A week ago I saw the old woman sit on the very ledge to London. They have punched - stabbed – a hole in Charing Cross Road and then sealed it, digging to the right instead. There are a few older houses in the middle of one of the busiest places in London, and there are still flats. The buildings themselves are from the 1900´s. They have torn down many buildings here now. But there, on what is suddenly a balcony out into a building site and traffic, with her apartment behind her, sitting in January weather, an old woman on a chair, smoking a cigarette as I pass by on a bus below.
She lives in what used to be hell in London: St Giles, the sink, home of the poorest of the poor. Now behind her, it is remade in huge skyrises that looks like made out of plastic and steel, a child´s toys where the people used to live in squalor and deprivation that is hard to even believe of London in the Victorian 1800´s.
One day the trains are cancelled. Sunday. Going back, I forget, and go to the station anyway. Sent on a run-around for buses that turn out not to exist I finally come to another platform, for another train, and go to another suburb where I have to change, and manage to get the right bus and then the right train. Flustered, tired, I think, the silly things we do with our life.
Rain, on the night streets of London. Chinese voices behind me on the bus.
Thinking. Preparing for the coming semester. Taking that breath before diving in. No, that´s wrong: I don´t think like that. Just already in there, planning.
I am now studying full time at two universities in two different countries. At least they´re on the same continent. Doing full time through web-based studies in Sweden lets me get the student loans I should have gotten for the course in England...ridiculous.
Bought more books: pediatric acupuncture, ear-acupuncture, Daoist classical healing practices through chinese medicine and ritual...and more needles. Sitting here in a Starbucks, writing this, a moving unit in the middle of creative chaos.
