It’s been almost three years since I moved to London and except from the fact that I find it incredibly difficult to make friends here (and I say friends, not beer buddies) or find a boyfriend, there’s one other thing that bothers me. So hear me out and don’t mind the moaning. We’re all allowed to do it from time to time.
I know there’s something wrong with every country and every person on this planet. We have our good parts and our bad ones (blah blah) Us, Eastern Europeans might be- at least in the eyes of the civilsed others- the invaders who steal movies and music from the Internet and try to cheat their way out of everything. I cannot say we don’t. I’ve even noticed this here at university when my fellow British colleagues were doing exactly as the teacher said while I was thinking what the teacher said was stupid and did things my way. So in this respect, Brits are more civilised than us and probably abide the law more than we do. But is this all there is to being civilised? Allow me to disagree.
You know how most people say Eastern European women are beautiful? Well, I don’t think they are necessarily beautiful- at least not to my taste because I prefer the French-, but what makes people say this is the fact the we are very well groomed indeed. No chipped nails, no hairy upper lips, no hairy legs or underarms, we spend lots of time trying to make our tresses look as shiny as possible, we wear make-up and we never forget to remove it (not while we’re on the tube, though) Even the tasteless Eastern European countryside girls look better than the average British girl. And that’s because when it comes to our personal hygiene and our tidy houses, we just do it better.
I remember moving into my new flat in London and being confronted with the fact that the previous tenant had never open the windows. And they don’t, much. Not when they wake up in the morning, not when cooking. To me, coming home to a flat that smells of curry and not opening the windows when frying onions is just disgusting. Why would I want my hair, clothes and entire house to smell like a cheap Thai restaurant? And after I’ve fried my onions and Sainsbury’s sausages, why wouldn’t I clean the stove covered in grease? I think I might have the answer to this one: Brits have more important things to do-like watching telly- to be preoccupied with such insignifiant details. But I guess this explains why so often when I go to work in the morning people on the tube stink. They’ve had curry the night before. Home-made. I have to admit, however, that I’ve met Brits whose flats were clean (not to my standards clean, no, but decent). They all had cleaning ladies. And while I don’t expect people to clean their houses weekly ( as I do), or spend 3 hours minmum to hoover, dust, scrub the bathroom and the kitchen (as I do), I really think they could make the effort to get a cleaning lady or at least spend some family time other than in front of the telly. This way they could burn out the calories from those crisps as well.
Having made my point, I am now going to have a good night sleep in my clean, lavender smelling bed.
Tah-tah
Last Tuesday my Iphone was stolen. While I was shopping. See, this is why I prefer Asos.com to Oxford Street or Westfield. Having something stolen from you is shocking and painful so I won’t get into much detail about the agony I’ve been through for the past few days trying to get my insurance company replace my Iphone. On Monday I will find out whether my claim was successful or not and all I can say is: pray for me.
It came as a surprise that my first concern when I realized I didn’t have my Iphone anymore wasn’t about not being able to communicate with people. It was about all the notes and ideas I kept in my Iphone and about the apps that make my life nicer. Which brings me to the conclusion that an Iphone is not a phone, really. It’s an amazing gadget and a life companion. You would now say that I’m really sad and maybe I should get a dog. But guess what: a dog can’t do for you the things and Iphone can. And the third thing I miss is taking photos. So in this respect having my Iphone stolen was a good thing because now I really know that I should get myself a professional camera.
But brace yourselves for the worst part of the story comes now: until I get a new Iphone I’ve had to go back to my old Blackberry. This was pretty much like going from a Mac to a PC and I must say that besides the difference in technology and all that, is the terrible design that most annoys me about using a Blackberry. However, looking through what was stocked in my old Blackberry was quite an interesting experience because I found old photos of me and friends but also photos of people that shouldn’t be there anymore. I found messages and chats that made me laugh and think about those people and so I got to thinking of how much our lives change and how me meet so many people but we stay in touch with so few. While scrolling through some of those I thought that we do have a tendency to abandon things that might even be dear to us in order to replace them with newer, upgraded versions and this is true for people also. It’s not a nice thought, but this is how we work. I am obviously not talking about best friends, family or very close ones.
