Things that may or may not happen during your first year in London
By Charlea - Friday, April 27, 2018
- You will spend a Thursday night in The Folly, which one of your friends has convinced you is a "good venue for a chilled glass of wine". You'll subsequently spend your evening fending off attention from suits possibly twice your age, who are trying to buy you martinis. After two (four) wines, you will dutifully accept a free martini, reel off a few quick anecdotes to the aforementioned elderly suit-wearer about your job and an imaginary but very long term and serious boyfriend, neck said martini, and run. For your life.
- You'll experience elation in its truest form when you discover that your local corner shop is well stocked with your obscure favourite chocolate from childhood. You'll eat said white chocolate Lion bar every night thereon.
- You will do a tequila shot with your boss, then the next day pretend it never happened. It will never be mentioned again.
- You'll try to take up smoking in a bid to earn some cool girl kudos/get to find out what everyone gossips about outside. You will only smoke Vogues because they make you look and feel like Audrey Hepburn. After several attempts at learning to inhale, you'll eventually realise you hate the taste and smell like a stale raincoat when you smoke, and you'll give up.
- You'll come into work hungover after less than three hours sleep, wearing your best friend's clothes with yesterday's hair, and nobody will bat an eyelid.
- You'll walk across London Bridge with your headphones in and an empowering feminist song playing, pretending you're in a music video/scene from Bridget Jones' Diary.
- You'll order a complicated latte because you want to try and be a cool London career girl. It'll cost you £4.50 for a regular. You'll hide your heart failure as you reluctantly tap your credit card and pretend you enjoy the taste of matcha (pond slime).
- You will eat a lot of street food. Food that isn't served in a polystyrene container and consumed with a plastic/wooden fork will feel strangely wrong.
- You'll go to a house party somewhere in Zone 6. It'll take you two hours, three tube lines and two buses to get there. You'll have spent so much on transport, your only contribution to the event will be a £3.50 bottle of Sainsbury's Basics white wine that you were delighted to find in the bigger than average supermarket next to the tube. You won't even be embarrassed.
- You'll fall asleep on the tube and wake up in Morden.
- You will become over-friendly with every Uber driver you have, and every cab you take will feel like an in-depth chat with a very old school friend. You'll know details including (but not limited to): how many children they have, how long it took them to pay off their mortgage, and whether or not cab driving was their dream career.
- You'll accept some form of freelance paid work (helping someone's mate's mum move house OR writing a three line paragraph for someone's uncle's business website), and you will work the job for £10. This will feel lucrative.
- You will post an edgy venue (see above) on your Instagram story. When people ask about it in shocked tones, you'll act like you're a regular and you go there all the time. You'll probably throw in an anecdote about who they commissioned for the art on the walls/which unknown but obviously very cool DJ was playing when you went/where they source their organic agave nectar from for the cocktails.
(Three years later, you'll read this very list that started on your iPhone notes section on a number 19 bus ride home three years ago, and you will curl up and cringe in shame at your former naïve self. Cos you're a REAL London gal now, dontcha know...)
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