Twenty four – Write Together

I had a couple of hours to kill before going to a comedy night; I checked my phone. The next event was called ‘write together’ and was going to take place in a café called Yumchaa, in Camden Town. I knew the street that the café was on, and knew the café, but had never been inside.

Yumchaa turned out to be a former pet shop that was once called Palmers. You only knew it was a tea shop by peering in through the window or noticing the sandwich board that was standing outside. The original shop hoarding was well maintained: it advertised ‘monkeys’ and ‘talking parrots’; clear evidence of a very different past.

I walked into the café and started looking for a man called Robert. Thankfully, he had made it very easy for me: he had put a sign on the table where he was sitting. Robert was a middle aged man who was surrounded by technology: an Apple laptop, an Apple tablet computer, and an iPhone. I shook Robert’s hand and introduced myself. I had seen a couple of these Write Together events before and was intrigued. I asked Robert asked whether it was okay to have a chat with him.

Write Together turned out to be a group that covers different areas of London. It’s a really simple concept: if you’ve got some writing work to do (irrespective of what it is), you head over to a nice place (which usually sells cake), and simply crack on with whatever writing you need to do. There are generally two parts to each Write Together event. The first part is the ‘get together and write stuff on your own’ bit. This then can be followed by a social event, where people get to chat, and perhaps have a meal or drink; it’s entirely up to whoever comes along and who does the hosting.

Robert lived in Camden and was a freelance copy writer and editor. He was also, apparently, trying to write screen play. I immediately understood the attraction of the group. If you’ve got stuff to do and you work at home, you can very easily go potty staring at the same four walls all the time: it’s a way to get a very welcome change of scene. He explained the rules: you can write whatever you want, ‘we’ve had people writing plays, poetry, and we’ve had some singer song writers’, but you must respect everyone’s space and privacy. It’s okay to talk, as long as you don’t disturb the others who are trying to do their stuff.

I fished around in my bag. I had come prepared: a pad of paper and a pen. I put these on the table, and then went to get a pot of tea.

We were soon joined by Ana. Ana taught Spanish at a sixth form college in London, but was also a part time novelist.

‘Have you had anything published?’

‘No, not yet, but I’m working on my second novel. I have it all planned out; I just have to write it now’. Ana’s novel was in Spanish.

David arrived. He was very tall, wore some studious looking spectacles and was impeccably dressed. He said a quiet hello, and sat down at our table.

This quiet time gave me an opportunity to reflect on where all this randomness was taking me. The fundamental questions were: where am I going, and have any of the groups I’ve been to given me any insight into what I would like to be doing for the rest of my life? Put it another way, have I found some stuff that I get really excited and passionate about? I thought of Chris who I met the other night: he seemed to be in a similar space, a space of existential anxiety. This connects to the profound question of: ‘is this it?’ Or, alternatively: ‘is this what it means to be a grown up adult?’, and ‘what else is there from life?’

Going to all these random events has become addictive. I enjoy the thrill of going to new places. I also enjoy the unexpected; the weirder and the more surprising the event, the more I enjoy them. There’s a passing realisation that I’m starting to become a Meetup junkie, but at the same time, I’m also becoming a London junkie too: my eyes are opening wider, and my city is becoming clearer and slightly more understandable – it is becoming less impersonal: the people that I meet are always friendly, approachable and willing to chat.

I never used to do things like this when I was married. Instead, I felt a strong desire to conform, to do the right thing, to have a steady job, to keep my head down and work so that I could try to build a home for a potential family, trying to satiate a desire that I couldn’t really articulate or put my finger on. I wanted to pay down the mortgage as quickly as possible, to create that illusion that is stability and security, fulfilling a masculine version of a nesting impulse.

The end of my ten year marriage was like a rug being pulled from under me, causing me to fall backwards and fracture my skull. In my injured state, many of my dreams seeped away; I quickly realised that I could never have what I was trying to build, and despite so many talks and so much effort, the idea of a joint enterprise, a family, had disappeared in the space of two long torturous days.

One of the hardest questions to ask when you are practically homeless and wandering around with a broken heart is: ‘now what?’ The simple and obvious stop-gap answers include activities such as going travelling, taking evening classes and learning how to ride a motorbike. Other answers that had crossed my mind included changing ones career, home, or even country.

Over the last year I had realised that I needed to find my own identity again.  For the sake of stability and security, I had supressed some of my idiosyncratic whims and fundamental passions.  I now see that when I was a part of a couple, I supressed too much; I placed the success of the marriage above myself. I know this because of a complete sense of being lost and confused.

I looked up from my notepad. David got up from his table and went to have a chat with two strangers. The strangers both spoke English with different accents. I overheard David telling them that he was making a film and asking what their names were and where they were from. I heard one of the visitors saying that she was from Cuba… David was 'on the pull'.

There are some things that I did know: that I’ve got a second chance, to again try to find that place of security, to do that whole ‘nesting’ thing again. But there is another question: do I really want to? Can I really be bothered? Is this really what really matters in life, to my life? In some respects, these thoughts, this lack of a firm direction was just a simple reflection that I was still hurting.

I realised that there was a simpler way to consider my predicament, and this is to just live, and to forget big dreams for a while. Perhaps the best way to be is to try to stop worrying, to enjoy, and let life offer simple nudges towards different directions, towards whatever it is that might one day be important.

In the café, two more people arrived. It was starting to fill up. There were a good number of tourists, happy to be sitting in a civilised place after having endured the commercial chaos of Camden Market.

I got up and asked for some more hot water for my pot of Earl Grey.

Another question I was gently mulling over was the kind of events that I would like to go to or experience. I do enjoy the technology events for the simple reason that they remind me about the reasons why I found technology interesting and fascinating. I then realised that I probably would need to find a pair of football boots and buy a cheap tennis racket from somewhere; I was pretty sure that I’ll have to go to some kind of sporting event at some point.

An hour and a half into the event, I was starting to feel maddeningly bored. I looked around the café once again and cursed my ‘bitter end’ rule. I had drunk two pots of tea, checked my email, written one Facebook status update, added three comments, and liked six stories.

Time had slowed down; I found it difficult to sit still. I realised that I had a great need to socialise and to chat to other people. I looked around.  I noticed Robert was googling books by Malcolm Bradbury and seemed to be listening to an audio book of George Orwell’s 1984 at the same time whilst writing something in a word processor. Ana was leafing through a notepad, and Dave was doing a very good job charming the Cuban woman. I looked at my watch: fifteen minutes to go.

By the time I had walked around the café and said hello to Katharyn who was sitting a couple of tables away, Robert had started to pack his things up. This was the call for me to go. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to go to the ‘phase two’ of the Meetup, since I had already agreed to meet some friends in a pub in Camden.

‘Come join us…’ I encouraged Katharyn, and Alicia, who were sitting close by.  I suddenly realised that I was potentially going to upset the whole dynamics of the group, so I left the question hanging in the air.

I returned to my table and packed my pen and notepad away. Even though I had been outrageously bored, I liked Yumchaa; they did good tea. I would be back.

I looked at my watch.  I had ten minutes to walk from one side of Camden to the other.  I stepped from the warm quiet of the café and onto a noisy street filled traffic and diesel fumes.  My destination was the pub that was next to the hidden river Fleet.

Footnote: the picture I've used above comes from a site called nickygrace.  Whoever you are, Nicky, two things.  The first thing: thank you, and secondly, I hope you don't mind!  It's a seriously great picture!