And as the story doesn’t end here, on Friday evening I’ve accidentally left my Blackberry charger in the office. So with a dead phone for the rest of the weekend, I’ve actually found time to work out on Saturday morning, catch up on my reading and write this blog post. But then again, I have to admit a dead Blackberry is not nearly as tragic as a dead Iphone.
I remember going through a Robbie Williams phase when I used to listen to one particular song too much. The song was called Supreme and there’s a point when he says “all the best women are married, all the handsome men are gay” and something like “all the lonely hearts in London caught a plane and flew away”. And I should have listened to the man more carefully because after almost 3 years in London, I can now tell that I’m in no man’s island.
I just came home from a night out with a friend and this might be the champagne talking but believe me, there’s some truth to what I’m about to say. Most of the cute guys in London are gay. And if they’re not gay, they act gay. Or they’re confused. I had to come all the way to London to find out that there is a special type of guys out there: the confused ones. These guys are usually my age and although I can- to a certain extent- understand while they’re so confused, that doesn’t make it less frustrating for me- a straight, (nice) single girl. Then there’s this thing people in London do. Or better said, don’t do. I rarely see people flirting in here. If you are on the tube and there’s a nice guy sitting in front of you, he won’t look at you. He won’t smile or even make eye contact. He’ll just read his Evening Standard, play Angry Birds on his iPhone or just stare at the ceiling. Those cute, funny, sexy moments that you see happening on the street in movies, are well, just happening in movies. And how could they happen in real life when everyone’s always in a rush? Always running, always busy, always working.
I’m not even sure it’s the English people. Yes, they are cold, kind of stiff and repressed, but London is full of people coming from all places and that doesn’t seem to help. Truth be told, all the English couples I’ve met made me really sad. I almost never saw them holding hands, kissing or being affectionate to each other. It seems like relationships are some sort of bussinnes deals: let’s be a couple because it’s cheaper to get a house and pay the mortgage together. I remember wandering the streets last summer and seeing this two Italian tourists cycling around and fighting. They were shouting at each other and I found myself smiling at them because I was happy to see some life, some passion. Do English people ever shout?
One other thing that scares me is all those stories I’ve heard about how people date in here. How they date more people at the same time and then have “the talk” and decide if they want to be in a relationship or not. Most of the times my reaction was “are you kidding me?”. In the world I come from, things are a little simpler: you either have fun with anyone and everyone, or you’re looking for a relationship so when you meet someone, like him, fall in love with him and all that, you give it a try and see if that works. If things don’t work out, you move on to the next guy and that’s it, really.
The last and probably the most scary thing is this whole online dating phenomenon. Whenever I’m on the tube, I see all these ads for online dating websites. And there are lots of them. I know Brits and capitalism go a long way back but maybe this society is just too spoiled and lazy. No wonder guys here don’t even flirt when they know there’ll always be a dating website to subscribe to. “Mr Right could be beneath this ad”. Yeah, right.
And since I know I will never give online dating a chance and I also know that frankly, it’s not me, what’s left then? I mean, is that all there is? Maybe I should just pack my bags and move to France. As Colin from Love Actually says, “I am Colin, god of sex, I’m just on the wrong continent, that’s all.” I hear you, mate.
“After we’ve left for the States, I saw him just twice more in m very long life, but I watched him from a distance as he became, very quickly, the most important writer of his generation and also a kind of hero of his own making. I saw him on the cover of Life Magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and others feats- the world- class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size. The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time- but under this, I knew he was still lost. That he slept with the light on or couldn’t sleep at all, that he feared death so much he sought it out wherever and however he could. He was such an enigma, really- fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn’t one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.”
