Quite a bit has changed since my last blog post in July. I have declined my DPhil offer in Oxford, moved to London, and will start a full-time job here next week. This year has been extremely unpredictable, and I would never have thought this is where I’d be in September. Over the last few months, I was feeling very anxious and dejected; now that I’ve found some stability, it’s much easier to breathe.

I don’t think I will stay in the UK for the rest of my life, but it makes sense to remain here for now. Even though this country has taken a severe turn for the worse since I first moved to Scotland in September 2015, I'm undeniably more at home here than in Finland by now. Sooner or later, I want go back to East Asia, but now is really not the right time for that.

Besides, I’ve never lived in London before, and moving here from Oxford is a change comparable to moving countries. I was feeling really trapped in Oxford by the end of summer, just desperate to get away. It’s not that I dislike Oxford, but it became completely dead in lockdown, and I got fed up with pretty streets saturated with dust and silence. It was such a shock moving here and having so many sounds around me all the time. I really needed this change of environment.

I’ve spent my first week in London just settling into my new flat and walking around a lot. I have also got off to a pretty good start working on some writing and other things I had put on hold for way too long.

The geography of this city is still very unfamiliar to me, and I love being able to just get lost. Over the quiet months in Oxford, I came to know most of the city like the back of my hand.

Of course the pandemic is still hanging heavily over London as well. Many shops are shuttered, there are almost no events of any kind, and public transport is relatively empty. It will be a long time until things are as lively as they used to be, and there might well be another (maybe more limited) lockdown over the autumn/winter period. But I should be staying here long enough to experience the city filling up with more movement. After Oxford, it already feels incredibly busy and stimulating.

Yesterday I experienced an annoying and unexpected setback. I went to register at the medical centre, and they insisted I get on the scales to get my height, weight and blood pressure readings for their files. I hadn’t weighed myself in almost 3 years and I really didn’t want to. I had written on my forms that I used to have an eating disorder and I don’t want to know my weight, but they still wanted to follow the usual procedure. So I had to get on this loud beeping machine that displayed my weight the whole time it was taking the blood pressure reading, and I couldn’t avoid looking at the number. It was a big shock to my system and now I am fighting the urge to buy scales so I could keep tracking the figure, even though I know that’s really bad for me. I’m frustrated that I allowed to let that happen so easily. After I left the medical centre, I just went on another long walk to try and push down the intrusive thoughts.

In terms of living space, I am very lucky to have found something just for myself. The rent is very expensive, but because I have a stable full-time income for the first time in my life, I can just about afford it. I am living in a one-room flat above a pub near Highbury & Islington station. It has dark hardwood floors, sash windows (that are a little bit broken at the moment), an old fireplace and relatively high ceilings, the lived-in atmosphere of old places I love. I really dislike most newly built housing. It feels hollow and ugly in case of more ‘affordable’ flats with light-coloured fake wood floors, low-hanging ceilings and tiny square prison windows, or cold and hostile in case of ‘luxury’ complexes with their empty metallic sheen and awkward added-value services like concierges and gyms.. Of course newly built flats are usually more energy-efficient, and it’s completely understandable that many people prefer the relative convenience of living in a flat with double-glazed windows etc. It’s good to have choice, although the real problem in the UK (especially here in the south) is how unaffordable most of it is.

In any case, when I walked into this flat for the first time, I already knew I wanted to live here. I wish I could stay for a good while.

Random note: This morning I woke up with Silent Shout by The Knife in my head, which turned out to be kind of a premonition, because I found out that Linea Aspera released a new album yesterday, and the leading song Solar Flare has similar vibes. It has turned into my soundtrack of the day. I don’t usually wake up with songs in my head, but maybe my dream was synth-fueled because I’m really excited to get back into playing. I’ve bought a midi controller and it was supposed to arrive today, but DPD went and broke it during shipping, so now I have to wait more.. ahh I am so excited about it though! Especially if there is another lockdown, it’ll be a good little distraction.

This is the third time in my life that I’m staying in a one-bedroom flat - I lived in a very tiny university dorm room for 3 years as a high school student in Finland (that cost 25% of my current rent), a shabby but cheap half-basement room in Shimokitazawa as an exchange student (that was just below 50%), and now this place. I quite enjoy living like this, it feels very manageable and everything I need is close to hand. I could have saved a lot of money by opting for a houseshare instead, and I did go see about a dozen very nice rooms in the weeks before my move. Shared houses have many advantages, such as the ability to use a communal washing machine instead of the launderette (none of my one-rooms so far have had the luxury of a laundry machine), and not accidentally going for a fortnight without talking to anyone outside work (which I can easily envision happening in case there is another lockdown).

But I felt a strong urge to live alone again, and now that it was financially possible, I couldn’t resist it.

Above all, my need to live alone probably stems from the fact that I have recently broken up with a long-term boyfriend and with academia, so I want to figure things out for myself now. It sounds selfish, but hopefully I will be able to become a better person eventually. If I live alone, I have no excuses to not write or not work on other things I find important. I want to rediscover how it feels to do things because I enjoy them, because practicing them feels good and natural, and not having to filter my behaviour through other people all the time.

I am hoping to also have more time for writing my blog (amongst other things) this autumn, although I don’t yet know what direction it might take! Over this last year, I have updated my blog really infrequently, and then the posts tend to become just ‘life updates’ like this. I know I don’t really need to write about anything, but this blog has always been almost like a diary for me, so completely omitting big life events or only referring to them in some oblique way wouldn’t feel right. I want to be able look back on my blog and trace the changes I’ve been going through. At the same time, I think these round-ups are pretty dull to read and write.

The longer the timeframe, the more detail is lost, but the small and seemingly irrelevant details are often the most fascinating in any textual or visual format. Blogging like this is just fast forwarding between big narrative nodes like graduating or moving from place A to B, but those aren’t really the things I want to write about. Of course writing a blog post or creating any kind of representation of reality is always a process of constructing a new narrative, but the falsification seems to become more egregious the more condensed the events are temporally. Trying to describe a day in a single sentence or picture requires craft & lies of omission, which are naturally amplified if we’re talking about whole months or years.. Of course the problem is not that things are omitted, because that is just inevitable - everything needs to be framed somehow. I just want to stop focusing so much on things I have codified as ‘important life events’ for whatever reason. It’s also part of learning to live in a different way, less focused on external goals and structures. Well, practicing some simplification is also a good exercise, because I (evidently) have a bad habit of being too long-winded.

In short - this autumn, I think I want to focus more on the inbetweens.

moving again