Skint in the shadow of the Shard
London, I love you, but my patience is wearing thin. Marking over two years together, my longest relationship to date, sometimes I wonder if it's time to call it quits.
Shovelling spoons of tuna pasta salad into my mouth, London’s skyline looks back at me. This is by no means our first date, but still, I should probably try to eat with more decorum when sat opposite such a lavish gent. I find myself perching at this spot when the promise of summer finally creeps in and pushes away the bitterness of bleak nights, when the merciless rain and oppressive clay-hued sky turns into a sunray softly pecking your eyelid awake. The Shard and the Gherkin look back at me blankly— it’s impossible to read their expression. Is it indifference? Detachment? We lock eyes for longer: smugness, even contempt. The skyline sneers at another twenty-something trying to make it in the Big Smoke. Another hopeful adventurer enlisted in the art of living out their promised hay days within the realms of the Underground map.
But even as I never stray from being in awe of the metallic blue and grey kaleidoscope of the City, eating cheap tuna pasta and the remains of my withering fridge-drawer salad facing its grandeur is not quite the Groucho club glamour, endless parties and thrills promised to me in the Tumblr-era candid shots of Alexa Chung and the hot girls of the 2010s snapped falling out of parties. The reality is rather more bleak, think Kerry Katona getting axed from being the poster girl for Iceland. A dependence on my credit card, boycotting the Tube, and leaving the pub after two drinks because any more and the bailiffs will be coming for the debt I’ve accrued that night.
“But sir, I was just trying to have fun,” I’d say as they ask to take this very pink MacBook—the most expensive thing I own and perhaps my only financial asset.
My phone was second to the Mac, until last Friday. After an unfortunate chain of events, it pretty much blew up. It all started the weekend before—my handbag, containing my legit and loyal Apple charger, got nicked at the pub—alongside my Charlotte Tilbury lipstick, wallet, ID and keys.
The phone narrowly escaped, hanging on unscathed in my jacket pocket. I ordered the first available charger on Amazon prime. Next thing I know, I’m having an angelic clean-girl Friday which began with the hottest spin class ever (thanks to the world’s sexiest spin instructor). After this, I euphorically trotted around the park in a sun-drenched haze, FaceTiming my friend. Then I went home, plugged my phone in before going to sleep, and my life blew up—quite literally.
A strange hissing noise turned out to be the burning plug. Luckily, I noticed and yanked it out of the socket in a panic, but it was too late. My iPhone 14 was more fried than the skin of a resident Benidorm boomer. Now, a broken phone isn’t the end of the world, but it was another spanner in the works in a very long series of spanners. It's unbelievable how a touch-screen rectangle is our passport into existing in the modern world and how utterly screwed we are without them.
I don’t mean to be the out-of-touch personification of a first-world problem, but life in this city has been testing me. For the past eight months or so, I feel like an evil hex has haunted me as I desperately try to find the fuel that lights my ever-optimistic fire. There are so many things I can’t get into online, but the ones that add to the general malaise and have caused my recent screaming-into-pillow outbursts look like this: rodents (first mice, then bedbugs), TfL charges, £8 pints, ever-growing grocery costs, spending all my wages two weeks into the month thanks to rent and bills accounting for over 50% of my income, and leering dirty old men on every high street, not to be confused with the men I’ve dated (who I might as well have picked up off the street).
It’s a nasty cycle of glistening sparkly hope on the horizon, then the brutal reckoning of reality. Just when the city’s magic feels tangible, within reach, it blows away down the Thames and I’m left having briefly grasped the dust of the promise before it bolts—leaving me scorned, but marked by it. A teasing amuse-bouche, just enough to know how delectable it is but I am left starving. It’s like falling for an emotionally unavailable man who blinds you with a hypnotic hologram of his potential. Straggling a relentless hamster wheel, maybe this is just adulthood? One minute you’re up, then you’re quickly humbled. But would it be easier to manage elsewhere? Where would I go? Move home to suffocate at my parents’ house in Derby? (Yes, I acknowledge I’m extremely lucky to have this option) Starting over again in another city where I don’t know anyone? Moving abroad is pretty much out of the equation for me right now: a) because of Brexit and b) if I wanted to travel, I’d only be able to save money if I were to move home.
It feels like we all signed into a scam. The Pied Piper led us towards his promise of wealth, stability and fulfilment, down the garden path of higher education and then onto the promised land of the big city. We grew up with our parents already on the property ladder. Stable. They reaped the sweet fruits of capitalism’s promise one Next Directory and package holiday at a time. They managed through the global financial crisis in 2007, and ten years of Tory cuts, until now, where we carry the burden of splitting the food shop in three and live under the constant threat of increasing rent or an astronomical leccy bill sneaking out of the blue to come and knock the wind out of your sail. Why did 2008 millennial skint seem chic? How were they still rocking up to the club to stamp out the anxiety of financial uncertainty in their stilettos? They said a collective fuck it in unison as they got low in Apple Bottom jeans, but as a Gen Zer I can’t even afford a ticket, and the club as an institution is going extinct.
A millennial called Helen McPherson has been sharing her nostalgic musings on the golden pre-financial crash days of 2000s clubbing with no money. “You didn’t have any money or you were waiting for payday. That didn’t mean you couldn’t go out. You could go out for £20 easily, or you could go to the bank in your lunch hour after you’d been to the sunbed shop and ask them to, like, extend some sort of overdraft or consolidate all your debts in like 10 minutes,” she shared in the viral video. Now, I know being poor is very much synonymous with being in your twenties, and I know one day I might reminisce through rose-tinted spectacles—but right now I feel conned. A TransUnion study found Gen Z (ages 22–24) in late 2023 earned around $45,493, whereas Millennials at the same age in 2013 earned $51,852 , which has been adjusted for inflation. Through the COVID-tinged student days, to slogging my guts out in a sandwich fast food chain for years to pay my way through university, to now—feeling worse off than when I wasn’t in a ‘real’ job.
But then another summer’s evening arrives. I go back to my balcony, watch the sunset over the glistening grid of rectangles in the distance, and feel an unmistakable contentment. Here I am, sat in my perch with a gin tin, and all the characters and stories I haven’t yet uncovered lie ahead. A pang to reach out and grab the pages and flick through all the adventures, plots, and twists waiting ahead. Walking hand-in-hand down Brick Lane in the afterglow of a sun-soaked day, giggling with my friend over a ridiculous frozen pink cocktail on Broadway Market in the warm-up to a much-awaited weekend. I feel myself falling again. Maybe he’s a con artist and will rinse me for all I’ve got. But maybe, just maybe, this testing, turbulent lover—London—will finally reciprocate my affection.