The lines above are an excerpt from The Paris Wife, a wonderful book I’ve just finished. The story of Ernest Hemingway’s wife and their beautiful life together. I say beautiful although there is so much sadness in it too because that’s what life itself looks like. Along with enjoying a glimpse of Paris in the 1920s and of all the art and great literature that was in the making, the book took me on a journey somewhere far away from where I live now. It took me to a time when people could live better than they do today with less money, when poverty was still awful but sacrificing confort for creating something so absurd and useless as art was regarded differently. A time when people enjoyed each other’s company more because there were no other means of communication and no other things to do anyway. There was drinking and partying, working, dancing the charleston and loving. Gabrielle Chanel once said that there is time for work and time for love and that leaves no other time. I still believe she was right.
What I loved most about the book though is that it tells the story of a woman who fell in love with a man. That man happened to be Ernest Hemingway and she chose to do nothing but love him, support him and be always his friend. She never had a career of her own or a life of her own for that matter. And there were women then too who had dreams of their own, who dreamt of creating something bigger than a family or a child and who pursued those dreams. Women who worked for Chanel or Vogue, women who wrote or painted and who never married. Hadley Richardson wasn’t one of them. She didin’t do anything remarkable but without her support Ernest wouldn’t have given the world many of his great books. Most of the young women my age would laugh at such a story and those many feminists out there would give Hadley as an example of how not to be a modern woman. But what is a modern woman anyway? Isn’t she the making of today’s society in the same way women who couldn’t dream of being anything more than wives were the making of the society back then?
Hadley endured all the suffering and the pain Ernest caused her because he also brought the best in her. And she brought the best in him as well. By caring for him she became stronger and one day found the strenght to actually put an end to it. Ernest on the other hand took the force Hadley gave him in order to fight his demons and write even when he was lost. They’ve loved each other even after their marriage had fallen apart and although he had 4 wives, she stayed his true friend until the end. Of course she tried to make the man her own and she never managed because as she beautifully says at some point in the book, “we can only belong to someone or something as long as we believe.” But in the end, love is something that cannot even be ruined by betrayal or cheating. Love is no longer there only when it vanishes by itself. After all, when someone changes our life is not all simple, easy and always happy.
I have never judged, disregarded or mocked women who gave everything that was good in them for their families and their husbands not leaving time for any other work. I believe it requires just as much courage as starting a business, having a career or doing anything that you really want to do. Many would say that women probably didn’t want to do that before but they had not choice. Maybe this is also true for young women today who are desperate to have a career rather than a baby because it just doesn’t fit with today’s society and trends. And one more reason why I admire a life as Hadley’s is that my mother did the same. The only thing I feel really sorry about is that my father didn’t turn out to be Ernest Hemingway.
I go to Paris at least once a year since I was 17. The more I go, the more I grow to love the city and to understand it. At first I was overwhelmed, then I wanted to see everything so I walked until my feet bled. After a while I started discovering the city on my own, exploring and finding places that would become my favourites. Then I came back to those places because I knew there I would have the best cheese or the best croissant. But last week when I was in Paris I finally just enjoyed it. I wandered the streets that were so familiar yet incredibly dear, but I walked slowly. I looked around without searching for something in particular and I sat in cafes looking at people as if I didn’t have a care in the world.
This time I got the chance to notice things that I haven’t observed before. One of them is that French people smelling very nice is not a myth. Almost everybody in Paris leaves a trace of wonderful perfume behind. And is not that kind of perfume that you find in duty free. In London for example, I can notice 10 girls in one day wearing the same perfume. Then there are the old people. The very old ones- in their late 80s- who can barely walk but still dine in restaurants. And they dress up for that. Old ladies wear make-up and jewellery, and they have 3 course meals and always eat dessert. They eat slowly. They smile and you can see how their life is more about living than doing things.
One other thing that struck me this time in Paris was how quiet the city is compared to London. If you go off Champs-Elysees, Rivoli or Saint-Germain, you can find yourself on an empty street with no one in sight and no noise at all. I didn’t realise how much the chaos and constant buzz of a big city can wear you off even when you’re so young and full of energy. In just one long weekend Paris made me feel so serene that I actually thought something was wrong with me.
