Insider trading and love in the tropics

This may surprise a lot of people, but I was unclear on the exact definition of insider trading until very recently. I had a general idea, of course, thanks to that Martha Stewart case a few years ago, but if you had asked me to provide a definition, I would have had produced little more than vague, buzzword-laden sentence fragments and sweeping hand gestures.

Then, the other night, I was out to dinner with my dad and brother Ted as a sort of last family hurrah before said brother moved to New York (if you’re reading this, I’m very happy that you landed such an excellent job with great perks and advancement opportunities etc etc etc, but I’m still mad at you for abandoning me). My dad was scheduled to make a trip to Orange County in the next couple of days, and being a naturally curious person, I asked him what it would entail.

‘We’re working with a lender down there and a private equity firm that’s going to give them $X million of capital,’ he told me.
Private equity! That was interesting.
‘Which lender?’ I asked. My father shook his head.
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Oh, come on,’ I protested. ‘Why not? It’s not like I’ll shout it from the rooftops or tell Rob.’ (My boss, whose commentary is read by tens of thousands of people on a daily basis.)
‘No, I can’t tell you,’ my dad repeated.
I was a touch put out. Was there a general perception that I couldn’t be trusted with secrets? That I wasn’t worthy of being privy to the company’s goings-on? I was about to get really offended when Ted spoke up.
‘If he told you, that would be, like, a textbook instance of insider trading,’ my brother helpfully pointed out.

Oh.

Moral of the story, if someone you know is about to coordinate a deal with a public company that involves a lot of capital, don’t be offended that they won’t give you the details. They’re probably just trying to not get put in prison for white-collar crime.

On a totally unrelated note (or is it?), I type this from the beautiful island of Maui, one of the most stunning of Hawaii’s numerous stunning islands. The ocean’s waves are crashing softly on a spit of golden sand and making that peaceful rustling noise I love so much, and a line of slender palms are waving their fronds in the light breeze. The air feels the exact temperature of my skin so that I blend into the summer evening like an unwitting ninja.

I am back in the tropics, and I am very, very happy.

Hawaii was utterly last minute. My friend Clare texted me last Friday with a message that read: ‘Hawaii 15-22. are you free?’ I’m not sure what I texted back, but I think it was along the lines of ‘fuck yes,’ give or take ten exclamation points. A ticket was booked, I cancelled an appointment or two, my shorts were washed, and that was it.

Clare and I can be found wreaking havoc in San Francisco most weekends, reveling in the fact that we can legally drink alcohol in this country, but we go way back, all the way to the halcyon days of the mid-2000s. We both attended The Branson School, where we sat our myriad AP tests and had class in the glen in nice weather and occasionally skipped class to go to the beach and got told constantly how vital it was that we go to a Prestigious University™.

In no particular order, things I adore about being in the tropics:

1. It’s hot. Duh. Not having to wear a jacket at night is one of life’s great pleasures, as is being able to walk around in a bikini shoeless. In temperate climates, I sort of feeling like everyone else is operating at their peak and I, with my blue lips and chattering teeth, am at something of a disadvantage. When I come to the tropics, I’m enlivened by the heat, not unlike a warm-blooded reptile, and frolic around with boundless energy as everyone else drags. The view is nice from the other side.

2. It’s humid. This means hair and fingernails that grow faster (!), better digestion, improved circulation, soft skin, and a glorious feeling of exhaustion at the end of the day. Long ago I discovered that I physically function much better in humid weather, so my body feels fucking amazing right now, to put it indelicately.

3. Delicious fruit. Papayas, pineapples, guavas, those tiny sweet bananas, and my personal favourite, coconuts, are all present here in abundance. They also taste much, much better when they’re not carted across an ocean.

4. The dim mauve coolness of the early morning before the sun rises. For some reason I can’t fully explain, I really love that before-the-waking-people time of relative freshness. I imagine it to be the time when those who need to get things done bustle about and do them so that they’re out of the way before the lazy heat rolls out and the folk on holiday whose to-do lists consist of ‘read crappy book’ awaken. 

5. Bright colours. The flowers, the birds, the ocean, the houses. You’re allowed to paint your house persimmon in the tropics. You’re allowed to wear lime green without people scowling like you’re hurting their eyes. I don’t even wear bright colours most of the time, having retreated into a preference for exiting shade like dark blue, hunter green, and grey, but I find this immensely cheering.

6. The architecture. Tile floors, high ceilings, old creaky wooden fixings, dilapidated shingles worn down by heavy, damp air—all unassumingly glorious. I love that sense of ‘it’s not perfect, but it does its job, so whatever.’ Cold weather requires a sturdy house, a powerful heating system, plush carpeting, and lots of thick-legged furniture, in my opinion, otherwise you risk a Siberian gulag-type vibe. Having had a lot of experience of what it’s like to be mind-numbingly and painfully cold, I panic at the thought of being in a rickety house where air whistles through the cracks in the foundation.

7. The excuse to drink particular cocktails. Ordering a daiquiri, mai tai, or, heaven forbid, a pina colada in the middle of Tokyo or London or New York is kind of gauche. Even in California, it’s kind of gauche. Being in the tropics, this is not only acceptable but encouraged (I pointedly ignored my mother’s observation that ‘pina coladas are pretty fattening, you know,’ which she told me over the phone this morning).

