England Made Me

In the January of 2001 I moved to London in order to be united with my internet girlfriend. Unfortunately, two weeks before I arrived she informed me that she no longer wanted me to come. Having already paid for my tickets I decided to go anyway. No longer knowing anyone and without anywhere to stay I had to make do with a youth hostel near St. Pauls. However, the communal nature of the place was not to my liking and after two nights I checked myself into crumbling two-star hotel near Paddington. Here I would waste almost two weeks listening to the bleak, squalid and very English pop of Black Box Recorder, and wondering exactly how I was going to get myself settled into this country. My father had organised through a company he dealt with for me to spend a morning on the floor of the London Metal Exchange. He thought he'd give me the opportunity to taste the action in the high stakes world of international metal trading. He hoped that I'd find the business exhilarating and feel compelled to follow in his footsteps. After several hours and having no idea what the fuck was going on, several of the lads invited me down to the pub for lunch. However, there was no lunch to be had, just an endless supply of vodka. Although at the time I was 21 and a half, I hadn't drunk alcohol since I was 17, and so by the time I had drunk 5 glasses (and I think they were giving me doubles) in half an hour I could barely stand up. Somehow I managed to find my way back to Bank Tube station, yet when changing lines at Notting Hill Gate I lost my guts all over the platform whilst waiting for the train. Alighting at Paddington, once I got outside it had started to rain. Without an umbrella, and conceivably without the coordination to operate one, I proceeded to get drenched as I stumbled back to my hotel. Once I managed to get back to my room I had just enough capacity to kick off my shoes and press play on my portal cd player which contained Black Box Recorder's The Facts Of Life album. And as I listened to the wry, seedy lyrics of the band, drunk out of my mind at three o'clock in the afternoon, friendless, with no job prospects and lying on the bed of a dingy hotel in a rain-soaked suit stained with my own vomit, it became apparent to me that I had settled into the country just fine.