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Week 6 on fortylove.tv: “How to Live Slowly”. A gorgeous break from the British winter. Found a Final Cut plug-in to create the old crackly film effect, so this one was a joy to edit.

Check out the full post here and go drool over more jamón.

I’m not sure what it was, but we seemed to enjoy each others’ company enough, and for the most part they were still surrounded by plenty of non pre-pubescent friends. 

Things haven’t changed much. I’ve just hit my mid-twenties (damn that dirty word, ‘mid’) and some of my favourite people to be around are thirty-somethings. There’s just something about this age group. These blessed beings straddle that divide between youth and ‘proper’ adulthood, they’ll still order cocktails with terrible names, and they are not yet at the point in their lives where it is appropriate to start a sentence with “When I was your age…”.

Here’s a couple of other reasons to celebrate thirty-somethings:

They’re jaded, but funny
Because they understand life is not always sunny meadows and rainbows, they’re more practical about things. While those in their thirties have had enough misadventures to last them well into the next age bracket, they mostly laugh it off. These people rarely prescribe best-scenario outcomes, but thirty-somethings are some of the most secretly optimistic people I know.

They’ll never whine about pimples
Annoying, habitual drama is unbecoming in your third decade of living, so they know how to tone it down. In our tweeny, twenty-something stages it is still necessary to complain about bad hair and crappy jobs and shite boyfriends and paying too much rent for a tiny room in the city. In your thirties you just get off your ass and get on with things.  

They’re less likely to say ‘I told you so’
Fresh from the scars of a foolish youth, thirty-somethings are still familiar with the social, financial, and personal faux-pax that plague the earlier years. They possess a unique wisdom that is characterised neither by the naivety of those in their twenties nor by the stoic arrogance of world-weary adults. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they’re not Jesus — they still mess up, and will laugh in your face when you trip. But they’ll probably help you right back up.

They’ll pay for drinks 
The injustice that is the underpaid, overworked years of our twenties: they’ve all been there. If there’s a single reason to be around older people, this one is it.
 

To one of my favourite thirty-somethings in the world: Happy Birthday, Julia Gulia. Let 2009 be fabulous.

I have to tell you something because this will never make it to the papers, although it is a good story.

My gorgeous darling of a friend Lieselot manages a bar in Brussels. Ealier tonight a rather famous British band called Oasis walked in and tried to order a Guinness. She told them off for asking for an Irish bevvie while they were in a Belgian establishment serving more than 50 different types of beer. Taken aback by her common sense, they acquiesced and proceeded to consume the first of many, many Belgian beers that night.

At some point during the night, Liam Gallagher walked over to her and asked her if she was married. “No”, came the reply, and he suddenly planted a big, sloppy one on her. “Are you crazy?!” she pushed him back, half astonished, half put off by the thick British bloke who wouldn’t take off his sunnies the entire time he was there.

“Just another drunk foreigner”, she thought to herself. One of the guys ran over, pulled him back, and politely apologised for his friend’s behaviour.

Liam and his posse ordered many drinks that night, calling her over to bring them another round each time. “You’ll have to wait, I’m serving the other table first”, she told them on occasion. When the bar began to empty out, the guys invited her to have a few drinks with them. She did, and found out that they were an okay bunch. So she stayed for a few more drinks and chatted some more.

“Can we play a song?” one of them asked, pointing at the stage where live bands usually play every night.

“Well…. I don’t know, I’ll check”, she replied, not sure if these blokes were going to be any good. Plus, was there any company policy about not letting drunk customers play music at the bar?

But the bar was quiet tonight, and there were only three tables left. One of the musicians on stage scanned the empty premises, and probably thought it would be a good time for a break. He told Lieselot those drunk British guys could come up to play if they wanted to.

So they did, and on the second song she thought to herself, ‘Hey, these guys are pretty good. In fact, their songs sound really familiar. Really, really familiar’.