8. Geckos. They’re cute. They make funny noises.

9. It’s green. There is something very satisfying about existing amidst miles of greenery after having existed in an arid landscape for a long time.

10. Being allowed to run late. In Indonesia, one often hears the term jam karet, which translates literally to ‘rubber time.’ In Hawaii, it’s ‘island time.’ The technical and much less charming term is polychronocity, a polychromic culture being one where a deadlines or appointment are really just suggestions. Singapore is one of the very few tropical places that comes to mind where a monochronic culture exists, but in places like Tanzania, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, or the majority of the Caribbean, you can pretty much run twenty minutes late and no one cares. As someone who is perpetually running twenty minutes late, I appreciate this very much.

Why I don't write much anymore

The reason I don’t write much anymore is because I spend most of my time writing. What! What japes are these? you may exclaim. Since January I’ve been working in the wide world of mortgage banking consulting, which most people react to with an about-face and a bland ‘mmm.’ On the How Cool Your Job Sounds scale, mortgage banking consulting is one step above ‘I’m in insurance’ but still at the opposite end of the spectrum from Supermegafamous Rockstar Deity, modern day treasure hunter, and happenin’ club owner. I’m usually quick to add that it’s actually really interesting (really interesting!) but no one ever believes me. I’ll bide my time. You’ll see, when you’re trying to get an FHA loan but have disputed and/or outstanding collection accounts exceeding $1,000 and are desperate to know if there have been any recent underwriting policy changes, I’ll have the last laugh.

You can see the fruits of my labours at http://robchrisman.com/, though my name doesn’t go on any of it because for some reason mortgage folk tend to trust people with MBAs and several decades of experience in the biz over some punk 22-year-old who has never owned a property. If you want to go all out you can even subscribe to the daily commentary and talk shop with that plethora of mortgage bankers you know. There’s always a joke at the end, and no, I have nothing to do with that part (she said humourlessly). And I do mean to be more on top of putting stuff in the blog. Really, I do.

Plus I get to do this in California, which isn’t bad at all. Tee hee.

This isn’t meant in any way to be ‘promotional,’ and I’ve decided to finish it off with a picture from the simultaneously terrifying and hilarious 90s cartoon Bananas in Pyjamas.
























Somewhere along the line, there was a person who said, 'Let's make a children's show about anthropomorphised fruit that wears an article of clothing that rhymes with its name. Oh yeah, let's make them doctors too.'

Reason #673 I'm going to hell

As a heathen/infidel/general non-believer, I don't actually believe in hell. Somewhat ironically, it is exactly this lack of belief that makes many religious folk certain that I will end up there. So this isn't about the afterlife, unless you consider fending off the advances of charity muggers ('chuggers') for eternity to be some kind of purgatory.

On any given day, my local high street is lined with four to six people holding clipboards and standing in the middle of the pavement. They plant themselves in front of the post office and the giant Sainsburys (east pavement) and HSBC and Caffe Nero (west pavement) so that it's impossible to avoid them if you want to get to the tube station or do your food shopping. Sometimes they wear matching jackets (now I've made them sound like they're part of a cult-they're not). Should you make eye contact, they will lock their gaze on yours and grin manically as you walk towards them, and then, when you're within five feet, they pounce.

These are the chuggers, and I hate them. They work on behalf of large charities (Save the Children, Help the Homeless, Shelter, Cancer Research, etc) that can afford to employ people to stand out in the cold and assault strangers for eight hours. Their goal, with their handy clipboards, is to pitch the organisation to passersby and then securing people's direct debit details to sign them up for a monthly donation. It's officially called Face to Face fundraising, or 'F2F', by the charitable sector. The charitable sector prefers not to use the term 'chugger', for obvious reasons.
















One of these. White dreadlocks not obligatory, but clearly encouraged.

'Hold on, you're saying that you hate charity,' you might be thinking. 'You're a jackass.'

But I don't hate charity. My mother has worked in non-profit development for the best part of the past three decades. I donate annually to a number of different causes. I spent a summer planting ebony saplings in an effort to reforest Mt Kilimanjaro. Soup kitchens, Adopt A Family, alumni donations, teaching English, giving away winter coats, you name it. You don't grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heartland of liberalism, and hate charity.

My beef lies with the chugging method. If I mistakenly make eye contact with one of them as I'm walking down the street, a wave of genuine dread rolls over me. For the next hundred feet, I swivel my head wildly in an attempt to find an escape route (there never is-both sides of the street, remember?) or in the futile hope that I can pretend as though I don't see them, and maybe, just maybe, they'll let me by. But the chuggers never do, and as soon as I draw level with them they lunge-yes, lunge!- and shout, 'HELLO MISS HOW IS YOUR DAY COULD I TAKE A MINUTE OF YOUR TIME TO TELL YOU ABOUT [Large Charity X]!'

There are a few reasons why I find this so irritating.

