The Internet Personified: See it, say it, sorted

Notes from London and beyond

• I came up with a term in therapy for what I’m feeling, just back from London, already immersed in my Berlin life. Emotional jet lag. Which is when your external self is already in its daily routine, grocery shopping and going to the library and seeing friends and switching your summer clothes for your winter ones etc and your internal self is still stepping outside the Airbnb you had on Ridley Road Market and making a right towards the Marks and Spencer Food Hall. As you walk through Berlin, flashes of your two week holiday persist, overlaid almost over all the normal daily things you do. Your feet find a rhythm through fallen leaves, you pull your hood up against the rain and yet, your brain is still doing complicated maths about how much a glass of wine costs even though you know you don’t need to any more. This happens to me when I come back from India as well, as though my body may have travelled but my mind needs a few days to catch up. I don’t think human beings were made for commercial flights, ultra fast travel, two hours from London to Berlin, eight hours to New Delhi, because what is eight hours when you consider how much you crossed, how many changes swiftly went on?

  

• First: Torquay. The festival was fantastic, the volunteers super friendly, the audience engaged. I was so nervous about speaking that I rehearsed my whole speech, printed out on fifteen well-spaced pages, and as a result: I spoke better than I ever have! What a nice thing to discover about yourself in your forties. This was my first public speaking event since COVID, not counting the small book launch I did here in Berlin for when Soft Animal came out. Also being around several fellow Agatha Christie lovers made me appreciate her even more. I didn’t think I wanted to read any more Christie for a long time (research is hard!) but now I think I’ve whetted my appetite once more. Torquay is a cute little English seaside town, K and his friend actually managed to stay out till 3 am partying but I sensibly refrained and went to bed at 11 pm. Also because I was exhausted, we had a series of disasters landing in London; first the Airbnb lockbox containing the key was EMPTY and it was MIDNIGHT so no one was picking up the phone. We wandered around London looking for a hotel and every place was full and it felt very Mary and Joseph looking for an inn, except, like, no baby Jesus to make everyone feel bad afterwards. FINALLY, we checked into a mixed dorm at a hostel, with only one other person in attendance, but that someone (extremely quietly in his defence) went for a run early in the morning and that woke me up, as someone rustling around your hotel room will do, even if you’re expecting it. Second, once we were en route to Torquay the bus’s luggage compartment refused to close so we made several very long extra stops—apparently the new electronic buses refuse to start if the luggage compartment is open so my idea of just putting the suitcases on board and carrying on was not practical—and finally stopped completely in the town of Exeter where we waited for another hour before the bus driver called it and sent us off to catch trains or buses to our final destinations. Lucky for us, there’s a very pretty little train that wasn’t super expensive that took us all the way to Torquay meandering down ocean shores and the bus driver said to hang on to receipts and the company would reimburse us. As did Airbnb in the end, but it’s a hard way to get all your money back for a journey. The bus was full of senior citizens, including one lady who was raising her ADHD grandson and she had been travelling since 1 am the previous day so she nearly wept when we were told to hop off. She couldn’t afford a train so they had to go to the local bus station and try their luck there.

• London is to K what Delhi is to me, so I let him choose the areas we were staying in and also take over the Airbnb bookings. We stayed in the East for all three of our Airbnbs, the first (disastrous) one was in Whitechapel, the second was a converted warehouse by the River Lea, adjoining an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, and the third was in Dalston, perhaps my favourite area of all three, being as it was super gentrified while retaining some grime (we were in the middle of a huge African diaspora wet food and vegetable market so the smell of meat and fish hit you as soon as you exited), because I’ve realised that as a tourist I want two things from my experience: the area should be lively enough to have loads of things to do and the public transport should be easy and straightforward with things not too far away. As a local, I’m sure I’d feel differently, but it was nice to be in a trendy part of town. The warehouse was the prettiest though, it was sort of a communal building filled with artists and they had the most gorgeous sit out at the back where you could watch the river and drink your coffee. There was barely any rain while we were there so it was beautifully sunny, not at all what I associate with England, which in my imagination (and previous experience) has always been wet and cold. Actually come to think of it, my neighbourhood in Berlin is like that: gentrified to fuck, grimy, and with super public transport in every direction. Maybe I’m just spoiled.

