The Essex Girl Guide To City Life

 The Reluctant Commuters Guide to Commuting

Get An Oyster Card. Then Find Out What The Hell An Oyster Card Is.

You can’t officially class yourself as anything resembling a ‘Londoner’ unless you own an oyster card- a strange blue piece of plastic that you slap everywhere from buses to trains apparently saving money. I can never work out all the differences between a paper travel card, pay as you go, or how the hell to work out which (if either) is better for your bank balance. The key is to not jam it into ticket slots when you’re half asleep at Liverpool street station. Its slap, not jam, slap not jam guys, and this key phrase will ensure you won’t blow your cover as having no idea whatsoever about London, commuting or how the hell to cope with early mornings.

 Watch Out For Random Parades Of Horses.


Cars aren’t really the hazard in London town I’ve found, mainly because they’re too many of them tangled with black cabs and buses to go very fast. The main hazard commuters should be wary of are cyclists,  creatures that ride a fine line(literally) between being a pedestrian and motorist, crossing the line when it suits them, ignoring traffic lights when they’re red and switching to pedestrian mode as they continue the other way in line with the green man. Cyclists love to guess when the light are going to turn green and think, ‘what the hell, it’ll probably be green in a few seconds,’ striding off into the sea of cars, seemingly unaware of the pedestrians not leaving the appearance of a green light down to guesswork.

The other hazard to watch for is horses. Some Londoners sweat through Hyde Park in spandex and expensive looking trainers with springs in them at 7.30am, some Londoners take their horses out for a ride before their morning espresso. There is a separate lane in the park for horse riding as well as the cycle lane (a lane I often wander into with my headphones on, oblivious to angry bike bells being rung at me by people in  aggressive looking helmets and knee protection).  A Horse parade caught me off guard one morning across Marble Arch-  a 40 beast strong line towing carts and Cannnons  ridden by various  stern looking men and women in stiff looking uniform. Horse parades do not stop at traffic lights I discovered, even when it was a green man I couldn’t cross the road for hooves and carts. I was rather indignant.

Don’t Go Shopping On The Way Home

You may think your being clever in avoiding the devil that is rush hour but its far more likely that you’ll get into hazardous situations..
I leisurely browsed the shoes in a high street shoe store before strolling out and was half way down the road when I felt someone tapping me on the shoulder
“You dropped your shoe.”
I pulled out my headphones. “My what?” I looked at the girl who was helpfully holding out a shoe in my direction. A shoe with a grey plastic security tag on it.

The shoe had become attached to my bag that had a woolly cardigan through the handles as I left the shop, then dropped on the pavement, but the girl was now looking at me, then the tag, then back at me as slowly she came to her conclusion. Before she could cry ‘Thief!’ I hastily interject-,
“It’s not mine.”
Good one. Because no thief has ever used that line.
The girl doesn’t move and is still holding out the shoe, now slightly unsure of what to do next. I decide that honesty is the best policy;
“It just got caught on my bag on the way out.” She doesn’t believe me. I try a different tactic. “Just chuck it in the bin.” Now she definitely doesn’t believe me.
 “The bin?”
Christ will this child give up?? 

At this point I wish I had just said thank you, taken the shoe and taken it back to the shop, rectifying the mistake instead of somehow now being involved in theft and destroying the evidence. The girl skirts over to the bin, chucks the shoes and scuttles off not looking back at me. We’re going down.

Don’t Use The Toilet On Trains.

 This is very good advice. Perhaps even better advice would be ‘press the brightly lit LOCK icon before dropping your knickers.’ Being slightly neurotic when it comes to small spaces, locks and trains, this particular combination meant that I decided not to lock the door. Hindsight they say, is a beautiful thing. I don’t quite know the logic of my erratic thinking, mainly because there usually isn’t any- but it led to the following scene being  played out: I was sitting on the toilet seat, and the wide sliding door slid open, ever-so slowly, painfully slowly until I was rather well acquainted with my fellow commuters. There was a bashful silence as the commuters best quality came into play- the ignoring of ALL things past the end of their nose- people singing, people trying to talk to you, people on the phone: a commuter has a little force field around them that protects them from any kind of human contact or emotion until they get into the office, whereby thy suddenly seem to be able to interact again.

I silently press the brightly lit ‘close the fucking door’ icon and it slides gracefully shut and I wonder if it would be plausible to just stay in here until my stop, or perhaps just until forever.

Don’t Trust Your Blackberry Sat Nav.

 I’ve spent a rather embarrassing amount of time wandering around the city unable to look up from the little black thing that has grown into an extension of my hand. The main problem is that for some reason my sat nav puts St Pauls cathedral 10 metres east of where it actually sits, and being a rather large landmark, this slightly confused my geographic understanding of Bank and Cheapside. Considering my train out of the city lies somewhere between all that, it took a while to get home that first week. ‘Blackberry-itus’ is the realization that even though there must have been a time where you didn’t actually own one, it’s so implausible, it sounds like a myth. It is an old legend that people coped without bbm, facebook, twitter and emails pouring out of one screen, letalone texts and actual phone calls. A blackberry or I phone is like a city passport along with the oyster card: they won’t let you in the city walls without one.



Beware Of Men In Suits

There is a rule me and my fellow amigas have discovered up here; that men automatically look 20% better looking when you put them in a suit. This makes the east side of central London a rather tricky place as you can imagine- rather like an optical illusion where seemingly good looking, successful males gather in herds and throw money around.  It’s not until you get a little closer that the illusion looses it’s shine slightly -give a young man too much money and a room rent free in his parent’s house, the product doesn’t exactly scream boyfriend material… The more I watch the jungle between Liverpool st and Fenchurch st, the more I wonder whether they live in the same London as everybody else- this strange faction whereby a culture of wanker-ish behaviour is cultivated from a young age, fed with food, beer and bonus’s …  (Miaow)

Always Have A Plan B.  (i.e Diazpam.)

 If you afraid of the tube, then it’s nothing short of unfortunate if the geography of your office requires you to sit on it for long periods. Everyday.

I don’t quite know how to even expand on this sentence, the understatement that it is, so the advice I’ll offer for now is, you have to really want it, for it to be worth it.

I have always harboured this sense that there are two types of Londoners; those that get on the tube, and those that do not. I can’t quite pinpoint my desperation to be one of those placid commuters who show no recognition of discomfort or anxiety at being stuffed in to a steel tube a hundred meters underground, but I really want to be one of those people, because I decided somewhere along the line that for whatever reason, that what Londoners are. The only problem lies in the fact that even writing that makes me feel ill, and I spent the first days of my city life paying 30p to wretch in station toilets at the thought of the central line I then had to get on, and would only get on knowing my pockets were lined with diazepam. Just in case. 

I have never once been late for work though.