1. I don't enjoy being shouted at. Unless there's a man behind me with an axe that's aiming for my neck and you're shouting, 'Duck!', I just don't see why it's necessary.
2. When I'm walking down the high street, I'm usually walking somewhere to do something I would like to get done in a timely fashion (if it's raining, windy or below 10 degrees outside, this goes double). Rarely do I, or anyone else for that matter, take a leisurely stroll down a busy city street.
3. In London, if a random jumps out at me, I naturally assume that he's got a knife and is aiming to either mug or stab. That momentary fear for my life, no matter how quickly it dissipates, does not leave me feeling particularly warm and fuzzy.
4. I already donate to charities of my choosing, and I'm not exactly thrilled at the idea of leaving my direct debit details with someone whom I've literally met on the street.
5. How is my day? Really? I would love to see someone stop in their tracks and give a chugger a blow-by-blow of this morning's carpool, how both the coffee machine AND the copier broke in the office, the lunchtime dry cleaning pickup, that super funny video of the camel being tickled!, and the conference called scheduled for 4 o' clock and watch the chugger act interested. Look, chuggers, you don't care, and I know you don't care, so, to put it indelicately, cut the crap.

Usually, I just fend them off by saying, 'Sorry, I'm running late', which is easy enough, but when you've gotten past one just to deal with another five on the same stretch of pavement, it tests your patience. Sometimes, frankly, I'm exhausted already and don't have the energy to deal with them at all.

There was one such day a few months ago when I was coming back from a long, difficult job assessment that had left me tired, downhearted, and rather certain that I wasn't going to get the job. My business heels had ceased to be comfortable several hours ago, and I was so excited about swapping my blazer and pencil skirt for my old Berkeley jumper that I debated calling a taxi for the 90-second ride home from the bus stop. Having pelted out the door that morning at such a high speed that all I had time to grab was a single carrot, I was also starving, and it was the thought of a fresh insalate caprese drizzled with olive oil that kept me going. Unfortunately, as I walked from the tube towards the giant Sainsburys, I realised that I was was heading straight towards a girl with a neon scarf, a clipboard, and a red Shelter jacket. Yes, one of them.

She was both louder than average and incredibly agile, darting from one side of the pavement to the other and letting no pedestrian pass without a shouted appeal. It was clear there was no way I could get to my tomatoes, basil and mozzarella in peace, as she clearly had this side of the street covered, and her Shelter cronies had the other side heavily manned. Caprese. Caprese. Caprese, I repeated internally, willing myself to go forward. I hugged exterior of the HSBC branch, but sure enough, there she was in a flash, hollering, 'HELLO MISS HOW ARE YOU TODAY CAN I-' I was so drained that I didn't even have the energy to make up some excuse, and simply walked on past.

There was a three-second pause, and then this girl yelled, at my retreating back, 'YOU DON'T HAVE TO BLANK ME, YOU KNOW!'

Had this been a film, I would have stopped dead in my tracks, slowly turned around, and said, 'WHAT did you just say to me?' I mean, really, if you're trying to get someone to give money to you is berating them the way to go? Did this neon-scarf wearing twit really think that was at all helpful?

Needless to say, she just fanned the flames.

Fast forward a few months to a bitterly cold, grey, damp excuse for a day. After lying low all afternoon with a very unattractive cough, I decided to make the trek to Sainsburys and buy some almonds for no other reason than I really wanted almonds. I bundled myself into a faded jumper, my sheepskin coat, scarf and a pair of black fleece-lined jodhpurs that are so thick they make my legs look considerably fatter. The look was not a particularly good one, but I had stuck my hand out the window to gauge the temperature, and I didn't care if I looked like the Yeti's ugly cousin so long as I would be able to brave the chill.



































How I see my walk to the store


(Note: I make it sound as though it were five below zero and I live three miles from the nearest supermarket. In reality, it was probably about ten degrees and there's an enormous Sainsburys less than ten minutes from my front door. But I was having a rough time.)

















My actual walk to the store. It's short. Like really short.

I was within a couple hundred feet of my precious almonds when I spied a tall guy in a black jacket holding a clipboard. Oh, please, just this once, let him not make eye contact with me, I thought. I was far too cold to deal with this. I didn't want to be outside a second longer than necessary. I scrabbled in my pockets for my phone or my iPod. No luck-I hadn't thought I'd need either. I craned my head at an improbably and uncomfortable angle in a desperate attempt to avoid his gaze, but it wasn't enough. The next thing I knew, there he was in front of me, enormous mad smile and all. He launched right into it: 'HELLO MISS HOW ARE YOU TODAY CAN-'

And, as I shivered beneath my ugly jumper and fat-leg jodhpurs, something inside me just snapped. I narrowed my eyes and told him, 'Not great. I just got diagnosed with TYPHUS.'

The second I said it, I was mortified. Typhus? What was I thinking?! Typhus, that disease often found in prisons and refugee camps and known as 'jail rot'. That disease extremely rare in London, especially in girls wearing Armani watches. That disease whose symptoms include rashes, stupor and delirium-not walking to Sainsburys to satisfy a craving for almonds. It was painfully, glaringly, spectacularly obvious that I did not have typhus.

Neither the chugger or I knew what to do. Still horrified, I ducked my head and quickly walked into the store as he stammered, 'Oh...erm...sorry.' I tried to keep it together as I selected the perfect almond option in the nuts aisle and shelled out a couple of pound coins. Okay, it was a shitty thing to do, but what's done is done, and it didn't actually harm anyone, I reasoned. But then I realised that, unless all of the chuggers had spontaneously decided to go home in the last five minutes, the guy would still be out there. Hopefully, in light of the awkward situation, he would just ignore me, because, really, who would actively try and exacerbate such awkwardness, am I right?!

My almonds and I had almost made it past and I was thinking of which film to stream when he struck. 'HELLO MISS HOW ARE YOU TODAY CAN-' Oh, holy shit. I sighed uncomfortably.

