Back in England at the end of January - missed the really bad storms that killed lots of people. J----- was talking to me again but J&M were moving out - into a house shared with their uncle, up in Wembley.
It was depressing. I had my photos but was quite lost now. I didn't feel I could keep living in that house. It was affecting my work too. So by March I was ready to move on.
Prior to moving to responded to a small ad C----, from Macclesfield. And soon after I applied to join a dating agency. That's how miserable I was by then.
1. the girls
It was an ad in Loot - the room was very cheap. I developed a technique for house-hunting back then. Bought Loot and marked up all likely rooms in an area of my choosing. They had to be in walking distance form each other. I can't remember why I chose to move to Brixton - maybe it was just the notoriety of the area, more likely it was because I'd noticed it was very cheap and very near the centre of the city. I'd fixed up a series of appointments that evening - February 1990? - and in the event it had snowed pretty heavily. Had already looked around in north London - remember looking at a place in Dollis Hill. There was a tremendous amount of snobbery and elitism in north London back then - it was really like the scene out of Shallow Grave a film I wasn;t to see for another 5 or 6 years. There was a vegetarian house - and I wasn;t vegetarian then. I was usually sat down and quizzed by a tremendously middle class person and if I didn't come up to their liberal standards in whatever area they were liberal, and a corresponding requirement of "interestingness" - often this meant having good travel stories somehting I personally find tedious int he extreme. Of course there was one requirement I always failed on - that of middle-classness. In south London people weren't so fussy. at least not back then. This house - i think - was the only one that came up to my high standards at the time. I saw one, virtually a doss house on Landor road, near the mental hospital, which upset me slightly. and then round the corner, crunching snow under my feet on the way. Three girls lived there; two were very attractive - one was a primary school teacher and the other - well i can't remember her job if indeed she had one, but she was a fairly glamorous clubber type of girl, and I imagine now that she had a series of temproary or part time jobs at the time - or maybe she studied. Really just can't remember. Oddly - they allowed me to move in.
this may have been the first time I used a "man with a van" type service - i had very little to move. My stereo had been nicked, so I had some books, tapes, vinyl and clothes. About three or four boxes worth was all. And a guitar and a bike! I moved in expecting it to be like "Man About The House" and it was for a bit until my level of cleanliness whch was not as high the girls' were caused rows and tears and eventually they both eventually moved after it came to a head - though the third girl (traveller from NZ) seemed not at all bothered, and seem to remember her thinking the others were uptight. To be fair to myself they didn;t move out just cos of me. The first moved out becasue she'd got a place at college and I guess the other one felt she could move on now - the bond was broken and on top of that i had become a nuisance too. The New Zealander didn't move out - in fact she stayed for quie a while finally losing her patience after Scott moved in. Scott never did anything around the house. she actually came to me to vent over Scott - I guess that me and her were the longest serving residents at that point so there was a bond of sorts.
One of the girls had been an extra in survivors and I think was related to the landlady - cousin?
The place becaem increasingly bohemian - I was the only one with a proper job i think - Lee was at college, Is was unemployed, Simon worked sporadically - wanted to be a musician; and ----- was a cycle courier.
It was this house that probably finished my high-flying career as an engineer. I started being late to work more often, sometimes overslept, often too tired to work.
