My space, your space, our space

London can be a trap. I spend so much energy on the day-to-day, tube-to-work, hand-to-mouth drudgery, it's hard to lift my eyes from feet and plan for better times (in sunnier climes). Lately I've felt restless, like I want to go home and get a mortgage, or start my own business.

Nomes echoed my thoughts yesterday, when she said she was sick of the survival mode in London, and she wanted to go home to Australia and 'build something'. What she wants to build wasn't clear or elaborated on, but I understood exactly.

Don't get me wrong. London can be fantastic, but finding the gems can be a scramble as you face bastardly opponents at every turn. Living here is a bit like trying to scratch your intials in marble with nothing but toothpick.

Nomes is particularly bitter, as she is being evicted this weekend - all last minute no notice. Yet another case of not having any rights as an underpaid immigrant in this city. She's a legal immigrant and yet she's still having trouble trying to create something of herself in this place.

It went something like this. She moved in with a girl she considered a friend and a colleague. She never signed a lease, and was sub-letting the room in the house. She thought that this girl and her were fairly close. They shared chocolate on the couch most evenings. Back home - eating chocolate and drinking wine on the couch is considered the domain of best friends. Not here, evidently, as this girl, inexplicably, turns to Nomes and says 'You have to move out by the end of the week because my sister is moving in'. You wouldn't treat a dog like that.

This is the same girl that turned around to her friend with cancer and said 'i can't be your friend anymore, because you're too negative'.

Nomes is not in a panic. She's quite calm about it, being a 6-year veteran to this kind of treatment had helped her roll with the punches. What troubled me was that she was questioning herself for geting into this situation, instead of this country.

'I think I melt into people. I thought she was my friend and I wouldn't do that to her, I assume people will treat me the way I treat them. I keep making that mistake over and over again.'

Please, Nomes, don't let London turn you into a drone. It's a big city and, like all big cities, it attracts the cold and heartless. But there's plenty of great stuff and great people too! (Everyone I speak to says looking for the good is too exhausting to bother).

She said it best when she said it was a cultural difference based on deprivation.

'People here feel deprived of everything. Sunlight, fresh air, fresh food, good money. What they do have, they hold onto fiercely and feel no guilt in taking things away from other people. Everyone in the city is in survival mode. At home, we have such an abundance, we feel nothing about sharing it. What's it going to hurt us, because there is plenty more. But here, everyone's out for themselves.'

Sadly, I can see the Australia she left behind only 6 years ago is different to the place I left only 2 years ago. There's less of the little Aussie battler, and 'she'll be right, mate' attitude, and more blatant racismm unacceptance of cultures, and paranoia about threats. I blame Howard. Squarely.

Anyway - off topic - but not really - this whole wanting to build something brings me onto the popularity of MySpace. It's a global phenomenon where's there's space for everyone! Lily Allen is being hailed as the next bright young thing over here. Personally, I tend to counter claims of 'next big things' with a healthy dash of cynicism, but I do admit she's got something. She's a londoner, she;s young, she'd got some good tunes and she's managed to build something of herself at the 'tender' (although she doens't seem that fragile to me) age of 21.

I'm now straddling the older generation, and Lily is the next gen, and she's got a better handle on what MySpace means:

"If you make music, as I and many others do, and want to share it with people, on something like this (myspace), people pick up on it and news spreads fast, theres nothing you can do to stop it , it's just the way things are these days. From my point of view , and the reason I am saddened by [Caroline Sullivan's Guardian article] is because people (maybe of an older generation) cannot differentiate between hype (in the old school sense) and genuine interest (from genuine punters), maybe not record buyers but music lovers all the same. The passage I find particularly confusing: 'Of late, the whole thing has snowballed, and Allen - daughter of comedian Keith - now finds herself the focus of great expectations without actually having done anything.'... saying I have 'done nothing' suggests that making an album, sharing it with you lot and gaining a fanbase (1,300,000 plays) counts for fuck all, and that, I feel, is a little on the ignorant side. ... We live in very different times now, we have the the internet and it is an amazing promotional tool, it saves money and time, and if people can't see that's very exciting, then I feel sorry for them."