'Erm. I'm the girl with typhus, remember?' I mumbled. He took a step back.

'Oh. Right. Sorry,' he mumbled in return. We both fled.

Chuggers continue to irritate me for all those reasons listed above. However, I've since realised that there are better ways of fending them off than faking typhus, and, although it certainly worked, I still get the occasional twinge of guilt. Because I'm pretty sure, in religious circles, that sort of thing does indeed earn you a one-way ticket to hell.

A big jolly goedemorgen from Amsterdam

I was having withdrawal symptoms—restlessness, irritability, cold shaky hands, relentless grinding of my teeth. I couldn’t concentrate. I would find myself picking up a book or logging into The Times online only to lose interest in a matter of minutes. My mind would race in such a way that it actually made me anxious, and somehow I was both full of nervous energy and lethargic as a parched houseplant.

If you read the title of this post, automatically assumed this was about drugs, and shook your head at my destructive ways, shame on you! Tainting my good name!

No, I’m talking about a different kind of withdrawal. As I woke up on the 23rd of October, I realised that it was the longest I hadn’t been on a plane in about four years. I had been on the island from June straight through until October, a full four months. No casual city breaks, no fleeing to the tropics to fend off the winter blues, no getting stranded in a tiny heat-blasted Gulf state, no brother’s university graduation that warranted hopping across the Atlantic, no long weekends in Beijing, no high-powered urgent business meetings requiring me to hop on a jumbo jet to the southern hemisphere ASAP! (They tell me that the last one is rather unlikely for a brand-new graduate at the bottom of the professional food chain.)

And so I found myself sat cross-legged on the floor of my aunt’s sitting room in Belgravia, left hand curled around a mug of green tea, right hand gesturing grandly as I tried to explain my painfully bourgeois variety of malaise. Most people would have given me a dry look and asked me to come back with a real problem, but I knew my aunt Louisa would empathise. You see, my dear auntie was a freelance travel writer for years, popping back and forth between the UK and Mauritius and Burma and Sri Lanka and Brazil and Indonesia on a weekly basis, and is still well-known amongst the luxury travel journo/PR set in London. She, too, has set a personal record for staying in one spot in the past few months, and fully understood the all-consuming desire to just get on a plane and fly.

So acute was my longing to travel that I tallied the hours I spent on planes in the 2010 calendar year. It came out to 140, or roughly nine days. We’re not talking getting to and from the airport or layovers or going through security, either, this is raw air-time. I had unwittingly trained my body to expect the packing of suitcases and the shedding of boots onto conveyor belts and the scanning of departure boards and that sweet hard rush of being launched into the sky. No wonder I felt weird. The highest I had been in the past four months was Hampstead Heath.

Dear God, I thought, I will do anything to get on a plane and go somewhere.

And just like that, thanks to a tatty old page buried in the middle of my passport, an excuse to travel fell into my lap.

Back in 2007, I was issued a British student visa (my passport arrived from the Los Angeles consulate quite literally the day before I was scheduled to depart for term at St Andrews—nerve-wracking, to say the least). The visa expired not at the end of June 2011, just after graduation, but the end of October, presumably given the bearer time to apply for a post-study work visa. I had meant to do this, but then realised that if I wasn’t working at a place that strictly required an £800 visa, then why buy one? I had until April to make my application, so why not wait a few months to spend that money and have the post-study visa expire in April 2014 rather than October 2013? It made a lot more sense, but it did make me wonder what would happen if I overstayed by 31 October 2011 expiry date. To the internet! After looking through various ‘ZOMGZ MY VISA EXPIRES N LIKE 5 MINS CAN ANY1 TELL ME WUT 2 DO KTHANX!!1!1!!’ forums, I was able to discern that overstaying a visa may not give you any trouble leaving Britain, but when it came time to applying for another visa, you could kiss your chances goodbye. That could only mean one thing.

I had to get out of Britain, and I had eight days to do it.

Had to! Literally! It was a bureaucratic necessity. Unless I wanted to seriously screw up my future, I had no choice. I nearly dropped to my knees and thanked the god I don’t believe in. My zeal renewed and kicked into high gear, I started the search for cheap last-minute flights. I had originally planned to spend the Halloween weekend at some St Andrews medic friends’ party in Manchester, so I figured I might as well fly out of there on the 31st. And as long as I was at it, why not just fly up into Edinburgh and pop up to St Andrews? Before I knew it, a simple weekend in Manchester turned into a ten-day three-legged journey where I zigzagged across Britain and the Netherlands in planes, trains and coaches. I could almost feel my muscles and my mind settle as the relief coursed through my veins. As I prepared to pack up my trusty royal blue suitcase with the feather-light frame, I fished my passport out of its designated nook. It was time for its little navy self to come out of hibernation and to gather some Dutch stamps.

Meanwhile, my aunt had arranged to meet a friend from California in Paris for the weekend, setting out on the Eurostar a few hours before I left for Manchester. When I came over to say goodbye, I found her packing, and she was utterly thrilled about it. ‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘I’m so excited—I get to pack! I can’t believe I ever complained about doing this!’ I told her to have a fabulous time in Paris and she me in Manchester and Amsterdam. ‘And we’ll see you when you’re back. When is that, exactly?’ she called as she plucked a top out of the closet.

‘Well, I’m taking a few days up in Scotland after Amsterdam, so around the 8th or the 9th,’ I told her. ‘It was all a bit…impromptu.’

