Tag: 2022/10/27

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.