The other bartenders thought they’d heard these tunes somewhere before. “These guys are famous”, one of them pipped. “I just don’t know who they are, but they’re quite big I think”. Unable to place them, the Belgians shrugged it off, and went back to drying glasses, wiping off the bar top and generally doing other bar-like things. Their customers continued with their late night chatter, enjoying the good voices and the decent riffs coming from the stage.

When they were done, Lieselot went over to their table.

“Hey, you guys are pretty good. Are you musicians?”

“Yeah, we’re a band actually. Oasis.”

“OH.”

And she had a few more drinks with them, and chatted some more. It was getting late, so they stood up, left her a generous tip and put on their jackets to leave.

“Are you in town for much longer?” she asked, as they were heading out.

“No, we’re heading to Stockholm tomorrow.”

So they said their goodbyes and left. Lieselot closed up the bar, headed home and had a shower. Then she googled “Oasis”.

“Oh, so that’s why they sounded so familiar. And hey, that guy who tried to kiss me, he’s the lead singer of the band!”

Dear blog, that’s what I had to tell you. Lies and I think it’s a good story, one to tell her grandkids many years from now, when she no longer has any real teeth and when they have no clue a band called Oasis ever existed, and when people no longer go to gigs because hologram bands now play live music in their living rooms.

“Really?”

Right there and then, I knew this brazillian wax was going to be different from any I’d had before. For starters, her name was Charlie and she stood right there while I took off my jeans. No discreet look-away move, no “I’ll be back in three minutes (while you strip and purposefully subject yourself to this torture)”.

“Alright then, up you go, lie right here. How are you?”

“I’m alright, thanks. Just got off work, thought I’d pop by. You sure you don’t need me to take my knickers off?”

“Aw yeah, it’s fine.”

“Wow, I mean, I’m just used to-”

*nggrap!*

“MOTHERFU-”

*nnggrrraaaaaap*

“Ooh darling, ye alright?”

“You get right to it, don’t you. Haha! I was just a bit surprised there!”

*nnnggggrrrraaaaaaaaaaap*

“Aw yeah, there’s no other way to do it!”

“MM-HMM. Wax is a bit hotter than I’m used to”

And then in four minutes flat, my poon was looking like a million bucks. The rest of our conversation is unimportant, and in any case was lost in that space between my silent screams and the shockingly fluorescent lights a few feet from my head. The only other thing I recall was the bit where she asked me if I wanted to leave a triangle, and I said yes please (because this is England and you mind your P’s and Q’s even when it comes to shaping your pubes).

Now you might not be familiar with brazilian waxes, or waxes in general. But where I come from the fancy salons boast about strip-offs that can be done in FIFTEEN minutes. They put you in nice rooms where the lights are dimmed and a Best of Bebel Gilberto CD streams from hidden speakers. They treat your poon like it’s another human being: “Wax temperature okay? This size alright? The other side now, yes?”. Short of reading it sonnets, my KL waxers have nothing but love for le poon.

But here in East London? Charlie will do it with your kickers on. In record time. I’m never doing high street beauty again if all it takes is a 20-minute Tube ride to the other side of town and 17 quid for this.

When paying up, I told her how genuinely impressed I was at the speed of my wax. She giggled, said thank you very much and told me that she’d be happy to see me in a month.

On my way out, I turned to Charlie and waved. I wanted to curtsey, too, but my poon hurt too much.

The magic store, should you ever find yourself in need of an express brazillian:

171 Hair & Beauty
171 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1RG
tel: +44 (0)20 7354 2266/3733

Perhaps The Sunday Times’ Andrew Sullivan put it best in his closing paragraph of his feature on the potential of the world’s most powerful country:

We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election. This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely mixed-race figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation re-imagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least.

It’s 3AM now. I’m staying up to see if the world is about to change.