‘That’s nearly two weeks! You’re going to be properly gone!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve been plotting to travel, haven’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I admitted, a smile creeping into my face.

And now, on the second of November, I have woken up to a radiant sunny day in Amsterdam, where the leaves are a riot of reds and golds and everyone has just started to wrap themselves in woolly scarves. And in the eyes of Westminster, I am really and truly no longer a student. It’s bittersweet, and I can’t think of a better place to come to terms with it than Amsterdam, one of my favourite cities on the planet. And I figure that if a 55-minute flight across the Channel can make me feel so good, it can hardly be wrong.

Life After Uni: It's a Riot

I am fully aware that the last thing I posted is three months old, but I’m not sure that I can be bothered to make excuses or justifications. Erm...I've been busy? Anyway, here we are.

When it comes to the shift from university to ‘the real world’, clichés abound—stuff like ‘the beginning of the rest of your life’, ‘becoming a “real person”’, et cetera. If I’m entirely honest, though, I haven’t had one of those moments where I realise, with a hugely jolting shock, that, ‘Oh my God, my life has changed ENORMOUSLY!’ I suppose that was what was in my mind when I titled the blog ‘In Transit’, because this is meant to be THE transition. So I’m a little bit disappointed that I haven’t had some major epiphany. But then I thought about it. I’ve worked during the summer since I was fifteen, having done full-time summer jobs all through uni, so I’m used to working nine-hour days. I worked in a proper office job last summer, so I’m used to looking presentable, commuting and using my brain. I’ve had my own flat, I’ve had a salary, I’ve managed my finances, I’ve lived overseas, I’ve lived in a massive city. Is my ‘new life’ really that different, then?

Well, no. All of ‘adult life’ was kind of expected, in which case, thanks are due to my parents. Congratulations, Mom and Dad, you raised a kid who’s not having a nervous breakdown about replacing a light bulb (in all seriousness, I mean that—I’ve been really lucky to have the opportunities that made THE transition so smooth). On paper, all the stuff looks rather monumental...

1. I wore a sombre black robe and got handed a diploma (ie I graduated). For one rather surreal week, my family and I stayed in St Andrews and drank a lot of champagne. I had stressed that, although it may have been June and California may have been Barcelona-sunny, Scotland would be grey, cool and breezy. They soon realised that I was not exaggerating and expressed wonder at how I had survived there for four years. Anyway, one long, Latin-filled ceremony and one mind-shattering graduation ball later, I found myself on the Caledonian Sleeper to Euston, bidding goodbye to St Andrews and goodbye to Scotland. It’s not like I was heading off to war, and plans have already been made for a cheeky weekend back up, so this was a lot less emotional than it could have been.
























This is me, but edumacated

2. I signed a contract for a job in London. A few years ago, this would have been entirely unremarkable, but now that the global economy is in the toilet, it does feel like slightly more like an accomplishment. It’s in PR, which isn’t my dream industry, but it puts money in the old RBS savings every month, so...you know. Amongst other things, it gives me an excuse to shop at Banana Republic for things like grey pinstriped trousers, which, if you’re unemployed, just look kind of try-hard.
























Employment is SO cool!

3. I signed a contract for a flat, also in London. When I was in California for the three weeks between the end of term and graduation, my brother told me, ‘You’re going to be living in a hovel—just so you know’. Ted has never exhibited any clairvoyant tendencies (rather, any particularly acute ones), so I’m not sure where he got that, but it turned out to be wrong. There are a few cons—it looks a little like a crack den from the outside, our landlord is kind of a bitch, and I accidentally blew up the oven a few weeks ago—but the interior is lovely. It gets tonnes of light, has a massive and recently refurbished kitchen, and comes complete with a balcony. On top of that, it’s a stone’s throw from Clapham Common and the tube. We also have a lot of Caribbean neighbours with gloriously cool accents, and, true to the Caribbean stereotype, they listen to really catchy music and cook food that smells delicious. Allie and I are working on getting a dinner invite somewhere.
























We looked at a flat about two feet away from this sign. Unsurprisingly, we opted not to live there.

4. I established a routine whereby I commuted from aforementioned flat to aforementioned job. Every morning, I hit the snooze button a few times, pelt out the door about ten minutes later than I intend to, and squeeze onto a Northern line train whose person-to-space ratio rivals that of the Shanghai metro at rush hour. After my first week of work, I admit that I was so exhausted that, zombie-like, I boarded a northbound Victoria train instead of the southbound one that would take me home. I completely failed to register the stop at Green Park and got to Oxford Circus before I realised that something wasn’t quite right. It also kind of makes me hate the general public even more than usual—I find that my ‘excuse me’ sounds more like a threat than a request these days—but Clapham Common to Victoria is a short commute by London standards (thirty minutes).
























How commuting makes me feel sometimes

...but, let’s be honest, everyone does this (apart from blowing up the oven). Unless they get signed for a record deal or descend into hipsterdom. How I hate hipsters.

Things wasn’t quite expecting?

