Down On The Upside

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Things are looking up. After dragging my arse around agencies and meetings with contacts, getting a haircut and dry cleaning my suits, I've managed to secure some work of decent pay and in central London.

I'm excited. But today I'm also depressed.

I just got home from a fairly uneventful night at a friend's mum's jewellery flogging night at her house, but I wasn't in the sparkliest of moods and probably came across quite rude. To top it off, it was rammed with middle class middle aged ladies pretending not to be locked into sham marriages for cash and pony clubs, and not many things grate on my already raw soul more than these sorts of Royal Berkshire-isms. But that's not the reason for my mood. I have to come clean and just say it out loud: I miss my boyfriend. Y'know, the one who I talked into staying in South America to finish his trip so that he would not regret cutting it short for me. It clouds everything.

That said, I am probably going to be back in London Town working and living by next Monday, oddly a month to the day that I flew home from my trip. I'm fortunate to have secured all the work through contacts and friends (those agency bastards are always useless). I have a cover story to write for my friend Katie, who is a commissioning editor now, a small vox pops piece for Marc who took my old job at Camden, and a month or more helping to create a marketing plan for some billionaire dude who has bought a cluster of deserted islands in the Carribbean and wants to sell off plots to other minted types, through a work contact who has become a friend. All I need is a place to stay and I'm also lucky there in that I have had several offers from some of my loveliest friends of spare rooms for a week or so here and there, but I'm really hoping that my friend Bex, who has so kindly put me up twice now at three night stretches, will allow me to stay at hers for most or all of the month. I do like staying with her and Paul and Arianne, their 8 month old daughter, I feel relaxed and happy in their presence, and I love being with little Ari. We'll see what they say. It would be a big thing, I think, to let me stay that long, being a young family both working and not having much time for anything else.

This work will help me pay off a couple of loan installments and buy some christmas gifts, and sustain me while I look for more freelance and permanent jobs. So it is really a blessing though I'm having confidence issues with my writing skills, having been away for so long. It always takes time when you start an article, to understand the issues, what questions need asking, to find people to interview, to explain yourself to them, to get the interviews, to transcribe, to then sit down in front of a blank Word page and think about what to write. It's frustrating starting out knowing youre on deadline and wanting to prove that you can still do it. The project work for a month is in Regent Street, four days a week and flexible hours, so I think that will be good.

It will be a relief to get out of the family house too. As I said before I do love my family. But I can't spend this much time in the same house with them. It makes me so lazy and I lose all the fire in my belly to get on. Soon as I have my own space again, even if it's just someone's spare room for a few nights, I can click back into place and do what I need to do. I have a bed for a few days while my dad is on business abroad. I sleep well when I sleep, but I find in this house, I am wide awake until 2 or 3 am and then I need to sleep really late. While I've always needed loads of sleep, it's not like me to not be able to sleep until so late. It fucks the day up losing the first half to loafery. Now I have stuff to do I want to get it done. But I am so tired.

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