In October I started working in a restaurant part time. I answered an ad that a friend sent to me on instagram looking for chefs. The restaurant was in the old Tramshed building in Shoreditch, one of the largest restaurant spaces in London. It used to belong to Mark Hix, whose restaurant group went bankrupt at the start of the pandemic. It is open for debate why it was that someone thought now would be a good time to go headlong into re-opening a cavernous restaurant in East London, right in the heart of London’s ‘tech roundabout’ at a time when tech companies are competing with each other for who can keep their employees working from home the longest and when it seemed pretty inevitable that new government guidelines would soon be introduced. Still, large venues like that are money-sinks and capital (and nature) abhors a vacuum so someone inevitably was going to fill it. When Hix was in charge the restaurant famously had a Damien Hirst cow suspended in formaldehyde hanging from the ceiling. The administrators removed it at a cost of £70,000. Apparently they had to bring a small crane and some armed guards to protect it from potential theft (it is worth a few million pounds) as it was loaded into a truck without much ceremony. I was set to work part time while writing but my hours were cut from 25 a week to zero when the tier 3 rules came in. I lasted three weeks.
I am living in my god-sisters apartment which she rented for the length of her masters degree. She is no longer in London because of our poor record of managing the virus and the risk contracting covid would pose to her because of underlying respiratory problems. The apartment is built on the site of the old Middlesex hospital and my nearest main streets are Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. It is very strange to live in the dead centre of a bustling metropolis and realise quite how unliveable the centre has become. There are infinite options for me to indulge in luxury retail, but it’s pretty difficult to buy an aubergine. Late nights cycling back from the restaurant I would cycle down Tottenham Court Road where there are now 7 large empty shop fronts; exciting new retail opportunities. After 9pm you barely see anyone along the street. Underneath the awnings of Heals and Habitat, two furniture stores, there is now a tent city of the homeless. There are about 20 tents on any given night. There are spot lights in the stores illuminating the empty beds they are selling. Sometimes as you cycle past you can see the silhouettes of people sitting upright in their tents, cast in stark relief by the store lights.
One of the quirks of this apartment is that it’s haunted. Perhaps that’s a factor of it being built on the site of an old oncology hospital or partly its haunted by the ghost of capital returns that haven’t quite come through. This luxury development came on stream in 2016, i.e. had been planned and funded in a world in which Brexit seemed inconceivable and London property had an inexorable return of anywhere from 10-33% year on year. Now, second wave of pandemic and no-deal Brexit imminent the block is largely empty. There are eight apartments on my floor and I have only met the neighbours in one of them. At night I look out at the other buildings (there are 6 in total) and can see roughly fifty apartments. Most evenings I only see 3 apartments with lights on. One time a package was left on my doorstep which was for the same apartment number in the next building. I went and knocked on their door, but predictably no-one was in. I went and dropped the package off on the concierge and they told me that no-one had been in since March. In that entire building. One of the few apartments that is occupied is directly opposite my own apartment, but one floor down in the next building over. The apartments all have giant glass windows floor to ceiling which was probably a great selling point when these apartments were an architectural rendering but which when filled with people means no-one has any privacy. I live in an aquarium, is how I feel on mornings when I wake up and pull the blinds up to see my naked form reflected in my neighbours kitchen window. That neighbour below me, she sits in the same chair everyday, on zoom calls from morning to night. Behind her on the wall is a canvas with the Hermes logo on it. Most days when I wake up she is already on zoom. Some nights she is still zooming after dinner, and long into the late evening.
The day before I was alerted by NHS track and trace that I had been exposed to the virus and was very likely infected, I went on a date to a sensory deprivation tank. I am a sucker for irony, so the fact that the last thing I did before having to completely isolate myself from the world was to completely isolate myself from the world is just fine with me. I had never used a sensory deprivation tank before. It is a giant egg shaped bath that is fully enclosed. In the water is over 500kg of salt which means you are perfectly buoyant. When the lid of the bath closes there is no light inside and there is no sound after a short intro of chimes and new-age pipe music that plays to get you in the mood. As the last panflute silences itself you are left floating in the dark. I did not hallucinate or have an out of body experience, as some people say they do. Sometime during the session I realised that I had been able to listen to my breath for a while and had not thought about much at all. I felt that had I done this even five years ago there would be no way that I would have gotten through a session without the voice in my head being so loud that I would have had to bail (I wonder how many people don’t manage the full hour and end up sitting near the egg, playing on their phone). I was, in that moment, comfortable enough in myself to just be. It was beautiful. There is something sad, of course, about whatever it is in late capitalism that has managed to package up our silence and sell it back to us. I felt that, keenly, as I bobbed along in suspended animation, aware of how unique it was to be so comfortably alone and blissfully unstimulated. It felt strange to be so alive to the fact that growth in this context was just being able to sit with myself quietly, without being wracked with doubts or feeling I should be being productive doing something else (and thus becoming ‘better’ at whatever that thing was, so I could like myself more). I am usually good at knowing, without looking at a clock, how much time has passed. Maybe it is because I am Swiss or maybe it is because I have cooked for so long, but I usually have a good sense of what an hour feels like. This time I did not. Time had no anchor. What a privilege, to escape the market logics of time for just a moment. The panflutes sounded, meaning my hour was nearly up, and some moments later the egg opened itself. I showered and went back to the world. The next morning I found out I had to isolate, and a few days later I started losing my sense of smell. I tested positive for corona and had to text everyone I had met the past few days to warn them. I got supplies together because I wouldn’t be able to leave the house for two weeks. I felt Isolated and sensorily deprived.
Before I started my ill-fated restaurant job I went to Margate for a few days. It was the end of September and on the first day it was so windy you could open your jacket and feel like you were about to take off. Before this year I had never really visited the British seaside, but this year in lieu of foreign travel I have been to a bunch of resort towns. Margate is dilapidated in a chic way, with the Turner Contemporary gallery, a bunch of trendy restaurants, vintage shops and third wave coffee by the sea. The second day we were there the wind subsided and by mid-afternoon the sun had emerged from behind the grey sheen of clouds. We walked along the beach to Broadstairs. We dipped in the freezing water of some rock pools that had formed as the tide had started going out. As we changed back into our clothes we noticed, sat there on the damp sand, the body of a stingray. It’s tail had bent at the base and stood straight up into the air, and its wings had curled inwards. It was dead. It had obviously been caught in a small pool as the tide had gone out and had died as the water had drained out from under it. Now it was drying in the fading autumn sun. We called him Steve. Steve was beautiful and there was something gothic and romantic about his curled frame. The long tail sticking straight up in the air, as if signalling for rescue. We thought he’d probably dry out nicely, and make for a beautiful, if strange, memento mori. I packed him in my tote bag and we forgot about him as we continued our walk. The next day we woke up in our apartment to an intense smell. We couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I circled outside the building to see if it was the bins. It was not. It was definitely coming from inside, but we couldn’t tell from where. Eventually we tracked the smell down to Steve, hanging out in my tote bag still, draped over the corner of a chair in the kitchen. Shuffling the bag even slightly created such a strong stench of rotting fish we both nearly threw up. Out went the entire tote bag, my beach towel, and Steve. I guess we have a tendency to romanticise decline. Maybe sometimes decline isn’t beautiful. Sometimes it’s just rotten. Sometimes it stinks.
(photo by Sirui Ma)