1. The worst riots London has seen in thirty years...in my backyard. I’ve been lucky enough to have avoided pretty much any kind of violent conflict in my lifetime, but as someone who’s never even been mugged, I can’t help but worry on occasion that I’ve got a bull’s eye between my shoulder blades, or maybe a flashing neon sign on my forehead that reads ‘WALKING UPPER-MIDDLE CLASS CASHPOINT WITH MINIMAL UPPER ARM STRENGTH’. Needless to say, when the news said that there were a thousand angry, fearless rioters making their way up Lavender Hill towards my house, I was a bit shaken. After Allie pointed to flames and hooded figures on her computer screen and said, ‘Look, we’re on the news’, the two of us, doing our best to seem casual, drew all the blinds and locked and barricaded our doors. My little chilli plant, which lives on our kitchen window sill, seemed especially vulnerable with its delicate green stalks waving in the air, so I tucked it behind the toaster. It then dawned on me that the looters were going after plasma TVS, not chilli plants, and that if a bunch of lawless yobs broke into my house, I would do better to worry about my laptop, jewellery, or skull. The riots themselves have stopped, but this whole thing, whatever it may be, is far from over. When people ask where I live and I tell them Clapham, I get a response that goes something like ‘Oh my God, was your flat okay?’, usually accompanied by a concerned and sinister ‘oooh’ sound. It’s as if I said that I grew up Darfur.

















What immediately comes to mind when I tell people where I live (photo actually taken in Croydon, I'll have you know)

2. Even ‘real people’ get excited about free food and free booze. Last Wednesday, we had a company rounders tournament and picnic in Hyde Park (company-mandated fun) that included a load of wine, sandwiches, quiche, hummus, crudités, and those delicious vegetable crisps that I wish weren’t so expensive. As we all clustered on our blankets and watched the sky fade to dusky pink, the main topic of conversation was, yes, the free food and booze. Similarly, the last half hour of Friday afternoons, which sees a company-wide ‘tea’ where ‘tea’ actually means ‘wine’, is when my coworkers are at their most animated. The cheese twists and chocolate buttons are practically hoovered up, the company manages to work through half a dozen bottles of sauvignon blanc in an impressively short time, and chatter fuelled by weekend euphoria fills the room. When, if ever, do free food and booze become less exciting?



















Cue mass hysteria!

3. A taste for seriously black coffee. As someone who fixes her coffee in such a way that it wouldn’t look out of place on a Viennese dessert cart, believe me, this was unexpected. I’ve found myself brewing coffee so strong and dense it could probably sit up and bark. Rocket fuel. Liquid crack black as the night. So intense that, if I brew a cafetiere and leave it in the kitchen downstairs, I feel obligated to leave a warning note. It leaves me feeling like that guy in Get Him to The Greek after he gets an adrenaline shot to the heart, which isn’t a good thing per se, but it definitely beats the sinking exhaustion brought on by, you know, being awake in the morning. I thought that caffeine addiction was just one of those office clichés, but it turns out that a good dose of it really does make work more bearable.














Me after my morning cup o' joe

4. There’s a fox that loiters outside my window at night. Yes, a real-live fox in Zone 2. What? Would you have expected that?















Hehehe!

I’m sure there are others too.

So. ‘Real life.’ All that I’ve come to conclude is that it’s not nearly as terrifying as everyone makes it out to be, but also that it doesn’t inspire some kind of massive celebration where there are champagne corks flying and everyone dressed to the nines.



















Hooray for not being a total screwup!

Not the next Aesop’s fables, but I suppose I can leave you with something about life being a journey, not the destination.

Hmm. That’s pretty milquetoast. Check back in a bit.

Various methods of procrastination during revision

As graduation encroaches, so does the end of my career as an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews. I've really come to love the things I study, but if it were up to me, I would just sit down with my tutors and have an intellectual discussion over a chardonnay rather than the draconian system of biannual examinations. Surely we should be marked on our chat, not just our ability to regurgitate information. Nevertheless, the university appears to still be giving us exams, which means long, torturous days of slogging through badly taken notes and prose that most definitely qualifies as turgid. Yes, we have entered the twilight zone of revision. To be fair, though, most of us spend a lot more time griping about revision than actually undertaking it, and when we finally actually sit down to do some work, 'something more interesting' always seems to come up. Wink, wink.

1. Looking up private islands for sale in the South Pacific. I've never been to the South Pacific, it rarely comes up in the news, and I never encountered it over the course of my studies (the region does not figure prominently in Russian history or Chinese foreign policy, unsurprisingly). My vague notions of the South Pacific are mostly derived from Conde Nast articles and childhood visits to Hawaii, so, within the confines of my head, it has remained a great unblemished paradise of sorts. And it turns out that properties for sale in Tonga, Vanuatu, Fiji et al go for prices that are far from exorbitant-you can buy half of a private island in Bora Bora for just over USD3 million. This seems like a bargain.









Looks decent


2. Excessive, borderline-psychological-disorder-style tidying. Five minutes into a journal article I usually have a mini-freakout over my room being 'filthy'. All surfaces are cleared, disinfected and reordered. All clothes are folded, hung up and stowed, with the laundry sorted into lights, darks and delicates. All stray papers are discarded or filed. All creases in the duvet are fastidiously smoothed; in extreme cases I usually end up changing the sheets and pillowcases even if they were just washed. This is a classic. Everyone knows that a student's bedroom is at its cleanest when an essay deadline or exam is looming.











