Friends: They're Great

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I'm writing this week's blog from the comforts of Becki and Paul's living room, plonked upon a warm leather couch, laptop perched on lap, glass of white to my left, mobile phone next to it, telly to my right. My belly is happy having been fed a thai noodle creation that Bex cooked, and I will retire after this to a very comfy double bed in my own room. In the morning I will get up and have a hot shower, chuck on my Zara suit and H&M shoes, plug myself into my iPod, get on the tube with my Oyster card, go to work in my very nice temping job with very nice bosses and colleagues, and come home to Bex' house nine hours later to babysit Ari and finish my freelance work in the same comforts as I am enjoying tonight.

Probably bores the pants off you, but this itinerary is pretty fucking spot on cool for me. For one, I'm working, two, I'm back in London, three I have a great place to stay, four I feel like I'm slowly integrating back into my life. I have some normality - some regularity, though I've never been a fan of having too much set in stone in my life, but this is a good level for me. And I have to say that a large amount of this settled-ness is due to the amazing friends I'm lucky to have. Bex and Paul have agreed to put me up in their spare room for three weeks, while Sonia and Rosie put me up in their living room last week - not only that but both sets of friends fed and watered me, and are endless entertainment and more importantly, support while I'm sorting myself out. I need them so much. I knew when I decided to do my trip that I'd come home to a situation where I'd have no money, no job, nowhere to live (I knew I could stay with my folks but they dont have a spare room and they are too far from the journalism jobs in central London for that to be a lasting solution - plus after neartly a decade of independence I find it hard to go backwards and weird to be out of my circle of friends and my life in London) and in order to get back on my feet, to start paying my loan off, would be a lot of work, and that he only way I could do it was with the help my my family and my friends. Now famly are sort of obliged to help really, but my friends don't have to lift a finger, not least because I brought this on myself by deciding to opt out of real life for a year. But I'm even luckier than I realised (as I've written this blog, the idea of luck as a concept has gone from non-existent to vital ini my life...) to have a small cirlce of close friends who not only make me feel comfortable asking them big favours, like putting me up for three weeks, but who want to help and make it so much easier to get established again. They're really astounding peeps and I will have some serious carbon offestting to do when I finally have some cash and a place to invite to them for free dinners. For now, as I don't get paid for at least another three weeks, all I can offer in return is free babysitting to Bex (which isn;t really a return favour as I'm in love with baby Ari and don't mind spending time with her) - as for my favourite Twins, I can't give them anything except my usual levels of love, which remain high for the pair of them. I've already started back on my fear that they'll go home to Australia, it's playing on my mind regularly and I'm thinking I'll move countries when they do, so that instead of realisinig what a massive gaping black chasm they've left in my life by going home, I'll be too busy starting a new life somewhere far away to notice the acute heartbreak and lack of dancing partners. I have dreams of holding adinner party for the lot of them, in my as-yet-non-existent flat in zone 1, with all their favouorite foods and a lot of wine.

And so it goes: my life continues in its theme of grand plans and currently unattainable dreams. This week contained two notable steps towards by journalism/publishing dreams. Somehow, I scored a job interview for a companies writer job with Investor's Chronicle, one of the oldest and most respected financial magazines on the planet, published by the Financial Times Group and based at One Souothwark Bridge, the famous FT building I'vbe spent several years dreaming about entering for the purposes of employment of attainment thereof. It was all very last minute so I didn't have too much time to prepare as I usually would, especially since I'm working four days a week on my consulting gig and I'm spending the other three days putting freelance bits together, and at some point I like to go out with my mates to enjoy being back in town, eat, have a shower or even sleep. Anyway, being a massive opportunity for me I was nervous beforehand, suited up to the nines, but I think I cocked it up. To be fair, it's essentially a stock reccommendations job wrapped into a writing job, and though I've been a financial journalist for knocking on eight years now, I've never really done that (in fact I've never really though it's a journalist's job to be telling people what's good to buy or sell - what do I know? ask your broker or analyst), and having been away for almost a year - one of the purposes of my trip being to seperate my self of confidence and my mind from my work for a bit and try to enjoy things outside without that in the way - I had only intermittently read the FT, the Economist or anything else containing any business or finance news, so my knowledge of current events is almost zero. I coouldnt answer any of the questions fired at me, or at least answer them in any meaningful way with any real confidence. The first questions was: "What is your take on the UK market?" - a question so (deliberately?) generic and wide open that the possibilities for a response (it's not Bolivia? it's fucking cold? The Spice Girls have re-formed?) sormed a sort of cumulo-nimbus cloud across my mind and I forgot any knowledge I miight have been able to proffer. I had to admit that I wasn't able to give a meaningful answer since I'd only been back in the country a month. Then the question was broadened to a global view. Shit. Luckily, I had taken a geniune interest in the fact that the Brazilian Stock Exchange (I can feel I' am losing your interest... go on, go to sleep) had floated its shares this week to a roaring response from the markets, so I threw this in as my stock pick. That held them off for a few seconds but they were quickly back with more intense questions that I had to simlpy admit I didn't know the answers to, either because I had been out of the game for a year or because my previous jobs never required that kind of knowlegde. I felt that thet whole thing was a failure and I must have looked like a right prick sat there with a decent looking CV but no big chat to back it up with. But they did ask keep me talking for 40 minutes and gave me a writing assignment to hand in next week, so I have a final chance to redeem myself. Perhaps it's noot the job for me though. We'll see. In any case, the guy who would be my boss clearly knew his cheese and I thought it must be great to work for such a man.
The second big event in this vein that's gone on this week is that a contact of mine in the financial world has asked me if I'm interestd in founding a publishing venture with him - not as an investor, but as a publisher. He was deadly serious and he is also in a position to actually do it. I didn't quite know how to react to his proposition as it came on the heels of an innocuous request from my for a heds up on the guy who interviewed me today at the FT (he knws the guy from the work rounds) - and was met with, "why don't you just work for us instead? you could set up our publishing arm. I'm serious". So he, I am his business partner meet to talk about it next week. That's all I want to say right now - but it immediately set me off on a dream tangent of what I'd do with my huge commerical and finiancial success from this project, and it seems that the chief idea I place above all others is to create a fouondation with which I can fund some very close-to-my-heart projects in Bolivia, led from there by Jorge, the guy who runs the civic committee of Puerto Villarroel but who was mysteriously sacked by TAPA and replaced by some European hippy grad who promptly quit a month into the job. Anyway, those are clearly lofty aims for an otherwise unemployed, homeless, penniless financial journalist. But even this oportunity comes from friends in business. I dunno how I'm going to pay off my karmic debt with all of this - let alone my carbon footprint.

x

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