an option anyway. But with that, he jumps straight into telling us about Thailand and how that could be something for us to think about. He knows people there on the music scene and is confident we would be able to hook up with them through knowing him. One of the guys was in an earlier, Thailand version of Drunken Monkees, the band I was in with Rick in Madrid. So he would almost be a colleague. Rick is convinced we would find somewhere to stay if we told him he could make a call or two on that, and we would also have an almost instant network, or at least an instant opportunity to get in on the network. We really get into the idea of this during the walk and call, both of which go on for well over an hour, possibly reaching two.

As soon as we get back to the apartment we’re on it. I’m researching people’s experiences and seeing what steps have to be taken to go, and what to do when you arrive. In the meantime, Maja is taking care of the practical things. Less than five minutes after starting, Maja urgently asks me to take a look at what she’s found. A perfectly affordable hotel type setup with a pool right in the centre of Bangkok. Yes yes and yes. This could definitely be a place to land. It would give us a destination and, from there we could start to look for something more settled. It’s Monday now. We could get ourselves sorted here and be on our way by the weekend. She doesn’t even hesitate and immediately starts to look at flights. We are really doing this. If she can get flights sorted now, she’ll get onto the hotel online and book us in and that will be that. We’re moving to Thailand this weekend. This is really happening. But we check ourselves just a little, allowing for the reality that, with Covid still very much top of the agenda all over the world, these are not normal times and it’s not so easy to just up and leave as it might have been four or five months ago. So, while she’s planning the practicalities of the move, I’m looking at travel restrictions, both as far as the UK is concerned with being able to book foreign travel, and how policy currently is regarding Thailand.

Oh damn. Maja’s face falls with mine as I start to discover restriction after restriction. First, the UK has banned all travel. We didn’t know that. But then we look at Thailand and see they’ve banned travel from the UK. We’re already on this flow and we don’t want to stop now. So we flip ourselves on the traditional dime and start to consider other countries. Countries outside of Europe and therefore outside of the Brexit bubble. Central America, north America, Asia. We go and look at the official government websites of every country we think could work for us, and one by one they get crossed off our list of possibilities for the same reasons as Thailand. We’re seeing now that this really is not an easy fix. More than that, we just can’t see how it can be fixed at all. 

We can’t go anywhere in Europe. What we thought would be our international alternatives have all been smashed off the table. Maja’s visa for the UK will run out at some point so she won’t be able to stay here and I won’t be able to go to Sweden. And I think we can rule out help from Sarah’s lawyer friend on any of this at this point; we’ve not even had an acknowledgement of the initial email. More immediately, we were already looking for places in London before Sarah handed us what we thought was a lifeline and we know how difficult to impossible that will be. And moving back to the old place? Well, that’s a big no no no. 

We feel trapped. With that, we give up for the night. We’re exhausted and very emotional. Despite the tiredness, sleep comes hard and is uneasy.

The knife block is still unopened in our room. We’ll be keeping this for ourselves. Where it will eventually be getting unpacked, we have absolutely no idea. Has anyone seen that impossible list?

Day 46

Tuesday April 6, 2021

We do not feel remotely like doing anything creative today. Even if we did, we just don’t want to be around the apartment. Sarah seems to have forgotten all about yesterday and is being very jolly and loving towards us. Her attitude seems to be, ‘I said my piece, it’s all over and we’re all good now.’ Which is great and cool that things can be said and you move on. It really helps to keep the air clear and lets everyone know where they stand. Brilliant. But this schtick is really wearing about as thin as we can take it. It’s constantly like, ‘Ignore me, it’s wonderful and I love you guys, it’s all good,’ followed by, ‘It might not be working out,’ followed by, ‘Ignore me, it’s wonderful and I love you guys, it’s all good.’ The feeling has just become, and has been for a while to be fair: When’s the next one going to happen? After every crisis, we calm down and we’re like, it’s OK. We’re good here. Everything’s actually fine. And then we catch ourselves and say something like, ‘Yes it is. Until the next time.’ As we know by now, there will always be a next time. Until, and if, Sarah comes good on her initial promise of jetting around the world and leaving the place to us. But that promise seems to have just quietly and gradually slipped away. Unless things really do calm down and we all make it to May 1, which is when she’s decided she’s going to The Congo to do humanitarian work there. Great. And yeah. That’s really going to happen. You’re going to have to let me know. Does sarcasm come across very well in black and white? I’m really not sure. But yeah. Congo. You go for it.

So we’re still a bit emotionally knocked out by yesterday and not at all feeling like doing anything creative so we push ourselves out of the place. I’ve got a little trip planned which I’ve been meaning to show Maja for a while and this is the perfect day to roll it out.

