London in the Rain

I love London. It's imposing, elegant, drenched, a cultural, literary, and financial powerhouse. It has naught the charming of Paris, the thexy of Barthelona, the quaint of Prague, the laissez faire of Berlin. But it is alive and roiling and older than you know. And it is goddamn beautiful.

Once again, I've left it too long, and now that I have to write one post about my six months in London, I'm paralysed by the possibilities. As happens when you condense, the grace notes that filled my days and nights get drowned out by the climaxes.

First Violin: THE SUMPTUOUS BRITISH LIBRARY

My memory of London is dominated by the three months I spent in a reading orgasm at the British Library. I went there five, sometimes six days a week, and in that time, read 20+ books on memory loss, dementia, Alzheimer's, drug addiction, and other uplifting topics. Novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, self help guides, family support books, neuropsychology papers, textbooks, whatever I could get my hands on. Given how many ways there are to lose it, I'm astonished and awed we keep it together as much as we do.

Because the BL is, hands down, one of the finest libraries in the world, only my imagination and ability limited my progress. The fact that it's not a lending library - i.e. you cannot take the books out - you have to read them there - meant I had to sit in one place for hours and do my biz. I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to read and only read, for eight hours a day. I have not spent that much time absorbed in books since I was a teenager.

Thank you, England, for issuing anyone who can show proof of residence, anywhere in the world, a reader pass (in my case, a Pennsylvania driver's license got me in), and letting her sit in the hushed reading rooms with their wide tables and comfy chairs and double plug points and banker's lamps.

Attacca: The locker rooms in the basement of the BL are free but competitive. If you arrive after noon, then expect to rove like some SUV driver in the mall parking lot. Ditto on the reading room carrels. While I usually managed an AM arrival, I almost never scored the coveted long yellow lockers up front, nor the corner carrels with the elevated reading rests and additional desk space.

I ordered my memory books from the BL's online catalogue a night or two before, or in the morning before hopping on the bus to King's Cross. Like magic, they appeared behind the reading room front desk, where they were held for as long as I kept coming back (unless I skipped for longer than three days).

Fanfare: The glass walled rare books section which rises through the centre of the BL for several stories, like some fantastical gilt edged literary lava.

No pens are allowed in the reading rooms, nor bags, nor gum, nor water. Nor bare feet propped up on desks (doh). So I carted my laptop over and racked up 82 single spaced pages of notes about memory. Not one page of fiction, but what an unparalleled treat to spend a summer reading.

Grand Piano: JIMCHAE

My host these last six months (a lovely pianist and singer himself, and one of my oldest friends in the world) would be mortified if he knew I were calling any attention to him, but I must. He let me take over his open plan Old Street loft, his weekends and vacations, his dinner plans and dance card, all with utterly generous aplomb.

Despite being a hermit, self-affirmed and obvious to anyone who knew him in his white terry robe university days, Jim is one of the most sociable people I know. A brilliant conversationalist, he can talk about love and war, finance and gaming, drugs and dancing, like they are all two sides of the same coin. In fact, they are. And Jim was always there to remind me not to be too proud of anything, like my hipster arty life, because it's as fraught with moral and financial corruption as an AIG convention in Vegas.

Trill: Unfortunately, I had little influence on Jim's Love Films rental queue. To that end, I watched more films with "Terrifying!" in their tag lines than I ever wanted to.

I cannot count the number of luscious dinners I was treated to, the VIP seating movie tickets, the Oyster and O2 topups, the black cab rides back home from nights out. And the weekends he didn't spend on the couch in his underwear playing Fallout and Uncharted, while I worked on my novel at the dining table in my underwear, we jaunted to Southend-On-Sea, Angel, Notting Hill, Lithuania, Camden, Hyde Park, Chinatown, Shoreditch, among others.

Dissonance: The time Jim and I got trashed on gewurztraminer and were dancing like mad men around his flat, and he decided it was a good time to read a page of my novel and mistook (and enjoyed) a gay sex scene as a baby murdering scene.

My poker-playing fried-chicken-eating bestie is hilarious and sharp, witty and silly, and oh so easy to get on and travel with. I couldn't have done London without him. I wouldn't want to.