And finally it dawned on me that most of Paris’ beauty comes from symmetry. Everything is so well designed, calculated, arranged and put together that it takes quite a lot of time to realize that if you go behind l’Ecole Militaire and look from that point to la Tour Eiffel you can see that they’re absolutely perfectly aligned. The same applies to people: they are simply more beautiful. In 4 days, I have seen more pretty girls and boys than I see in London in 4 months.
But it’s not even the beautiful language, the delicious food and the way French people actually know how to eat ( you will never see a French man gulping on a Pret sandwich over his laptop at lunch all under 3 minutes) that makes Paris special. Elegance, good taste and poise are definitely in their culture and DNA but it’s something else, something that cannot be defined or described that gives Paris its magic. That beauty seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Even from the sadness that Paris posses, because there is a lot of that too. There is dirt on the streets, poor people and places that stink. Out of all places, Monmartre is probably the most sad because everything that was wonderful about it before is now gone. The painters’ market is full of charlatans making horrible portraits for naive tourists and gypsies beging for money. People take too many photos of themselves in front of Sacre Coeur failing to actually marvel at it and the black guys selling their miniature Eiffel towers are all over the place.
Yet people always return to Paris. Either because they find it the most romantic place in the world, or because they want to take photos of the Mona Lisa, eat macaroons or eggs at Cafe de Flore. They will always say French women are beautiful and know how to dress (and on this one I agree) and will make movies about it. The fascination will never perish and many will fall in love with it while others will claim they don’t understand what is so great about Paris anyway. As for me, all I know is that I truly love Paris because I feel I belong in there. The sheer joy it gives me to be there is more than I could dream to have from something that is not even mine and to which I haven’t given anything. Except my heart.
Last Saturday I was having dinner with two girlfriends of mine and telling them abut the Elle writing contest last year and how I didn’t win. This led to a very interesting conversation about winning stuff and being lucky: from finding money on the street to participating to various contests or gambling. None of us considers herself lucky in this particular department although Diana told us she once won a spa day by sending a text message to some fashion magazine. She said she enjoyed the day so much and that got me thinking and asking myself whether we tend to enjoy things that we’ve won by chance rather than things that we’ve earned through hard work.
There are, of course, so many questions when it comes to luck: does such think actually exist? Do we keep fooling ourselves and avoid taking responsibility or action because we give luck too much credit and importance when making things happen for us?
This also reminds me of a Sex And The City episode when the girls go to Las Vegas for the weekend and try to have a jolly good time in tacky casinos. At the end of the weekend Carrie tries to put some thoughts on paper and says: “People go to casinos for the same reason they go on blind dates: hoping to hit the jackpot. But mostly you just wind up broke or alone in a bar. If we know the house always wins, why gamble?”
I have never gambled but I admit I’ve always been attracted to casinos and think they could be really great fun. Since a trip to Vegas was unlikely to happen after dinner on Saturday, I went home and started to look online for something just as sparkling, glittery and loud. Cheeky Bingo seemed the perfect choice: pink, girly and free. Thus I found myself on a late Saturday night wearing my nice dress, pearls and red lipstick while playing bingo and gambling. I spent a good couple of hours online and boy, oh boy, was I hooked. The entire thing had a retro vibe to it and I felt like one of those dolled-up ladies who meet on Sunday afternoon to play bingo.
So why gamble? Simply put because it’s really good fun. And because we sometimes need not spoil the fantasy that it’s possible to hit the big jackpot. If you have some time to kill and want to do something completely nuts and fun, give gambling a try. You have my blessing. Oh, and let me know if you like it for we might as well organize some bingo Sunday afternoons. With cocktails, of course.
