Three Evictions and Several Hundred Red Bulls Later

I believe the first red flag was when my new flatmate described how the best day of his life was when he first smoked crack cocaine.

A poor choice, you say? Well, a month prior I was in the middle of hurriedly throwing my unwanted belongings into a skip from the third-floor balcony of the block I was living in. The flat I rented was being repossessed and I was not upset. I had had to share it with an Australian girl who liked to scrape toe jam from under her nails and wipe it on the sofa and a guy who kicked my bedroom door in because I wouldn’t go to G-A-Y with him. Days later, I moved into a half-renovated pub off Cambridge Heath Road where I slept on a mattress under the boiler and paid the month’s rent in cash.

It was two weeks into that poor choice when the real landlord let himself into my bedroom at 7 am to tell me I was illegally subletting and needed to be out that afternoon. This was the early days of the London rental market losing its mind before its full metamorphosis into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

Luckily, I’d met – let’s call him 'Jamie' – the week before. He was, for want of a better word, “peppy” or more accurate, “wild-eyed”. He originally came to view the pub basement for rent and was put off by the heady mildew aroma. But then told me about a flat in a magical land called Dalston that was available. It was laughably out of my price range so he offered to pay the shortfall. Being 21-years-old, dumb and desperate I took him up on his offer.

I had no time or brain cells left over to make smart decisions. At the weekends I was pulling shifts at a well-known, masochistic high-street shoe shop. Your wage was dependent on how fast you could descend into the stockroom, run back up with some Nike Blazers and deliver a hard sell. For someone who was then smoking twenty a day, this was not going to happen. Instead, each shift I’d persuade whoever was on the till to ring-through every other sale, be it suede protector or shoelaces, as my commission.

On weeknights, I was with a temping agency where I did everything from silver service to professional Christmas elf-ing. I had a stretch working the bar at staff parties for all the posh museums in London. They would start the evening deliciously uptight and end it pawing at us for more with cat-bum mouths stained by red wine...“GO TO HER, SHE’S NOT MEASURING THE DRINKS OUT!”

During the weekdays, however, is when I pushed my body to new limits of self-hatred. I gritted my teeth through being ignored at back-to-back internships, making sure to rob as many office toilet rolls as possible. My blood was becoming largely caffeine so the likelihood of stunning editors with my personality rather than the fact I was sweating Red Bull dropped dramatically. But, I persevered for months interning and pavement-pounding for local papers where I vox-popped old ladies on what they thought of their bin-men.

Writing has always made me feel happy and secure even when starting fresh is excruciating. So all of this was part of my vague plan to get into serious journalism in the hopes I could write for a living. But it was an uphill battle where with each step it became more apparent that I didn’t have the right background, I didn't have the right education and I certainly didn’t know the right people to be in that world.

Anyway, back to Jamie. He had a mid-level job at a sports brand but for some reason seemed to have VIP access to everything, was cash-rich and stayed, in total, about four nights at our new flat. A beautiful warehouse conversion with electric gates that locked you away from pre-soya-milk-lattes Dalston. I didn’t want to think too deeply about why people would frequently ‘stop by’ the place but he himself never stayed overnight.

I also didn’t care by that point because he unwittingly gave me access to a world that I would wrap myself up in like a security blanket for the entirety of my 20s. There was one weekend in particular that I now see as pivotal – going to Lovebox for the first time with a backstage wristband and a fistful of pills hidden in my socks.

Let me give you more context. University was not a happy time. I’d picked a pretentious art college based on the alumni and not on credentials. I just wanted to get myself far away from press-on french manicures and jobs in telesales but wasn’t sure of how to get there. I went from having no white friends to spending three years trying on different personas AKA. wearing ugly tea dresses, dancing to shit indie and getting into debt in Soho. I fumbled through my degree and was so intimidated by what felt like a chasm in interests between myself and classmates, that I began to visibly shake if I had to speak in seminars. By the final year, I was attending less than an hour a week of my course.

If I had known then what I know now – that people in the future would be doing Pure Garage cosplay for cultural cache – things might have been different.

But back to this fateful weekend. After a long period of just never quite fitting in, I was pleased with how I slotted into Jamie’s group of friends. They looked like me, listened to music I sincerely loved and were all, seemingly, surviving in creative jobs. I didn't realise the combination was possible. I believe it was the first time I would experience the thrill of barging past a herd of Jessicas in flower crowns to go straight backstage, but it certainly wasn’t the last. I missed most of the performances because I was busy gurning into the early hours of the morning with sleazy casting agents and middle-aged editors who could, finally, get me gainful employment.

A few weeks after that weekend, however, Jamie had gone AWOL and I was yet again packing for my third eviction in as many months. But I just felt a different resolve. There would be more evictions, more shitty jobs but sea changes were happening in music journalism that wasn’t happening elsewhere. It isn’t what I’d had in my mind but there was light from a crack in the door I could feasibly shove my foot in, where other parts of the industry had been shut tight. And, more importantly, I was TIRED. I had been burning out before I'd even started. So I knew I wouldn't be triumphantly getting scoops and exposing the baddies or rubbing shoulders with any earnest columnists. But this direction meant I could write every day and worry about being taken seriously later.

Except now is later. I am alone in a strange country, having pulled a sharp career 180 that, through obvious circumstance, is not working out how I anticipated and I'm mulling over the last ten years. I'm mulling over unfulfilled ambitions and, like many of you, feeling helpless to the news cycle.

And so that nagging dilemma gets louder every passing lockdown day: what the fuck am I doing and how does it help anyone?