Exactly three years ago, I wake up at my ex girlfriend parents / formally our old summer cabin outside Skelleftehamn. The night before this morning some of my friends had held a farewell party for me there - waving me goodbye as I was about to leave for my 7 month long internship in London.
That was three years ago.
So I arrived on Tuesday the 19th of August 2003. Karl Tyselius meet me at Edgware Road tube station and told me the latest gossip of the flat and London as he walked me home to the flat at Frampton Street.
My first evening in London was spend with really nice friends in a Italian restaurant on Edgware Road. I had carbonara, a glass of red and it cost me £7.
Below is a piece of text I wrote for my then current website a few months after I arrived… or more exactly 890 days ago. I quite like it, and I do believe it belongs in this post.
If you are about to call someone in this country, and you not happen to be in it yourself - the story begins, like this one, with 0044.
In this weird 0044 country, were people still insist on driving on the left side of the road, I will stay (not until they realize that driving on the right side can be quite a good idea, nor until they start to use the metric system I, or others by the way, can understand and find useful, but…) for a while.
The hard truth is that you will not find me back in my beautiful home country, country 0046 (normal traffic, metric system), for the next -890 days.
Until then - take care, and don’t hesitate to begin the 0044 story sometimes to drop a “hello” or a “how are you feeling today my good old friend?”, because I may need it from time to time (It’s not because I believe I will miss 0046, my friends and family that much - I’ll survive, it’s more…) to make sure that everything is still fine outside the protecting walls of the land where people like Blair, Tracy Lords, Liam and Noel pay their taxes, the land of James Bond and Roger Moore, the land with the number zero zero four four.