Charles Dickens once famously wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And as far as time, or better said, timing goes, this statement couldn’t be more true. How many times do we say to ourselves that timing is everything? How many times do we ask ourselves what if we’ve been to a certain place at the right moment, what if we have met a certain person earlier or later? Perfect timing doesn’t happen too often. But what is this perfect timing anyway? Because to me it’s seems there’s no such thing. Time does indeed control our lives but we sometimes are afraid of at least trying to take control. It’s probably when we don’t like what is happening to us that we begin to seek for hidden reasons and explanations for something that we can’t quite understand. More often than not, things just are what they seem. They just happen and there’s no secret meaning to be later discovered.
If I look back, I can find many things that I’ve thrown away or missed just because I put the “bad timing” label on them. As my best friend says, in business timing is everything but there’s more to life than business. Maybe I would have had a father now if he hadn’t decided that 21 years ago wasn’t the right time for him to have a child. But on the other hand, I am quite happy that my mother didn’t think that at 23 was the wrong time to have one. After all, most of one’s life is just the sum of the decisions they’ve made. And the power of choice may overcome that of time because the fight against the latter is just lost from the very beginning. To seize the day might seem the best option in any circumstance and since both reason and feelings have failed me before, I tend to have less regrets when choosing to follow my intuition. Saying what I think, doing what I feel or what I want aren’t always easy choices to make but I know that this is what I owe to myself.
There is this funny saying “when life throws you lemons, make lemonade.” I say when life or people offer you something, a gift, an opportunity or just a smile, take it. When you meet someone and find that you have a wonderful connection or chemistry, jump. Leaving doubt, suspicion and fear behind is probably the lesson I try to learn everyday but even if I don’t make it all the time, I will not give up on this. And I will not do it for those rare moments when I realize that the only thing standing between me and something wonderful is my little stupid fear. Fear which is only built on past experiences or memories and on that futile thought that no matter what I choose, there’s always going to be another option. But for now, I really try to only choose the best of times and squeeze the last drop of juice from the lemons that I’ve got.
Last night I watched The Deep Blue Sea. It wasn’t particularly good, and except from a stunning Rachel Weisz and the beautiful soundtrack, the movie didn’t say much to me. Rachel plays a woman living in the 50s, married to an older guy- or should I just say old- who adores her. But she is unhappy and has an affair with a younger, more passionate guy. This is the classical Hollywood recipe of what great love is made of. And this is in fact what everything, from literature to movies teaches us. That the more complicated, twisted and impossible love is, the more it’s worth having. When Rachel leaves her cold, boring husband to go live with the man she loves, she is not prepared to face the inevitable: after a while, her man will start having more important things to do than make crazy love to her. And so she decides to kill herself. Not because of him, of course, but because of her incapacity to be happy. Or so she claims in her suicidal letter.
There is, however, an extraordinary moment in the movie. Rachel’s neighbour, and old lady who finds her after the failed attempt to commit suicide, is taking care of her dying husband. And she says to Rachel: “Do you think you know what love is? What you have is not love because love means wiping someone’s ass, changing the sheets when they’ve wet the bed for both of you to be able to keep your dignity and go on living.” Even though there is no such thing as the definition of love, we all try at some point in our lives to define it. And I can’t say for sure I know what love is, but I am certain is not what Rachel thinks. This is perhaps because she does what we all do: run. She runs from a man who loves her and after another who doesn’t love her just as much. So she becomes her husband. This movie made me think of how we get bored with what we have and keep chasing what is not making itself available to us. And thus the idea of love is just ego. Our needy nature , always in the pursuit of attention, validation and reassurance only to throw it in the garbage once we have it.
Lust, passion, sex, the thrill of something or someone new, excitement and attachement are not love. And the whole idea of romance is most of the time a fairytale. We meet people, we fall in love, we live stories- some good, some bad and some extraordinary.But maybe love is just the ability to be kind, to know forgiveness or to live your life exactly how you want to live it. Or maybe love truly is what remains in the absence of everything else.
