FFS...

‘lived in’ is such a ‘strong’ word.

While freelancing for clients in the london area I was living monday to friday in various places in outer / greater london and spent in all about five years in B&B type accomodation inside the expanded ULEZ and about a year of that was inside the south circular ring road.

It’s fair to say i hated every instant. Constant fear of car breakin was the main one.

But what finally did it for me was two tube breakdowns two days apart in my first week in a central london firm.

I was updating the claims register software for Lloyds of London. I stayed in a sort of guest house in Rickmansworth and caught the Metropolitan line to Finsbury Pavement.

On the tuesday i got on the tube and after moving 100 yards the thing stopped and all the lights went out. We were trapped in this mobile coffin for 30 minutes barely fifty yards from the scene of the worst loss of life in a london underground accident EVER

What astounded me was how calm everyone was. And how dirty the songs we sang while waiting for rescue

Two days later the same thing happenned again.

I asked to cancel my contract

The project manager was shocked not at my request but at tbe failure about which they knew nothing.

I was offered the opportunity to do the work out of a satellite office at Bristol and gratefully accepted.

That was 1999. Fear of entombment in a dank dark hole has kept me away from taking work there since. I’ve done installations and taken circle line trains over sections where the line is in daylight but that’s it.

I have to take the Elizabeth line to get between Victoria and Paddington in five weeks.

I’m not looking forward to it