Exit Strategies

“There’s nothing more permanent then the temporary” (Greek said). But at least this time it was wrong: it took something like 20 days to found a place, but I eventually did. Mankind can be perverse when has to deal with the chance to gain money by any means, as you can desume by Mr Captain of the Rant‘s poem Trust In Stan – an ode to Estate Agents:

Hi there
I’m Stan from Stan, Stan and Stan Estates
How are you?
Good good, I’m glad
Glorious day, glorious day
Except for the massive storm obviously
Look at my hair!
It’s a kind of gel
It’s all crinkly and messed up
It’s supposed to look casual
But I spend five hours every morning
Making it look just right
Teeth shining like a shark’s
Look at my tie!
Pure penguin skin, I’m assured
Spanking suit and sparkling shoes from Topman
Yes, this is a great area, great area
That wasn’t a gunshot you heard it was a dog bang-barking

Concentrate on my voice
My confident, fast-talking, I-know-my-business voice
I love my job, you’re my new best friend
I am a human being
And I’m certainly not doing this for the money

Anyway, this is the building
Crumbling to death?
No, no no
It’s beautiful and archaic, isn’t it?
Yes, of course it is.
Don’t look at the front garden
Ignore the dead cats and used needles

Concentrate on my face
Look at my face
Look at my face

Let’s go in
This is the hallway
No time to look at it properly
What’s that?
Smells like a three week-old corpse that’s been drowned in its own piss?
Oh, I love your sense of humour
Let’s go upstairs
No wheelchair access
But then again
It’s their fault for pricing themselves out of the market
By getting all crippled up

Ignore what I say
Just concentrate on the tone
Look at my face
Look at my face

Right now, this is the flat
It’s very comfortable and compact
This room is a bedroom slash kitchen slash bathroom
That’s not mould, it’s just got a very lived in look
Don’t look at the mould!

Look at my face
Look at my face

There’s no toilet as yet
But there is a very deep sink in the kitchen
And you look like the kind of practical person who will make do
do you like animals?
Great, great
Then you won’t mind the incredibly cute
Special breed of rat-looking mice we installed just for you

Oh look, there’s ones now!

Look at my face
Look at my face

What was that?
Oh it’s only nine hundred pounds a month
Very cheap for this area
And think about it this way:
That’s only a pound for every arrest a week in this borough
And doesn’t it make you feel safe?

Look at my face
Look at my face

So that’s two months rent deposit
And one month rent in advance
And the cough contract handling fee cough
Is a hundred pounds
Those contracts are very heavy
Agreed?
Fantastic.
Sign here.
Brilliant.
Pleasure doing business with you.
Are you getting the bus home?
Well, good luck, I’ll probably pass you in my Merc
Which you’ve helped pay for.

Have a great day.

Immigrant among immigrants, as living now in a flat managed by a nice Turkish guy whose manners are much better then any Londoner landlord I met so far. What I hadn’t for all these days made me think a lot about how important is what we usually take for granted: a warm place where to feel safe. And I’m feeling like a bird building her den, now, but by collecting pieces from bump hunting (as long as I don’t figurate myself as a desperate poor immigrant, but look at this research with curiosity and sense of adventure, is fine). I can perfectly understand Virginia Woolf’s A room of One’s Own, and in my imagination – and in concrete facts – I’m playing as a kid having a coloring book.

And then, again those graffiti, again those desperate, witty, sarcastic and high quality stencils. You get them everywhere in London’s markets. But it can’t be an institutional supported art this one – that shows two male policemen passionately kissing, or a member of the royal guards pissing on a wall whilst hoping nobody to see him, can it? I keep on wondering about its possible being an amazing market campaign, or some sort of “underground production”… I buy three posters (1 pound each in a 1-pound-each-product Middle Eastern shop), and once home I do some researches on the net: their author is a guy called Banksy.

Banksy is likely to live in Hackney, this Londoner borough I like so much and where I’m living at the moment. His works are – black&white, pure, essential but sharp – stencils with either the human subject, or monkeys, or rats. The issues he works about concern freedom, surveillance, responsibility, loneliness, death, violence, war, peace and hope in the contemporary society, and show a sharp mind, a quick deep thought and a rare ability in synthesis of words in messages (and messages in words).

