Just go for a drive

Last night I went to the cinema. After 16 years without television, I'm always excited to see the advertisements before the film. I can't resist the promise of spectacle, but like the desire for fast food when you're hungry, the excitement lasts for about two minutes, then comes nausea.

Three out of four ads are trying to sell cars. One of those screened last night had a man cruising some downtown at night alone in his car. Of course he seems alert, confident and strangely content as he drives through the slick cityscape. The allure of the edge: dark empty streets, drug dealer types, somewhere a burning vehicle in an empty parking lot. Thank god, it's a bus. Nobody likes public transport. And then the punchline: When was the last time you just went for a drive?

Well, never, in my case, but I know people do. Some years ago Time Out asked various celebrities what's best to do in London "for free", and the superstar architect David Adjaya said he likes to drive his car around the city aimlessly for hours. So much for "London for free" (what about car maintenance, petrol, congestion charge?)

Driving just for fun: burning petrol, pumping CO2 and pollutants to the air, and making your car a little older. As they say, doing your bit for the economy; the economy of overproduction, waste, and ecological destruction. In a few years, if we ever get to have the Fossil Fuel Museum, these citations can go on the wall. I imagine visitors' reaction: you had the cheapest energy ever available to humans, and you just burnt it for fun?

Five years ago a barrael of petroleum sold for $22. Today the price is $78 - almost four times more. Most rollercoasters return to the starting level at the end of the trip, but this one's going up the mountain the whole way, a spectacular takeoff straight into the sunset. In five or ten years "just going out for a ride" will be as likely as burning your house to get warm. But you wiil always be able to go out for a cycle. And there won't be all these annoying architects in their swanky cars on the roads.

upturn

"London has a beating heart" said P two years ago. We were in Amsterdam sitting on a bench and watching the Amstel. He was opening grolsch bottles one after the other like pistachio nuts. "London is a living monster. It can crash you like an insect, throw you into the gutter, it can kill you if it wants, but it can also protect you, heal you and look after you".

Saturday London decided to be kind. It started with a slow and good visit to the market where we found asparagus, parsley plums, grapes and papayas. Later a five hours farewell-to-south-London party on the roof with a pink sunset on one side and a rainbow on the other. By 1am got hi-jacked to another party in a former psychiatric clinic, squatted by Polish kids. The building seemed in bad shape, and they have no water or electricity inside the house. So they use a generator and rebuilt their kitchen in the garden near the only working tap. The music was 1980s cheese, bad, bad, bad, you know it.

Someone looked at me and said:
Very good. Always make sure your shirt matches your drink.

I was holding vodka and cranberry, which should give you some idea about the shirt.

Slim bikes were overcrowding the dark corridor. The next room had a football table and a kitten. And their court papers for late July.

When I cycled back the day was starting. Walorth road was packed with cars and bagels were in much demand.

Life seems to go into a spiral just at the moment where I needed three months of stability to complete the project on which I've worked for four years. As I am moving from one temporary accommodation to another, my housing situation beyond August is uncertain; my computer has gone into a comma, giving me the blue screen of death; and worst, my body feels like it is disintegrating. Many months of hard work on the computer are taking their toll. The fact I had no hot water at home for most of this period didn't help.

Now I discover in practice what I always knew in principle: that my way of life, which enabled me to live on almost no money (at some points, as little as £5 a week) in one of the most expensive cities in the world, could be sustained only as long as I was healthy. With severe back aches I cannot cycle, so I have to pay for the bus; no cycling means no trips to the market to skip free vegetables and fruits, as I cannot carry heavy loads. And so I find myself in the hateful supermarkets - which I have generally succeeded in avoiding so far.

If I was still squatting with a large group of people, like I did for most of my London days, I could perhaps leave skipping for others and could help in the house in other ways. My housemates would have looked after me, as they did in the past, as I did for them. But in my last house there were only two of us. And as conditions deteriorated, we are both on our way out.

Instability, precariousness, challenging living conditions, and frequent housemoves: I've lived with all of these for five years now. If I feel that I cannot take it any longer, this is also because I have a choice now: with a more-or-less steady income I can contemplate alternatives to squatting. Maybe other people with less choices would love to have my cave. But I have no illusions: discomfort seems to be such an integral part of life here, - a thing of cultural differences; and precarity, a condition that is gradually swallowing more aspects of our lives.

Empties

For those who haven't seen Mario's Empties (a short film about squatting in London), here it is. Spot the mink!

Advice

When you reach England, if you come to London, pass through it quickly, for I do not at all like that city. All sorts of men crowd together there from every country under the heavens. Each race brings its own vices and its own customs to the city. No-one lives in it without falling into some sort of crime. Every quarter of it abounds in grave obscenities. The greater a rascal a man is, the better a man he is accounted. I know whom I am instructing. You have a warmth of character beyond your years, and a coolness of memory; and from these contrary qualities arises a temperateness of reasoning. I fear nothing for you, unless you live with evil companions, for manners are formed by association.

Well, be that as it may! You will arrive in London. Behold, I prophesy to you: whatever evil or malicious thing that can be found in any part of the world, you will find in that one city. Do not associate with the crowds of pimps; do not mingle with the throngs in eating-houses; avoid dice and gambling, the theatre and the tavern. You will meet with more braggarts there than in all France; the number of parasites is infinite. Actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty boys, effeminates, pederasts, singing and dancing girls, quacks, belly-dancers, sorceresses, extortioners, night-wanderers, magicians, mimes, beggars, buffoons: all this tribe fill all the houses. Therefore, if you do not want to dwell with evildoers, do not live in London. I do not speak against learned or religious men, or against Jews: however, because of their living amidst evil people, I believe they are less perfect there than elsewhere.

The end of a house is always very much like its beginning. As structures of ordinarity, banality, and daily schedule collapse, you find yourself eating take-aways; sleeping in your sleeping bag; using your mobile phone rather than the landline; living from your rucksack. Temporariness sneaks in and settles; still not the temporariness of the new place, but rather of your precarity laid bare. The illusion which was maintained so many months - in salvaged posters on the wall, in morning porridge, in music played in the early hours - in laughter round a crammed dinner table - has left your home to go elsewhere. These moments of beginning/end, like opening a telescope, are rich and dense and startling. A richness which perhaps no one can bear. The space where you spent many nights and days is stripped of traces of you: they are all in a pile of suitcases, boxes, bags. Suddenly this room can be anyone's: it's previous owner or its unknown next. But know this: your fleeting presence will remain long after you'll be gone, like the voice of an Opera singer lingering in the concert hall decades after that celebrated night.

Yesterday I went back to my old home to pack my things. Inside awaited me the silence of Sundays without electricity: the air was slightly damp. It's never easy to pack your life into boxes, but in darkness it is even harder. I filled the room with small candles and used a torch and a reading-light. In the twilight, I still find myself having to make hard choices, like if Goethe's Italian Journal should go to Fiction or Non-Fiction. Finally it was nearly over; I still haven't ventured into the kitchen. In the back of the house, two potatoes are spreading their roots, like huge arms searching for the switch. Small potato treas, from some Nordish fairy tale.