My bleach usage skyrockets during exam time


3. Personal beautification. I think I've plucked my eyebrows about six times in the past seven days. They don't look all that different-I have a healthy fear of overplucking them-which means that really, I've just spent a lot of time cross-legged on the bathroom counter with my face smushed up against the mirror doing nothing. When I want something more time intensive, I plaster my skin with a clay masque, wait for it to dry, wash it off and moisturise. It takes about ten minutes for it to dry, and I have managed to convince myself that, for those ten minutes, I can't possibly revise. Logically, this is entirely untrue. If I'm really desperate, I clip my nails.













Seriously, don't overpluck

4. Naps. Never a huge fan of office chairs, I do most of my academic work sitting cross-legged on my bed with my back against the wall. Unfortunately, it is nearly effortless to tip over so that my head lands on the pillow, and we all know that from there it's a lost cause.










When I'm out, I'm out


5. Looking up how much it would cost to fly to [obscure faraway destination here]. It would cost 635 pounds to fly from London to Antananarivo (capital of Madagascar, for those too lazy to pull up Google maps) if one embarked on the 16th of March and returned on the 31st.










Central Antananarivo looks just gorgeousss

6. Trying on various formal dresses and high heels. You know, just to remind myself what they look like.













It turns out this dress and heels look exactly the same


7. Downloading most of VH1's Top 100 Dance Songs of the 90s. I am now the proud owner of hits such as Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now) by C+C Music Factory, Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, Bad Touch by Bloodhound Gang, MMMBop by Hanson, and Precious by Depeche Mode. I don't like, have never liked, and probably never will like Depeche Mode, and chances are that I will never listen to the others after next Wednesday (last exam).










The 90s were totally rad!


8. Newfound enthusiasm for the gym. At least this one is healthy and constructive-it might provide an opportunity to listen to my new 90s dance hits, gives me the chance to interact with other human beings, pumps me full of endorphins and of course prevents me from becoming a fatass. Plus, if every visit entails cardio, core, stretching, AND sixty minutes in the shower/moisturising my legs/waiting for my hair to dry, one casual innocuous-sounding gym session can take up a good two and a half hours.










What would probably happen if exams went on indefinitely


9. Watching 'educational' documentaries on North Korea. The DPRK has come up in my current module on Chinese foreign policy, but, if I'm entirely honest, it's really not important enough to merit my watching multiple documentaries on the whackjobbery of Kim Jong-Il and his father. It's just so incredibly BIZARRE. How does someplace like that still exist?! Isn't it incredible that there's a whole North Korea that we, the wider world, know absolutely nothing about?!! The more documentaries I watch, the more it blows my mind. And, erm, educates me.












I'll definitely be mentioning this in my IR exam


10. Anything. Really. Along with pretty much every single person in St Andrews at the moment, I'm starting to wonder if I have severe ADD.













Hey! Dressing up as a clown and learning to juggle seems like a constructive use of my time

Good luck, fellow St Andreans. The exams do end eventually.

...and one thing about Scotland that is not so awesome

Before any of you get all hot and bothered about the title of the post, it's not about 'the people' or the traditions or the culture or the right to be independent or anything like that. In fact, unless you or one of your loved ones works at the Apple store in Glasgow, there is nothing in here that you can or should take personally, so, you know, cool your jets. (ha)

Although I was somewhat loathe to come back to the UK after two hot, blissful weeks on the island of Sri Lanka—by all accounts, paradise—I’m now quite happy to be in London. I always forget how much I like the place until I’m back; I’ll be striding along happily with hordes of people, coffee in hand, when I realise, Oh, right, I actually really enjoy it here. When Natasha and I were sat beneath a creaking ceiling fan watching the tuktuks of Unawatuna whiz by in the bold equatorial sun, I had questioned my sanity about the decision to move here next year and made a note to start looking into something based in Honolulu, but false alarm! I think I’ve made the right call.

Another reason I’m genuinely excited about moving here? The Mac store. Specifically, the one on Regent Street.

Generally, I have a hard time caring about technology (my mobile looks like something you would get with a McDonalds Happy Meal, made worse by the crack that appeared in the screen after I got it back from Tel Aviv airport security), but I love my Mac. A lot. Love isn’t even the right word; at this point, it has actually become an extension of me. The Chinese word for computer, diannao, is better suited, as it literally translates to ‘electric brain’, and my laptop is just a part of my brain that is outside my body. Thanks to the time my little electric brain and I have spent together, Apple has effectively hooked me for life. I could put something like ‘once you go Mac you never go back!!!’ here, but it made me cringe, so I’ll just leave it at that.

The trouble with living in St Andrews and Scotland in general is that the only Mac store is based in Glasgow (ominous music).

I will admit that there are some nice bits of Glasgow, yes, but for the most part, it’s difficult not to kind of despise it. Obviously there are no direct trains from St Andrews, so the only other choice is a two and a half-hour coach that takes you on a tour of the heart of Fife, and as you go through the heart of Fife, the coach accumulates a lot of people who, frankly, you would rather not sit with in an enclosed space. One of my more recent rides on the X24 saw a herd of about twenty-five local women in their late thirties embark, absolutely wasted, at about ten am from the beautiful town of Glenrothes (a total lie. Glenrothes is an armpit, has always been an armpit, and will always be an armpit.). It was their friend’s fortieth birthday, apparently, and they had decided to celebrate by being tremendously irritating. Armed with balloons, plastic water bottles filled with booze and luridly coloured mixers, pungent cheesy snacks, bad dye jobs, and a lot of excess flesh, they proceeded to make life hell for the next two hours. The low point? Either when they all started singing ‘Single Ladies’ at the top of their drunk Fife voices or when a particularly robust one started to perform a striptease (a shudder just ripped through my body). That was a particularly bad journey, but even without a flock of drunken chavs, it’s long, it’s boring, and it’s made worse by the fact that you know, at the end, you’ll be deposited in Glasgow. I’ve done it a few too many times and appear to have developed some kind of visceral reaction to the thought of it.










