Greenwich Mean Time

A Torontonian’s guide to life in London

Coming together
Central London finally made sense the other day. I got out of a meeting near Piccadilly Circus, and decided to walk towards some pretty buildings rather than back to the Tube. This led me to Trafalgar Square, which I had no idea was right nearby. Then, all without a map, I walked towards Soho through Chinatown, where I knew exactly the right Chinese grocery store to visit, and then on to Tottenham Court Road, where I knew exactly the right bus to catch home. This is a big deal.

Posted on Apr 10.08 to Uncategorized | Comments Off

On London winter
This past winter was basically the first of my life without snow–save for melting remnants during my week in Toronto at Christmas, and a surprise attack of watery flurries that didn’t stay on the ground in St Albans on Easter Monday.

It’s April 1 tomorrow, we started daylight savings time this weekend, and I think it’s safe to say we won’t see another snowflake in London till next winter, if at all. But the lack of snow here doesn’t mean it didn’t feel like winter. In a way, it was worse—many, if not most days since November have been dark, rainy, and bone-chillingly damp, the cold finding a way through even the warmest layers of clothing. I’ve never experienced a type of cold as distressing as London’s damp cold on its worst days this winter. Back home, it may feel like minus 40 in January, but at least sweaters, mittens, and a puffy parka give you a fighting chance. And the sun’s out a lot more.

One day in early December, it was like the fog had somehow frozen onto the sidewalk, creating an extra-slippery, fraction-of-a-milimetre-thick sheet of London ice. It was invisible, and I had to walk all the way down a hill to get to the Tube on my way to work, so the ice was extra deadly. Maybe I wasn’t in the best shoes for the job, but I literally had to cling to walls, fences and telephone polls the whole way down, doing an embarrassing shuffle that was at least three times as slow as my normal pace.

I can’t complain though. Trees had blossoms and lawns had crocuses as early as late January. Spring arrives here much earlier, but again, it’s different. In Toronto, you know it’s spring, finally, when the patios downtown fill up and everyone’s in an amazing mood. On the first day of proper spring last year, I was walking down Front Street, and in the little square by St. Lawrence Market North, random couples were literally waltzing to songs by an accordion-wielding busker. I haven’t seen a single patio on the street outside a London café, restaurant or bar. Many pubs here have “beer gardens” out back—pubs are supposed to be “public houses”, so these are like the backyards. I’m looking forward to visiting those again this spring, but I’ll really miss the atmosphere of dining on a crowded patio right on a busy downtown Toronto street, with sun and overjoyed people everywhere.

Posted on Mar 31.08 to Uncategorized | No Comments »

Nursery rhymes and fairy tales
It’s pretty cool to live in a city where different sights are name-checked in hundreds-of-years-old nursery rhymes. When I was covering that fraud trial for Metal Bulletin and visiting Southwark Crown Court a few times a week, London Bridge was nearby. It’s not the same one from the rhyme, however; it was rebuilt and repaired a few times in the Middle Ages, hence the “falling down,” and rebuilt again in the 1800s, and finally, again in the early 1970s.

(It’s not much to look at now, so it’s understandable that many mistake Tower Bridge for London Bridge–including, supposedly, a rich Texan who bought the similarly unattractive 1800s edition of London Bridge as it was being dismantled in 1968 to make way for the new one. Legend has it he thought he was buying Tower Bridge; either way, the bridge he bought has been reassembled in Arizona.)

I’ve also passed by Drury Lane, home of the Muffin Man. But probably the biggest nursery rhyme moment came the other night; I was walking past Shoreditch Church, of Oranges and Lemons fame, and the melody to the rhyme was pouring out of the bell tower, sped up and really out of time, kinda like an arty East London rendition of the tune.

In other news, I visited Oxford for the day two weeks ago, to practice my music writing by reviewing this band–the first band in a while I’ve been this excited about, and worth the trip. (I’m going to keep practicing the music writing, I think.) Not sure what parts of Oxford, if any, show up in nursery rhymes, but the whole place looks like it belongs in a freaking fairy tale; it was my second trip, but my first time climbing the St. Mary’s church tower for a view of the city, and my first time watching students cavort around in the streets, and now I’m completely, completely smitten, and jealous of the students.

Pictures of glorious Oxford that I’ve been meaning to post, after the jump. Read more…

Posted on Mar 10.08 to Uncategorized | No Comments »

Where I live
London is a city of villages that expanded and joined together over hundreds of years; therefore, it has so many neighbourhoods it’s insane. There are 32 boroughs alone, 33 if you count the not-really-a-borough City of London–the original, pre-expansion London that sits in the centre of a map of the city like a bull’s-eye, only one square mile in size. (And the least historic “historic centre” you’ll ever see–yeah, it’s got St. Paul’s, but also, as the main financial district, more towers than you’ll find anywhere else in the city.)

I live in a neighbourhood called Tufnell Park, “a nice bit of proper North London,” I’m told. The neighbourhood straddles two famous boroughs, Camden and Islington. It’s strange that Tufnell Park is partially in Camden, because Camden, in its hugeness, also contains the likes of Covent Garden in central London. (Camden district council meetings must be interesting.) Islington is also huge; my flat is just past the Islington border, so I technically have a flat in Islington, although it’s nowhere near Islington proper, which would be the neighbourhoods of Highbury and Angel. (Probably the area Douglas Adams meant when he sent Arthur Dent to a party at a flat in Islington in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

In half an hour, or a lot less, I can walk from Tufnell Park to: Kentish Town, Camden Town, Kings Cross, Archway, Holloway, Gospel Oak, Highgate and Hampstead. Read more…

Posted on Feb 22.08 to Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Canal crawl
London can be a stressful city. It’s the sort of place where you can spend months doing little more than commuting to and from work jammed inside an overcrowded Northern Line train, and hiding indoors at work and home from cold misty rain that umbrellas are worthless against.