It’s a walk I would recommend to anyone visiting London and, indeed, many people who live in London because the truth is, many people who live in London don’t use London. But then, one can have some sympathy for that when you see the prices for tourist attractions. They are not priced for locals. They are priced for people who may be in London one time in their life and it’s taken for granted that they have enough money to think, screw it, I’m here once, if it costs the better part of 20 quid to go down a slide, then fine. Yes, that’s what it costs to go down the twisty slidey thing in Stratford, east London. Or the London Eye. I’d love to go on that but £33, don’t think so. I’ve been on plenty of walks round London, seen something really interesting, thought it would make a wonderful addition to the day, then discovered it cost north of 50 quid. So no. London is not made for Londoners. But this walk definitely is. 

We just take a bus into the centre and onto Tower Bridge which is a worldwide destination in itself, with the Tower of London on its north side. But we’re really here today for the southside. Apart from offering views of the other side of the river and the spectacular city buildings all the way down, this route also takes you by City Hall, then immediately past HMS Belfast, an imposing battleship moored right at the dock. Further down and you meander through an outdoor bar and street restaurant scene and right past a spectacular replica of The Golden Hinde, Sir Francis Drake’s 16th century flagship. A little further on and you’re back in time again, this time to the 17th century for a walk past the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre. Not far past that and you’re at Millenium Bridge, a beautiful pedestrian bridge which takes you right in the direction of St Paul’s Cathedral which sits right at the end of it. Cross that bridge and, if you want to continue east, you’re in the direction of Holborn, Soho, Covent Garden and Mayfair. But by then, you might also be a bit walked out. We go a little further, then get a bus back home. However, when we get close to home, we realise we really don’t want to go in. So we set off on another walk, this time all the way to the end of Holloway kinda like we did the other day. What we’re practicing now is home avoidance and we’re almost limping by the time a bus just happens to stop next to us at a bus stop and we decide it really is time to go home.

Day 47

Wednesday April 7, 2021

Mark:

Somehow there’s still very much a sense of fun in the apartment, although I’m starting to feel it’s a bit strained. An outside observer wouldn’t have a clue though. All they’d see is Sarah and Maja being best friends, as I look on and see them merely playing at being best friends. There’s a manic energy in the place as Sarah constantly performs her new song and dance routine. She also asks me again if I’ll be ready to practice some bass with her later on. I say of course I will. I won’t. Almost everyday for around a week she’s been telling me we’ll do a rehearsal. I’ve got myself all ready for, it made sure to get back in touch with the repertoire, then it’s been cancelled, or simply just not happened. I’ve given up being prepared.

But anyway, who needs bass and vocal rehearsals when one of you could be dressing up as a giant chicken? Yep. Sarah’s chicken costume arrives in the mail today and she can’t wait to try it on. Cue more hysterical scenes of, ‘We’re all best friends here.’ Then, costume on, she decides to go one stage further. She’s going to go out to the shop. Dressed as a chicken. Of course she is. Folks, that’s how wacky and zany we are round here.

Later in the evening, things have calmed down. The fun has slowly seeped through the walls but we’re still all friends here. No hard feelings and all that. Let’s talk. Frankly.

We sit around on high stools in a triangle in the main room and it’s quickly and quietly agreed that we should move on. As and when we want to of course. No pressure. But it’s started to feel like it lately with Sarah asking us when our big move is going to happen. This has begun to feel less like friendly interest and more like a hint. She wants her apartment back. Fair enough. It’s hers and for her to do what she wants with. We tell her we’ve been looking at options and, although we could possibly just leave and go, it really doesn’t look that viable. We tell her we’ve looked at a lot of other countries and it all looks complicated due to corona. ‘Oh that’s rubbish,’ she barks back. ‘Corona’s a scam, it’s a hoax.’ You know, have that viewpoint if you want, but saying that won’t help when a borderguard is telling you you’re not coming into the country. No matter how much we try this argument, no ice gets cut with Sarah at all. ‘If you want to go somewhere, just go,’ she says, voice rising to shrill. ‘Don’t let Corona stop you. That’s pathetic.’ ‘Yeah, but try telling that to someone when…’ I give up. You can’t argue with this.

One of the things we have decided is to stay in the UK until the world is ready for travel again. The UK’s travel ban is set to be lifted on May 17. We could wait and see how the world’s changed by then. We’ve been thinking we could stay here as long as we wanted as long as it was clear we had a plan to move on when it was possible but, without saying it out loud, it’s quite clear Sarah is thinking of us being here for just another two weeks max. ‘There’s loads of places round here you could go,’ she says breezily. Hint hint. Been there, done that. There isn’t.