• Actually the Berlin connection for us came in very useful. I get so bored of saying I’m from India, I mean you can see I’m from India, there are a lot of us, it’s not very exciting. Don’t get me wrong: I’d rather be from India than from Germany because of a variety of things not limited to my history, my culture, my food and my language/s, but I felt like answering the question differently while on holiday. “Where are you from?” “I live in Berlin.” Not inaccurate, and it sparked so many conversations. Turned out the Brits love Berlin, the sheer amount of books about Berlin I stumbled across in charity shops was testament to this. Our warehouse Airbnb host loves Berlin so much she spends a vast amount of time here, and we spent pleasant mornings discussing the city. Another time—and I think this is my best London story—I was rummaging through a second hand shop and the owner got chatting with me, and it turned out not only did he do half London half Berlin but one of his sons was a television actor and model who got given a lot of clothes on account of his celebrity and I bought one of his (the son’s) coats, which is beautiful and still gives me a thrill. This man told us to come over to his bar later, it was an old Dalston institution that K remembered from his time in London decades ago. It started out with a very grown up jazz bar playing to people eating fish dinners then TRANSMOGRIFIED into a nightclub, where the owner himself was a DJ and played all these songs from my own literal youth so I was jumping up and singing along till about 2 am. With the youths, who were also jumping and singing like they didn’t realise there was an actual person next to them who had heard the songs when they first released. You think you look young and then you’re surrounded by all these twenty somethings lush and youthful and you’re like, “Ah. I look young for my age.”

• We saw three plays. Here are the short reviews:

  • Viola’s Room by Punch Drunk Productions: The last time we were in London we did a Punch Drunk immersive theatre thing that was one of the highlights of our trip. That one was large, all the audience wore masks and there were real life actors. You could choose to follow one actor through the play or move from room to room and experience the scenes. I’m not sure what the eventual story was, but it didn’t matter because it was such a vast and transformative performance. This one featured no live actors, instead you had headphones where a story by Daisy Johnson was read out loud by Helena Bonham Carter and there were scenes that were just made up of different light and sound. It was very clever, especially since we had to take off our shoes and socks and the texture of the ground changed between rooms. 10/10 for lighting and set design, maybe a 5/10 for the story which didn’t really give us a good payout at the end. I missed the live actors and the feeling of getting lost but this performance was much cheaper and the timings were every hour on the hour, making it very convenient.

  • Slave Play which was a huge, if controversial success in the US, before moving to the West End. Starring Kit Harrington (!) (Jon Snow, ya) and Denzel Washington’s daughter and six other people, the play is about three sets of interracial couples who are doing radical therapy where the Black partner is pretending to be a literal SLAVE in the Antebellum South. There’s some sex on stage, and bits were uncomfortable watching and some parts of the dialogue really shone through but at 2.5 hours with no break we felt sort of washed out afterwards. Like everything that had to be said was already said on stage so there was nothing really for us to add. 7/10, I felt it could’ve been edited so not everything was spelt out for the audience. Give them some credit too!

  • The Band Back Together was my favourite. We walked into it by happenstance because we were having coffee next door to the theatre. A beautiful play about a set of childhood friends who were in a band and then life and adulthood happened and they drifted apart and now were coming together for a reunion. I was actually quite moist eyed during some of it which NEVER happens to me, because I am stern with my tears. It made me think about old friendships and growing up and growing apart and also about my art and my life. It also featured original songs that the three actors sang themselves which were also so lovely and atmospheric. 10/10, no notes.

• My whole time in London I read Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series. I’d already read the first two ages ago and remember them being excellent guides to the city as well. Yes, memory confirmed! I read five in a row and can now rattle off some very specific facts and figures as well as talk about magic in a non-Harry Potter way should you be that way inclined. You must pick them up for your next visit. There’s nine in this series about a magical cop, so lots to go on.

  

---

I mean, there’s loads more I could say, but these are the highlights. I had a lovely time and now I’m taking a little break from being on vacation before buckling down to my new novel once more. If you liked this edition or any of my others, feel free to drop a tip in my little virtual tip jar!

You can also share this edition because word of mouth is actually the best marketing practise.

Have a great week!

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

Follow me on Instagram. (Plus my book recommendation Instagram!) (Although I’m off Instagram these days, so really, this is the only place I come to chat.)

Forward to your friends if you liked this and to the end of summer blues which come inevitably to us all living in the Northern Hemisphere if you didn’t.

Also, write back to me! I love to hear from you.