It’s easy to forget you’re actually living in London, London, when that happens, and I’ve been pretty guilty of this the past few months. But now that my morning commute only involves lugging my laptop down to a makeshift office in the living room, and the sun has been out every day for a week, I’m starting to get reacquainted with the city. And we were reacquainted in a big way on Sunday, when Matt and I visited the Islington stretch of the Regent’s Canal and walked east. Read more…

Posted on Feb 14.08 to Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Airborne toxic event

(Image via lemonontoast)

This afternoon was interrupted by a fire at a bus station in Stratford, East London, that set a cloud of black smoke free to loom ominously over the city and cause panic on Sky News. After assuring us that the “incident” was not “terrorist-related,” the frantic news anchor took phone calls from “eye witnesses,” resulting in some of the worst “disaster” coverage I’ve seen. “There’s a huge cloud of smoke,” one caller described. She said she was about nine miles away from the scene, meaning she was probably less of an eye witness than I was. After a few similar calls and no reports of injuries, the newscasters sheepishly moved on to a murder story and the dramatic “BREAKING NEWS” banners disappeared from the screen.

thelondonpaper also had some impeccable coverage:

“Thelondonpaper.com video reporter Pru Vincent who was driving close to the area at the time said: ‘It smells odd, it smells like plastic.’”

“Eyewitnesses David Buik said: ‘There is a huge plume of smoke hovering over Canary Wharf, nobody knows what it is.’”

“Emma Brompton, a film production worker in Forest Gate, five miles from the blast. Said: ‘It is black in the sky, it almost reminds me of the black smoke that came out of the Twin Towers.’”

I bet the reporters totally just interviewed their friends.

Posted on Nov 13.07 to Uncategorized | No Comments »

You know you’re really living in the UK when…
You get your national insurance number. Mine finally came today, and I can’t believe how long the process took.

It took longer than the bank account, and securing the bank account was a lengthy, horribly annoying ordeal. It’s so difficult to get one here that my flatmate Kate, who’s Australian, tells me she actually resorted to crying in front of the bank representative. I couldn’t even begin applying for one until I had a job, a carefully worded letter proving I had that job, and a proof of address. And even after I was successful, it was weeks before I had a working bank card thanks to the excessive security measures Lloyd’s TSB likes to put its new customers through.

But the national insurance number wins in the red tape department. You can’t make an appointment to get one until you have a job. Then, when they let you make an appointment, the earliest one available will be a month away. Then, a month later, you hand in your forms at the Jobcentre Plus office in Camden on a Tuesday morning, and you think you’re done, only to be told your national insurance number will arrive in the mail in four to six weeks. Only then can your employer start paying you properly. I can finally get on that tomorrow.

At least I won’t have to go through the process again in my lifetime. A UK national insurance number becomes yours for life, even if you leave and come back. Thousands of twentysomethings come here on working holidays and get national insurance numbers, but it’s made me feel more like a proper resident, ever so slightly.

Posted on Nov 13.07 to Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The last ten weeks
You know what a lazy procrastinator I am. Such a lazy procrastinator that I’m setting up my blog about London two months after having arrived here. Two months procrastination means I haven’t written about how chaotic the first few weeks were, and how normal everything’s now become–not a huge loss.

But it also means I didn’t blog about the houseboat warming party on the Thames I attended last month. (The boat was a newly-renovated former Dutch floating hotel, and I woke up on a mattress in the control room on deck the next morning, with a view of Tower Bridge.) I also didn’t get to write about the St Albans Beer Festival, put on by The Campaign for Real Ale, a nonprofit group crusading for the preservation of genuine UK pubs–and the pouring of proper pints. (There, I found out that proper English cider tastes nothing like Strongbow. It’s kinda vinegary.)

I didn’t blog about my first Monday night pub quiz at the Pineapple, the adorable pub down the street that’s exactly how you’d picture an English pub, if the usual English pub had pineapple ornaments hanging everywhere and served Thai food. (My team lost badly, partially due to my lack of knowledge of British history, partially due to the fact that pub quiz-obsessed old men frequent the place.)

I would have loved to blog about the picnic I had on Hampstead Heath, the massive park in the middle of North London that feels more like a nature reserve, with woods and unruly grass, until you stumble upon Parliament Hill, with its view of the entire city. And about my first time in the Lebanese supermarket on Kentish Town Road, which sells more varieties of baklava than I knew could exist. And about how much I loved the tube until the day they shut down the Northern Line on my way to work and I became as frustrated with it as the typical bitter Londoner normally is, which I didn’t think could happen, considering I’m from Toronto.

Anyway, the missing out on blog-worthy moments can end now. I don’t know how often I’ll update, as my new and unexpected career as a lead and zinc reporter at a metal industry magazine can be life-consuming–a couple of weeks ago, metal industry events took me out well past usual working hours. (Surreally, to some of London’s swankiest hotels, where I roamed the corridors in a cocktail dress drinking bottomless glasses of champagne in the company of metal traders from around the world–literally the last thing I expected to be doing here.)

But London keeps proving itself too interesting not to write about, and I intend to start taking advantage, lazy procrastination be damned.

Posted on Oct 31.07 to Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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