ajhaynes.net

Something appalling happened to me recently. I was swanning around an exotic continent, when boom! My money ran out. It was time to go home.

Farewell Guatemala, I will miss your smiling people and your rule free traffic. Goodbye mountain ringed Xela, you were an ugly town but you knew how to have a good time.

‘We had had a good time didn’t we?!’ I kept shouting as a representative from my bank in England bundled me onto the plane. Suddenly I had swapped the shores of volcanic lakes, some of the most beautiful places I had ever been for the puddly curbs of London town. In mere hours technology had sucked me half way around the world, back into the West, back into the old world. Airports, nerves, that weird pata-cake of duty free as they hand you your booze then take it away then hand it back…and then…and then…

London! The vastness, the drizzle, the sheer difference. How could this compare to the freedom of traveling? It was then I decided something…as I stood in Heathrow’s tube station I thought ‘Why stop traveling?’ I always felt I had never got the best out of London. What if I approached my own home town with the same wonder and freedom that you get from somewhere new? Go to all the places I hadn’t been, try the best of the traditional, sample the most exotic subcultures - dance not commute! I would holiday at home!

Well alright I didn’t think it quite as neatly as that. It was more ‘God I hate being home.’ and ‘Why doesn’t anyone bring their chickens on the Tube?’

Still all I needed was an excuse to get out there and this blog is it…I want to write about London as if I had never been there before. It really is a jungle this place -the people, the bars, the parties. I want to see it new. Starting today! Yes, yes, yes.

So here’s the deal with my blog. Coming soon I will be forming up a list of adventures-nightclubs, parties, soirees, launches, galleries, events. All that shallow media malarkey (where I ring up plummy PR girls and demand free tickets) but I also want to write a genuine blog about what it is really like to live in London, my personal experience of it. That way you’ll get a taste for the real town and I get to put my feet up from time to time.

Truth be told I am worried. Am I really party boy? Readers we shall see. I have one lined up so far, a Byronic party held under the Lord Mayor’s Stables. I have a feeling it is going to be lots of aristocrats in their knickers and let’s face it that can’t be bad!

Perhaps this blog be my moral downfall? A mad dynamo that parties me into my grave when all I wanted was a mortgage and a nice DVD from time to time?

Only time will tell! What I do know is I want to love London again, ‘cos readers believe me this town can be a handful.