I lived in London for three and a half years, but looking back on it now, I’m aware of the fact that I never really made it my own. Indeed, having now spent the last week in east London – at a couple of grim Airbnb flats in Whitechapel – and while bouncing around between meetings and dinners and events in Shoreditch and Hackney and the City of London, it’s become apparent that I did not, in fact, really live in that London which people think of and attracts foreigners and British outlanders alike in their millions. I lived in Greenwich, and spent lovely days and evenings and weekends traipsing through the parks and suburbs of the southeast – but there was a sort of endless suburban feel to it. I think the fact that I often rented a Zipcar and did errands by car sort of sums it up: London, proper, is a city of the tube and black taxis and walking shoes. My time in there allowed me to have a quick commute to Canary Wharf, and while Greenwich had an amazing sort of village feel to it which definitely made it an English experience, it wasn’t really London.
West to east
The drive across the country took six days. I left Seattle on a Monday night after picking my son up from school and spending the afternoon with him, the dog and I making good time to Spokane. I was pulled over, speeding through eastern Washington, but the state trooper seemed to take pity on us driving to Maine and let me off with a warning. We didn’t see much once we got past the mountains, driving in the dark across the plateau. We stayed at a soulless roadside hotel; they allowed dogs, which was enough.
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When I was about six years old, my dad had to buy an IBM PC, one of the original ones, for his business. He was an insurance agent, and the company he represented put all of their actuarial models into a brand new “program” that ran on PCs, and agents were told they would have to run pricing models themselves instead of calling up the home office for the models to be run on the company’s mainframes. Dad wasn’t thrilled about it; to say he’s not technologically oriented would be an understatement. Being a precocious kid who loved anything complicated and new, I volunteered to come into his office and try things out.
Moving
I’m moving again. There’s a pile of boxes, some random furniture, and a couple of cleared off bookshelves and some tables in my living room, ready to be moved over later today to a new studio apartment closer to my son’s house. I’ll also bring his bed and his things, ready to occupy pride of place in the new apartment. I need to buy a bed and a mattress for myself; the queen size bed I have now doesn’t make sense for a studio. I’ll get a ZipCar van today and get the bed, then swing by my current apartment and pack the rest of the furniture, and move in.
Living in exile
When I left university and moved west, my parents found a great birthday gift, a t-shirt that said “Born in Maine, Living in Exile”. It remains my favorite t-shirt, although by now it’s barely holding together after twenty plus years of wearings and washings. I only bring it out on rare occasions – for example, I wore it to Safeco Field for a Mariners-Blue Jays game. Since most people at the game were Canadian, I thought I might get a good reaction, and sure enough, some Newfies now living in Vancouver who were following the Jays spotted the t-shirt and we struck up a great conversation about growing up on the Atlantic and living on the Pacific.