Surreal Estate

I know about fixed rates and variables, interest only, shared ownership. I am versed in the economies of real estate dialogue, which generously increases square footage to include the ceiling, and I've gotten completely used to being patronized by spotty eighteen year olds with dangly earrings and those repulsive little ballet pumps thrust upon their white and spindly youthful stick-legs, entombed in Top-Shop footless tights. I've become accustomed to the sneer of derision which accompanies the answer to the question, 'How much do you want to spend?', and I've patiently explained, over and over, that while Stratford may be a fantastic investment because of the next Olympics, I refuse to live in a vomit-stained ex-council flat with Keith, Jackie, their seven shaven-headed kids and a pit bull in close proximity.

I think the Estate Agent and I now understand one another.

So while it seems that I have a good chance of getting a mortgage, I'll probably have to get some poor sucker of a man to help me pay it for the next 25 years, or buy and just rent it out, and continue eking out my transient existence in a rented maisonette in Crouch End next to James McCavoy. I'm totally happy with the concept of lettting someone else pay my mortgage for me so I can go back to India and live in Mysore and Delhi and Amritsar and the Himalayas for a while....

In the meantime life trundles on in Crouch End. I still can't quite get to grips with the sheer normality of Britain. It's just so much less dramatic than the States. In New York I felt like I was in a movie 24/7, living out some bizarre scripted life I had no control over, and when I left even the ending was so... scripted. I lived like a novel, and here in the UK I struggle to conjure up something to write. It's all tea, biscuits, conversations in pubs, chats with mental yoga teachers about their raw foods diets, which may sound interesting, and certainly is, but is also like being stuck in a soap opera on loop . It's good to recover here - I'm loving teaching and researching the next book, and applying for jobs to keep me ticking over financially, but I'm also itching to get somewhere where there's something to write about, other than Faisal in Marks and Spencers who sold me Jam Sandwich biscuits today, or the Iraqui guy in the PO who always tells me he's going to take my yoga classes, or poor James McCavoy and the Number 41 bus. I find the normality of Crouch End more surreal than the circus of NoHo in New York...