Good Or Shit: Leaving London

It’s a spring Sunday afternoon in London. That stuff blowing about in the wind and rain outside our large living room windows is blossom from the trees — but you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s snow. The heater is on. And I put the radio on in an attempt to stop us from transforming into sofa slobs, watching back-to-back episodes of something on TV, like we did yesterday.

I feel content. At home. And I’m aware of that, because I’m leaving.

Listening to BBC Six Music, I remember coming to London three years ago on a one-way ticket bought for me by a guy I slept with once. It wasn’t prostitution. At the time of the ticket’s purchase, we had every intention of sleeping together again, but things didn’t turn out that way.

Living on a friend’s couch, I told myself not to have the typical Australian-in-London experience. So in an area far away from areas populated by Australians, I sublet a room in a council-owned house from a fortysomething woman with an accent that was ‘proper London, yeah’, who smoked loads of hash and whose dog got a period every couple of months and had to wear a nappy.

I was under the impression BBC Radio 1 was the station to listen to. Loads of the artist bios I’d read over the years heralded it as The Thing, so I was horrified to find it was like 2Day FM.

One of the first things I did when I moved in to my new room – other than smoke anything I wanted, inside, and eat apple pie every night because there was no one to tell me I was getting fat – was buy a radio. It cost me a tenner in a car boot sale and looked like it had been bashed and mugged in the seedy motel it was probably stolen from.

After years of blagging my way through interviews for this music publication, with musicians I’d never heard of and have mostly forgotten, I was under the impression BBC Radio 1 was the station to listen to. Loads of the artist bios I’d read over the years heralded it as The Thing, so I tuned in expecting to find myself in a Triple J or FBi-like environment and was horrified to find it was more like 2Day FM.

Everybody needs a good radio station. It’s a comfort. You don’t have to make a decision about what to listen to, it keeps you engaged with the world through playlists, interviews, and news programs, you learn things, become attached to presenters, and often end up a loyal listener for life.

When starting your life from scratch in a foreign country, finding a radio station is high up on your list of necessities. Along with finding a newspaper, a barista, and well before making any friends.

For weeks I listened to different stations, Googled lists and read descriptions, trying to find one that suited me – occasionally peeking out my window to watch the police search for clues to a murder that happened across the street – and just generally feeling lost and fairly alone. After a while, one of the two people I knew in the country suggested Six Music. After that, all those life elements began falling into place.

On this chilled out Sunday afternoon, the radio plays Ghostpoet, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Bjork, Bob Dylan, Gaz Coombes, Al Green, Radio Head, Florence and the Machine, Betty Davis, my housemate is writing inappropriate dialogue in speech bubbles on the faces of people in the paper I read, and we’re drinking our favourite coffee.

Sad face.

It’s beginning to sink in and I want to throw a tantrum. I morph from snarly to weepy and I’m moved by everything. I watched my entire company do the Macarena at a work party and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

After three years of living in London, where on even my most 'nothing' days there is still a level of excitement, simply because I’m in London, I’m now moving somewhere else. And not Palestine, like I’d always dreamed, but Sydney. Home.

And while part of me is good with this decision – I’m over being in the world’s longest long-distance relationship, my grandmother has dementia, and if my mother’s blog is anything to go by, both old bats could do with some help – the other part just flat-out doesn’t want to go.

It’s beginning to sink in and I want to throw a tantrum. I morph from snarly to weepy and I’m moved by everything. I watched my entire company do the Macarena at a work party and thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I tried to join in, but I couldn’t. My heart just wasn’t in it.

And that’s because I’m trying to keep my heart in control. And anyone who loves to dance, who loves to be seduced into movement by a musical rhythm, knows that dancing requires letting go.

Three years ago I was a stranger in this city, full of uncertainty, and I stood on the edge of dance floors and watched others let themselves go. Three years on, as I prepare to do it all over again, my inclination is again to stand back.

And then I remember, I’m not the person I was three years ago. Yes, I’m going to be unemployed and a stranger among people who feel strange to me. But I know I can start again. And I’ll probably do it again, and again, and hopefully again (in Palestine this time), and again. And I can find a radio station anywhere I go.