We finish the conversation very amiably with all best wishes raining down on us from Sarah, but we really do have to start thinking about a very real plan of moving on. And very soon. We return to our room and have a chat about things for a while. One of the topics we touch on is Brexit with Maja having suddenly developed a new curiosity of and how it works with Ireland and the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. She starts to ask a few searching questions. ‘Ireland is in the EU, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘And Northern Ireland is UK right?’ Right. ‘There’s no hard border between them and people from Northern Ireland can go to Ireland and live there?’ ‘Right.’ Where’s she going with this? ‘Well, Northern Ireland is UK, so if people from Northern Ireland can live there, can’t anyone from the UK do the same?’ Oh damn. Lightbulbs everywhere. Before I’ve fully realised what she’s getting at she goes right for it. ‘Couldn’t we just move to Ireland?’ I’m hit by the sudden realisation that she really might just be right. 

Right. If you’re from the UK or Ireland, or are familiar with either or both, you can probably skip this next bit or skim through it. But I know there will be readers for whom the issues and geographies of the UK and Ireland, not mention Brexit, have held little significance, so I feel some kind of potted explanation here is necessary. To be fair, Maja is still coming to terms with the fact that there are four countries in this country – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all centrally governed from London in the UK, but each with their own parliaments. The latter of these countries shares an island with The Republic of Ireland, from here on to be referred to as Ireland. Northern Ireland will be referred to as Northern Ireland.

When the UK left the European Union, for our purposes, we’ll say for various political reasons it was decided to keep Ireland more or less as the one trading entity it had been, and it was also declared a common travel area – CTU. This meant that the peoples of the two countries could continue to come and go without hindrance as they had before. This means that, with Northern Ireland being UK, this CTU also extended to the rest of the UK; many Irish people live and work in the UK and vice versa. And of course, we share, or at least use the same first language. OK, Ireland does have its own language, but you know what I mean. We’re starting to get a little excited now as this really begins to take shape in our minds, as I hope it is now starting to take shape in yours. We research a little deeper and come up with the answers we thought and hoped we would come up with. Maja is European. Ireland is still in the European Union. Maja can live and work there. I’m in the UK and have lost my previously easy European living and working rights but, with the CTU, I can move to, and live and work in, Ireland. Maja looks up from her latest mini research project as she realises she’s negotiated the last hurdle. ‘This is it,’ she says. ‘We can move to Ireland.’ Wow. For the first time, it feels like we might actually have reached a solution. At any rate, we said we would not be prisoners to the visa situation. We now seem to have found a way to completely break free from it.

Day 48

Thursday April 8, 2021

Mark:

Sarah comes into our room this morning as we’re waking up and all’s nice and chilled with a lovely morning vibe. Almost like we’ve all got our apartment mojo back. Full of fun, she tells us a little story about herself. One of those little self deprecating tales of comical disaster. Towards the end of it, mid laugh, her face suddenly turns to stone. She looks at me and says, ‘Stop thinking that.’ What the hell am I supposed to say to that? ‘I’ve got powers,’ she says. ‘I know what you’re thinking and you can stop it right now.’ Oh dear. This is not good. Yes ladies and gentlemen. We have reached that stage. The one where you don’t even have to say anything anymore. We are now actually being accused of thinking the wrong things. It’s kind of an irrelevance, but I really wasn’t thinking anything. Just enjoying the story. I guess that’s what you get these days if you happen to catch Sarah’s eye the wrong way, kinda like Maja did the other morning. If you’re now being accused of thinking something you may not be thinking, on top of almost everything you say – even totally positive stuff – being twisted into being something you didn’t at all mean, any kind of communication becomes impossible. All I can do now, as I lie in bed and she stands over us, is wait out this horrible misconceived, awkward misunderstanding and hope she eventually gives up and goes away.

We realise now that this particular mindset just isn’t going to stop. It had started to become almost impossible to say anything to Sarah without it being taken the wrong way. Now it’s even become impossible to not say anything as well. What can you do with that? After she’s gone, me and Maja look at each other and quickly agree that we really do need to take control now and look for something else. The time for hoping this situation will stabilise and all will be OK has passed. It just won’t. In the same breath, we agree that going back to the old place with the two of us living in that tiny room with Jenn living directly below just isn’t an option. But the rent is still being paid so it still exists for us. But no. Just, no. But it still does exist. Just saying.

In any case, this apartment is no longer the place for us right now so once more we go out for no other reason than we have to get out. The difference this time is that we’re totally cranking up the hunt for a new place. We’re starting to reach desperate town. With what’s just happened, it’s time to just get out. We would still rather jump straight to another country and we’ve been speaking about that a lot, but at the same time, we just need another place. Now. And if that’s to be somewhere in London again while we sort out the real move, fine.