Surprisingly, in reading about his work, you get his quotation “Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place”. Well, I’m not pretty sure about the first, but for the latest you are quite wrong, my dear: in fact, as we can inscribe you in this category, with your art you make people think, and this already means promoting the change of the world (although we can never control the direction – or better the end spot – of the changes we promote) and not only his looking better.

So don’t think about skipping your merits nor you faults: in a word, your “responsibilities”. A pic of your graffiti with the guy holding the sign that says “Keep your coins. I WANT CHANGE” is in front of me now. I stare at it, and look for strategies to make this happen, in a big personal blast, with both my usual critical consciousness towards the society, and the lightness of your cute, tender girl making soap bubbles.

Searching for a flat in London is an experience I don’t wish upon my worst enemy. It exposes you to the weirdest humanity you can imagine meeting. It seems that all the borderlines of the world have gathered here with all their financial resources, and bought flats to rent out in an act of affirmation of their identity. Renting a flat or letting a flat is a matter of status, in fact. And newbies on both sides know and accept this. All except the last, who could care less about this rubbish: me.
I’m not a Muslim woman willing to sharing a flat while waiting for the right one to whom to devote myself. I’m not the lesbian frightened by men to the point of not allowing – just in case – even my father to come, visit and sleep near me. Not to mention all the 20-something idiot girls I met who told me: “Sorry, but you seem to be too old to get on well with us” (in this last case I’m only upset I will not see you in the next 15 years, darling, when your life will be fucked up by an inconsiderate man and a couple of useless kids and you will wonder why you were so stupid to party every night instead of studying and building your means of survival).

But most of all I’m not the eco-vegan-animalist willing to recycle every tiny little thing I use to show how much I care about this planet: nice one, but on the contrary I think the best demonstration of my care for it would be to spread (and join) the proposal for a mass suicide of mankind as the friendliest act to let the earth regenerate by itself, and – hopefully – in less than one hundred years to forget the existence of human beings on its surface. But eco-vegan-animalists would never care enough for the cause to be the first ones to do it (at this point, dear reader, I want to enlighten you to the fact that – in case you are of such bad faith as to accuse me of instigation to suicide – I am not supporting this perspective in any way: mine is only a reasonable observation).
So I’m looking for a simple, clean, unpretentious place. Given all this background, my search is quite hard.

I keep on looking on the internet at Gossip, a lovely café in Broadway Market. Yes, it’s fancy and elitist – in this renewed area which ten years ago was considered such a slum that people willing to open a business couldn’t get bank loans, and those working in the area had to come by taxi because they were afraid to use public buses. But now it’s a “stylish” area, where young people come on Saturday mornings to buy expensive organic food in the market and wander around all day showing themselves off. All dressed in the same, classical English style: tweeds, tartans, lots of wool pullovers, jackets, coats and scarves. All pale, with sad, depressed eyes giving the impression they are always about to faint. And all with the same haircut, the one that made me hate the Beatles from the very first moment I saw them.

The Gossip has wi-fi, a great selections of teas and two young people as staff who are supportive and let me stay there the whole day to search in exchange for the few teas I drink while almost “squatting” a table and a chair. I will never be able to thank the people here enough for their kindness and hospitality (in spite of the desperate room search).

Today I found another place whose destiny is to become “my place”: the British Library. A huge, modern building and a paradise for book lovers. Here, you don’t even understand how they check you, but they do, deeply. You can plug in your laptop anywhere and leave it (apparently) unguarded. You have a free wi-fi connection (but no chance to do any political activity through it) and gluten-free chocolate cakes (the only way I can survive, as all the other food costs too much for someone with celiac disease).

I took off my shoes, since my left foot hurt, and realised after a while that I was walking around the library barefoot. “Whatever”. I sat on the floor and checked my email. My status on Facebook today says: “Cristina is still homeless but searching for a room at the free wi-fi hotspot in the British Library”. My punk attitude always comes out, aligned to my new conception of myself as somehow a snobbish newbie Londoner.
And, as I’m a part of it, my dear new co-citizens, can’t you let me sleep inside here for free? I feel safe here, among lively books you consider unanimated. “Adopt a book” – an advertisement inside says. Yeah, I’d rather pay for a book than for a room at this point. Would any of the books among the social sciences sector adopt me as well? I would feel “home” surrounded by them – and sleep quite cool and safe on the floor, imagining all the wonderful, surprising, unique and adventurous lives and stories they contain, and which my life will not be long enough to read.