BoBAR

Bored. Beyond All Recognition. Why haven't I written for weeks, oh demanding readers? Because I have absolutely nothing to report. Nothing. And I'm not one of those people that says nothing and in reality just means 'nothing that is scandalous enough to make Heat magazine'. I MEAN nothing. I'm starting to doubt the whole meaning of my existence.

I have not been this bored since the International Whaling Commission meeting at 11pm on a Friday night last year, where I had to sit in the office (or rather, outside the door smoking and looking melancholy in the hope that Mr Unrequited would take pity and stay - he didn't, but he did give me a cigarette to while away the next three hours) waiting until some godforsaken hour so I could post the results on the Greenpeace website. I remember that night looking ahead to the same empty calendar, seemingly for the next twenty years. Funnily enough, that was pretty much exactly a year ago - hopefully it's cyclical.

I miss my heady days of flitting off to Tokyo on a romantic whim or booking trips to New York to see horrendous cheap daytime tv filmed (oh yes and attend the MoMA of course), or even getting bundled off to a toxic waste dump in Korea. I miss Stockholm summers with a variety of friends to call on for brunch, impromptu wine, or an inevitable thousand beers, usually starting in the sun after work and ending in the sun in the early hours of the next morning, probably with a midnight swim on the way. I miss having my life socially engineered by Team Sweden. Irina was right - how long do you want to be on the way to somewhere else? she asked. Good bloody question.

But since leaving Sweden, and despite the best efforts of Team London (I rather suspect that Team London's stamina is not quite up to Team Sweden's especially after a rather unfortunate evening of drunkenness and debauchery involving a bank holiday weekend, kebabs and 'shenanigans,' as Jonathan would say), I have struggled to do anything more exciting than eat, work and sleep (in my tiny tiny room). Too much of my own company is actually starting to drive me a little bit crazy - I'm afraid I'm going to start muttering to myself on the tube and hanging out at the local Sainsburys (the one that makes you feel like you're in a war zone...more about that later) yelling at the kids.

Sure - I could go to the all-night Alien-fest at the British Film Institute, I could go to see Swedish band The Concretes or The Sounds next week, or I could even go get yelled at by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay at his new gastropub - but... I would have to do all those things alone.

This is the worst thing about moving cities/countries, and even worse when you know you left something good behind and just can't see how to build it again. I have a feeling I'm going to be watching a lot of Jake Gyllenhaal movies and single-handedly keeping the manufacturers of Green & Black's vanilla bourbon ice-cream racking up a healthy profit for quite a while yet.