We go up onto Hampstead Heath and I start to call friends to see if they have, or know of, any rooms going. This turns into quite a nice catchup with a lot of people as I let them know a little of what’s been going on – only the good stuff of course – and I get to hear how they’ve been doing. Some of these people I haven’t seen or spoken to in well over a year. I’m turning nothing up though, although the word is getting out and people are saying they’ll keep an ear and an eye open. But again, this is still pandemic, lockdown London. Not total total lockdown London, but there remains very little fluid movement of the kind that would normally see a room shake itself free sooner or later.

Then I call my producer friend Alex, who also works as executive chef at a pub in Angel. I played a few studio sessions with as he put together his pop/electronica album. Like everyone else I’ve spoken to so far, he doesn’t know of anything but he does tell me he’s having a party tomorrow night in one of the apartments above his pub. He says he was going to call me about this some time tonight anyway. A lot of people I know will be there and he’s doubling it as a video shoot for one of the songs I played on. Well, chicken and egg here. He’s arranged the video shoot and, with various friends helping out and acting in it, has decided to turn it into the opportunity for a party. He asks me to bring my bass too as he might want me to film a scene with me. Cooler and cooler. We will be there. Me, Maja and bass.  

I make some more calls for a while but still nothing concrete turns up. Oh well. We’ve got the word out there. Time to head back. It’s now sometime between six and seven.

We get to the apartment and Maja decides she wants to keep walking for a while. No problem. So we continue, this time heading into residential London rather than the deep green of the wonderful Hampstead Heath. All the while of course, we’re talking about our experiences with Sarah and our feelings about them. Then we start to talk about the day she came into our room and started filming. Then Maja says, ‘I’m really glad she deleted that video.’ Oh dear. It is true that we asked for that and that Sarah immediately agreed, but I think it’s time the truth was told here. I take a deep breath and dive straight in. ‘Maja, the video wasn’t deleted. Sarah sent it to people and got a negative response back from it. I’m sorry I never told you but…,’ I don’t get any further. Maja has already started to react and it’s stronger than anything I could have imagined. She’s hyperventilating and nothing I can say is going to help right now. I guess I should have just told her at the time, but like I said then, I really didn’t want things to blow up. Well, something had to give, and here we go. It’s blowing up. Immediately we head back to the apartment. This is happening. Now.

Maja:

We go back, pack a backpack each, and a suitcase with duvets and pillows, and our basses and head out, but not before a confrontation with Sarah.

Mark:

Oh yes. That confrontation. Neither of us is in the mood to speak to Sarah right now, and certainly not to have the moving out conversation. So we think we’ll just go in, pick up some backpacks and leave with overnight stuff and come again and maybe have that chat. We’re in and out with backpacks all the time anyway so we figure it will be inconspicuous enough. But somehow Sarah is able to read the situation exactly for what it is and lets her deep offence known that we’re trying to just secretly sneak off. We have to come back again over the next day or two anyway to clear out everything else and that certainly couldn’t be done in secret so no-one’s sneaking off anywhere. We just didn’t want to have any kind of big deal thing going on tonight. Of course I don’t get to say all that and of course it wouldn’t cut any ice if I did. It really is just best to just let Sarah say her thing and get out of here. But no. If there was any chance of us leaving on good terms, that’s not a thing anymore.

But before any of that happens, and before we head back to the apartment to have that confrontation we were hoping not to have, I call Cris to tell him we’re coming back. What I’m really thinking is that he can help us move with his super huge seven seater car. But he has a bad reaction to the fact that we’re moving back, saying this would not be good for Jenn. No it would not but we really have nowhere else to go. And anyway, we’re planning on moving to Ireland soon so hopefully it’s only going to be a temporary thing. He finally comes round to the idea and says, ‘Yes, I understand. I see you have no choice. OK.’ Great. It’s not like we needed his permission, but at least some kind of weak blessing which has been granted, even if someone reluctantly and hesitatingly. But there’s no way I’m going to ask him for car help now. I feel that would put him in an awkward, in the middle, situation.

Then, in all fairness, I have to call Jenn just to give her the heads up that we’re moving back in. She is stunned, but ends up with some kind of resigned acceptance.

Back to the old place it is and we enter quietly and back to the tiny room without encountering anyone. Straight away we start to look at apartments and rooms to try to get ourselves out of here as soon as possible. Nothing fits any kind of realistic budget and, as we talk it through, we conclude that yes, we’ll get onto planning that Ireland move, and then make it as soon as possible. So let’s lie low here. I’ll work my notice at the bar, and then we’ll leave. Two weeks, give or take, and we’ll be on our way. At least, that’s the plan.