The most valuable things I have learned so far came from what people are, not from what they do. I keep coming back to this little obsession of mine with people who become human doings rather than human beings and that is because I feel more and more how everything revolves around what we do. And what we do is about succes, and succes is usually measured in fame or money. I, for one, have never shared this commun belief that people can only influence or help others by building something big. And I know at least two of them who can prove my point.
The first is my mother who has never had the successful career most modern women are dying for. She wasn’t a stay at home mum either, but although she has always worked, she managed to be the most wonderful parent I could have ever wished for. She gave me so much love, attention and has helped me try to become the best self I can be. And today, she taught me something once again. She was telling me how my sister who’s studying in an arts school called her crying that she’ll never be good enough with her painting. And my mum told her not to give up every time the road gets rough because all she needs to do is have passion for something. She doesn’t have to be Michelangelo in order to be happy as long as she loves what she’s doing. Mum also said that even though you feel that what you are doing is shit, you could at least try to make that shit an original one. She is now translating a book about Tarantino and told my sister that he was a visionary man, intelligent enough to make art and to innovate something other people threw away. He used violence, kitsch and old actors in order to create an unique style that many have tried to copy years later. Tarantino only made 6 movies but he influenced cinematography simply by pursuing his passion. As a child, he started watching movies with his mother but he didn’t get an expensive education or a luxurious lifestyle. He only wanted to do something he loved and most important, he wanted to be himself. He didn’t want to be Fellini.
The other person is Hannah, my flatmate. She turns 30 in two days and was supposed to go on a lovely trip with her boyfriend. But today she found out he is trapped in Cape Town because of some issues with his visa and won’t be able to make it. I would have freaked out, been mad at him, probably yelled on the phone for hours and then be sad for days. Hannah, on the other hand, handled this with calm and didn’t, for one second, blame him for something that wasn’t his fault. We’ve been living together for almost 2 years now and all of this time I’ve admired her for her understanding, non-judgemental and compassionate nature. I have learned a lot from what she is like and am trying everyday to be kinder.
There are many other people I’m learning from, however, today I chose to write about those who didn’t build companies, made millions or became famous. And that’s for one simple reason: they are not less happy or less wonderful than those who have.
I have never been one of those happy people who smile all the time. I have never been able to feel better just at the thought that there is always someone in a worse situation than mine. I mean, how can I relate to a starving kid in Africa and all of the sudden feel grateful for being able to afford a steak? Happiness itself is a very vague notion and I would be a hypocrite no to admit that what the kid in Africa and I need to have in order to be happy might be very different. You could say being happy is not about having things, it’s about giving, sharing, loving and all that. Which is true to some extent. Being surrounded by people I love and who in return love me, fills my heart with joy and warmth. But so does affording to buy books, go to the opera, travel, or a new pair of shoes. Of course it’s not the same kind of happiness, many would say, but since when should we divide happiness in that worth feeling and the frivolous one? As long as I feel good, I see no reason to do so. A life full of Manolo Blahnik shoes and no one to love me would indeed be sad. And a life with someone to love me and nothing to wear on my feet would be just as sad.
Even though I’m not one of those people who are happy all the time, I’m not one of those who don’t have the ability to be happy at all either. And this is something to be grateful for. Sometimes is the perfect blue sky, other times a good book or a weekend in Paris. And believe it or not, most of the times is very small things like meeting a friend who’s going through difficult times but who hasn’t lost his optimism, sharing a horrible, microwaved pancake with my best friend or my mum posting on my Facebook wall that she misses me. All we hear since our early lives is that money doesn’t bring happiness, that it’s wrong to desire big and expensive things, that we should always put ourselves in the shoes of those less fortunate, appreciate what we have instead of complaining for what we don’t have and so on. In other words, we should all be the Dalai Lama or Mother Theresa. Call it Western civilisation brain wash, shallowness or whatever you want, but I never tried to be them. And this is precisely because I don’t think certain kinds of happiness are better than others. Just to be able to feel happy is enough for me, or at least enough to actually be, happy.