Timpani: AN EYE FOR AN EYE

Ok so all money is blood money, and even though I've managed to support myself the last nine years by working for scientists and educators and environmentalists and universities and students, I know my hands are not clean. I support the capitalists by teaching bschool wannabes. I destroy the environment with my air travel. I sleep with cocksure adulterers. I love CVS and hotdogs and lux hotels. I live large.

Interludes: Seven days on the Turkish Mediterranean, a revel in Ireland, returning to my heart city of Barcelona, a Baltic jaunt in Lithuania, and my thank you taste of Berlin. London is a launch pad.

But there probably couldn't be a clearer breach of my so-called morals than what I did this fall in London by working for the defense of the destruction of rainforest land. Twelve years ago, I walked (crawled) away from Whartonia, for many reasons. At the time, I was so fucked up, I couldn't have articulated any of them other than that I couldn't do it anymore. I have a little more clarity now. I don't judge anyone for operating within the clever subversive domain of marketing, or the outrageous paper chase of high finance. I just don't want to do it myself.

What I want is a marginally innocuous part time job that pays me enough money to rent my own flat in some megacity of the world, while I write and take photographs on the side. I've managed it in the past, but the last five years of travelling have both thinned my self-sustaining abilities while fattening my ambition.

Sognando: I spent most of October working on a proposal for my next pipe dream project - "The Long Way Home" - a large format book, with images from over 25 countries on five continents, interleaved with poems, and organised by themes that reach across region and religion. It's a way of contrasting and coalescing my images of arty religious Mexico City and Kolkata, the sexed up foodie cultures of San Francisco and Bangkok and Buenos Aires, the solitude of Bhutan's mountains and the salt flats of Bolivia. These places exist alone. They exist in each other. They share something multiplicitous and mysterious, real, if only in the eye. I might not get the fellowship I applied for, but I'm making this book, and if nothing else, it will be one accounting of my gypsy years.

I need to stop moving. Not because I want to date or because I need a stable income source or because I would like a room (and bathroom) of my own. All those are true, but above all, I need some time to think. And while I've figured out how to write on the move, I can't think on the fly. When I needed to pick poems for my MFA apps, I used a polling system and Excel to rank the ones I'd written. When I'm freaking out, writing a to-do list calms me down, even if I end up doing nothing on the list. When I need to figure out my next move, I have to try it out. None of this visualising, theorising, pros and cons discussing works.

Where to live? I have to actually go live there. Who with? S/he has to be a willing thrall. Which job? I gotta work it to know. What to wear? For now, this is easy, but I'd like it to be a little more complicated, like owning more than one pair of jeans.

I'm not complaining in the least. London was a haven for me. I didn't have to think about the real world for six months. I just read and wrote and sometimes worked. Aside from a handful of beautiful people who took me to plays (thank you (camera-shy) Zubaer), let me feed them experimental quinoa meals (thank you Maeve), watched any movie I wanted (thank you Ray and Debbie), acted their hearts out on stage (thank you Leesa), talked shop while sitting pretty (thank you Ella and Shane), went dancing with me whenever I asked (thank you Farah and Ewelina), and let me house sit for weeks (thank you Tahmima), I walked alone and I loved it.

Staccato: The candy store in Angel which sells pickle scented lip balm and bacon flavoured dental floss. Front row seats on the 55 bus to Oxford Circus. Sweet potato falafel balls and perfectly ripe pears and avocados from Waitrose. Fabulous! free! museums! The surprise eight course meal at the Lobster Pot. Surviving in the Ministry of Sound til 5am to be rewarded by space to dance all wild to the best DJ of the night. The £5 ferry ride from Embankment to Canary Wharf at sunset. George's kickass dynamic yoga classes at Virgin Active Moorgate. The National Theatre. McVities Dark Chocolate Digestives.

Even the rain prettifies London. The sodium lamps. The glittering streets. The flashbulb store fronts. The high heeled revelers. The cranes with their grey heads hung in mourning. The looming centuries behind, the ones to come.

I've never been one for history. Nothing I ever learned in school, in Nigeria or in the States, seemed real or relevant. It was only when I started writing, travelling, photographing, that history started to resonate. London stands in it, substance, significance, saga. Everything about it is epic. Eye teeth for a red passport.