Chase your dreams! Move to the big smoke!

Then move around it, and around it…

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

You think you’re — maybe not settling down. Settling anyway. A chat with the shopkeeper downstairs lasts for whole minutes now, though both of you are past the point where you could’ve swapped names. The guys at the Chicken Cottage who call you boss you’ve taken to calling it back. So you don’t have roots. But you have your routes. One for cycling, painstakingly plotted to avoid traffic and a violent death on the way to work. A bus route home so rutted in your muscle memory that even at 1am when you’re absent from your head you still manage to keep on track. The only change is when your agency calls.

The new temp job’s near one of the many stations you’ve been through but never to. And, for somewhere between a week and a year, that’s your life: the tail-end of a Tube line, a top deck bus ride past a mysterious park, your short-cut walk through the well-intentioned but crazily circuitous Google Maps route. You wake up masochistically early to work before work then don’t get much done than yawning and staring. Lunch hours you spend writing in a caff, afternoons hiding drafts inside spreadsheet cells.