I suspect these people are in fancy dress, but they should give you a good picture of the kind of thing one has to put up with on the ride to Glasgow

So there’s that, you know, the whole five-hour return trip through some of Scotland’s shittiest parts. Not technically the fault of the Apple store. The same goes for the people soliciting for charity who roam the length of Buchanan Street every weekend, the very ones that scare the hell out of me by approaching purposefully with a big Joker-esque smile and leave me shrieking excuses about ‘important appointment pleasepleaseplease get away from me’. The Mac people can’t do anything about them, I don’t think.

But! The sanctuary provided by the modern and spacious floorplan and the gentle whirring of Macs en masse is deceptive, because it turns out that the people working in the Glasgow Apple store are kind of incompetent. Actually, really incompetent. Nice enough, most of them, but if their jobs are to help people with their computer needs, then they are painfully bad at their jobs.

The laptop saga is long and generally uninteresting, but the basic issue was that my poor little Macbook had to have its logic board replaced (I think this is the thing with the ethernet port and all that—very important). After being quoted a price that made the blood drain from my face, I left my electric brain in the hands of the Glasgow staff for a week. After a long seven days I made the journey back to Buchanan Street, where it was presented to me all new-looking and shiny and happy and functional. I took it in my arms and promised to never leave it again. Forty-eight hours later, it convulsed and then died. Made nauseous at the thought of going back to Glasgow yet again, I had it examined by a guy down in Edinburgh on my way to the airport who pried it open and said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ’. Apparently the logic board had been put together shockingly badly. Like wires crossing things that they shouldn’t, screws that were the wrong size, things that were making the topcase bulge outward as though an alien were living under there. I put in a few calls to the Buchanan Street store, during which I listened to a lot of easy listening whilst on hold and was then promised that someone would call me back. Needless to say, that never happened, so I bundled up my electric brain, which had now become a very expensive, delicate and cumbersome paperweight, carried it through Sri Lanka, and vowed to avenge its pathetic death by booking an appointment at the Regent Street store in London upon my return to the UK.

After showering off the grime accumulated from a three-hour train ride through the tropics and twelve hours of flying, I bounded out into the sunshine streaming through all of London and made my way there. Compared to the torture of getting to Glasgow, it was so easy I could have wept. It seemed as through one minute, I was hopping on the tube at Sloane Square and the next, I was making my way up the trademark translucent aqua stairs towards technological salvation. I’m never living in the middle of nowhere again.

Unfortunately, instead of arriving at 3.40 for the appointment I had booked from the hot confines of a Sri Lankan internet café, I arrived at 4.40. My timezones had been well and clearly scrambled by the overnight journey and daylight savings time, and as the laid-back guy in the official blue shirt told me that, erm, actually, my appointment was for an hour ago, I wanted to kick myself. However, he immediately promised me that he would make space and that I would be seen anyway—something would never happen in Glasgow.

I waited for maybe twenty minutes when he came rushing back to sit down beside me, sympathising, ‘You’ve been waiting for ages, huh?’ Considering that I had been without a laptop for a month, twenty minutes hardly seemed that long, but I proceeded to tell him the whole unfortunate tale, including the fact that I was leaving London on Tuesday and would either need it done by then or shipped up to Scotland. As transit-induced exhaustion started to set in, there was a great deal of hand-wringing, eyes cast upward in despair, some tears that were definitely more real than strategic, and a plaintive ‘I just want my laptop back’ to conclude. Now thoroughly mortified at my inability to tell time and to not cry in front of the Mac employees, I was led over to another laid-back guy in a blue shirt.

I braced myself for the worst.

His nimble and technology-friendly fingers danced over the machine a bit, and after a minute or two he looked up and said, ‘We should be able to finish this within a day, probably. As long as we have the parts.’ He checked to see if they had the parts. They did. ‘Okay, so that’s that.’ This is going far, far too smoothly, I thought. Suspiciously so.

Warily, like a fawn approaching a mountain lion, I asked him if I would be charged the £400-plus I had been told a new logic board cost.













How I feel when I ask about the cost for computer repairs

‘No, of course not. It should be ready by the time you leave for your flight on Tuesday. If you want to speak to anyone, call this number. We’ll get it fixed, thank you very much, and have a nice day.’ And I was walking back out the doors, blinking into the sun that was beginning to set over Regent Street.

It was so easy! So incredibly, unfathomably easy! After I had spent the majority of four years living in an isolated and wind-blasted little Scottish town, and with Shanghai seeming a world away, I had forgotten how gloriously accessible everything is when you live in a proper city. As I slid the key into the lock of my aunt and uncle’s house, which has always provided a lovely temporary home when I’m in London, I thought of all the wonderful things that accompanied life in civilisation. Indonesian food. Nightlife past two. Supermarkets other than Tesco and clothing shops other than Jack Wills and H&M. And, of course, a massive Apple store filled with people that actually seem to know what they’re doing, right at my fingertips.

(Art, music, theatre, diversity—all that is good too.)