Overheard at the smoking shed:

Middle-aged blonde #1: Oh bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger.
Middle-aged blonde #2: What?
Middle-aged blonde #1: I just sent off an important letter, marked it CONFIDENTIAL and left out the recipient’s name.
Middle-aged blonde #2: Ha, ha! Not very confidential is it?
Middle-aged blonde #1: Silly cow.

*both giggle and take another drag from their cigarettes*

Dear London, I love you back.

One week into my new place, and several epiphanies about going solo. Each time I’ve lived away from home, I’d always lived with other people. We shared everything: bedrooms, bathrooms, toothpaste, toothbrushes, stolen internet connections, food, dinner duties, the blame for mysteriously clogged toilet bowls.

For everyone who’s ever had housemates, you know it’s joy and misery in (un)equal parts.

Things are a bit different this time round. Comfortably funded expat-type arrangements have landed me a one-bedroom flat in a big city. Living by myself has revealed a whole new type of existence; sometimes liberating, but not always perfect. I’ve discovered – through seven days of careful observation – the pros and cons of living alone:

Pros

• peace and quiet when you need it
• uncontested tastes in TV and music
• the underrated pleasure of a bathroom all to yourself (have you lived with three girls before? have you brushed your teeth while someone sat next to you on the toilet, and another took a shower two feet behind you?)
• near-absolute autonomy over choice and existence of company
• the unbridled freedom to fart, burp, and generally display God’s gifts for bodily emissions

Cons

• cooking for yourself most days, with glaringly absent dinnertime conversations
• the unavailability of in-house wake up calls (and added service such as flatmates jumping on your bed and pulling you from under the sheets by your ankles)
• cleaning duties are yours, allllllll yours
• no one to sit in pajamas and drink beers with at the end of a long day
• no one to compliment, contest, or complain about your farts and burps

I guess the jury is still out on this one.

But living here is a different bag of tricks.

Refusing to stay at a hotel through all of autumn and winter means that I’ve taken the smartass route down real estate hell. I decided to get a place of my own. Which has meant talking to 20 different agents, trawling through websites that look like someone shat HTML and yellow serif fonts all over them, and most harrowing of all: de-jargonising real estate talk.

For the benefit of all those who come after me, I present thee my two-minute guide to understanding property in central London:

Excellent views
This is London, not the hills of Nepal. If excellent views are a side note, then fine. But if they are a selling point then you should have your doubts. I drew the curtains of a fancy studio in a fancy serviced apartment building to get a breathtaking view of the construction outside. Plus, isn’t it a strange concept to begin with? Saying ‘excellent view’ is like saying ‘sweet candy’.

Within walking distance of _______ Underground Station
Sure. The same way Beijing is within walking distance of Calcutta. I mean, this walking business is all relative innit? My advice: Googlemap the damn thing, and you might feel that 37 minutes is a bit of a trek to get to public transportation.

Quiet, private settings in the heart of the city
Harley Street: posh neighbourhood and playground for the city’s most famous surgeons. I’d been quoted a ridiculously sane amount for a flat with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. What they forgot to mention though, was that I had the basement unit and the only scenery I’d have was the five-inch slither at the top of my window that offered a great view of the pavement.

Newly-refurbished Victorian building
This could mean a renovated property, restored interiors, new fittings. But it could also mean that they gave the walls a new coat of paint and replaced the rotting carpets. And that pesky old lift? No one’s gotten stuck in it lately!

Fully-anything / fashionable
Ah. The mother(s) of all real estate terminology. Furnishing and equipment, as with distance, are relative. Sometimes a microwave and some cutlery constitute a fully-equipped kitchen. Which wouldn’t be completely untrue – you do need a fork to stab holes in those microwave dinners before you heat them up. Fashionable could be Mayfair, but it could also mean Bayswater or Shoreditch. All a matter of opinion.

All that bitched and done, I did find a place I’ll probably move into by next week. It’s a newly-refurbished building in the West End with great views, just a stone’s throw from the nearest Tube station. I also get cutlery.