Funnily enough, all my big stupid life adventures seem to begin in the rain. I’m counting this London sofa-surfing project as a ‘big stupid life adventure’ more to make me feel a teeny bit more optimistic about having to finish my university degree, which quite honestly, I don’t want much anymore. But I’ve come too far to quit, so now I’m here, on a train to London Waterloo after a year’s sabbatical away from this dreaded city, watching the rain streak diagonally down windows. Maybe there’s something symbolic about rain on Day One of my journeys. Something about rain clearing the air, making way for new growth, new life, prosperity and opportunity.
I’m not so sure.
I could feel the spirituality seep out of my body the minute I woke up, in a constant grumbly rush to get to the train station on time and dodge the rain. Everything annoyed me, from my dad harmlessly forgetting to pour me a cup of coffee to my raincoat being slightly harder to squeeze into my backpack than expected. I had this terrifying urge to scream, this all-encompassing anger, until I took a seat on the train and accepted the inevitable. This was London entering my system again, the impatience, bitterness, stress, and it was going to be quite the mission to suppress it, to focus instead on the hippie-like positivity I’d perfected over the last year.
At least, that’s what I thought. As if on cue, the rain cleared, the world seemed a bit more beautiful, and I rolled into Waterloo Station with a thrilling sense of anticipation in my bones. As if by reflex, I swiftly moved past dawdling people milling onto the platform and down the escalator to the Underground, didn’t even need to think about getting to the Northern line and was instead guided my by ever-intuitive feet, and slid into the carriage knowing I’d positioned myself exactly where the exit was on the other side. The body remembers everything, and it seems even a year’s worth of insane travel-filled memories wasn’t enough to make my brain forget London. I laughed to myself on the Tube, confused at the ease of it all. My return.
London is an interesting place for me. I was born here, lived in NW6 until I was six, and moved here again at the naive, fresh and optimistic age of 18, ready to inhabit MY city again, make it my home. And for two years it was. I fell in love, with the hustle and bustle, with the opportunity and confusion and chaos and sheer life that London gives you. I was in love with having uni, friends, job, flat, boyfriend, the ‘real’ London life success. In love with house parties and jazz nights and book stores and thrifting. In love with the thousand different worlds that all exist inside this one city. It’s always been beautiful to me, London has always been home. But just because it’s ‘home’ doesn’t mean it’s not hard.
London is also isolating, cold, rainy, abrupt, brutal and uncaring. It’s unfriendly and aggravating, depressing and drowning. It went wrong in the end, with friends, job, uni, boyfriend, flat, everything – I was unlucky and foolish, or naive and stupid, take your pick – but whatever it was, London became a nasty place for me, and I had to get out. Sometimes the loneliness suffocates you, the grind batters you, the cluelessness sinks your soul. I needed to see the world, escape the big city, understand who I was and what I wanted. All I knew back then was that I definitely didn’t want this London existence; working overtime in a pub full to the brim with sexist estate agents for pittance wage, just about keeping my head above water, in a uni degree I’d started to loathe, living in an overpriced flat with a small square box to call my room throughout Covid lockdowns, in an unhealthy relationship that made me more miserable day by day without realising. This wasn’t life, this wasn’t living. I needed to get out.
So I did, and I didn’t look back. I dropped my whole life, and spent over a year dodging every excuse to come back to this city, instead exploring Latin America, learning to surf, falling recklessly in and out of love, finding my passions, realising who I was always meant to be. I stayed as far as I could from London, from my friends, my ex, my former life, and I healed. Slowly. But I did. Somewhere in my deepest conscious I always knew I’d need to return, so until that day came I cast the city life aside, healed from it, learned to trust myself and prayed that I could cope with going back.
And today, I start uni again. My final year has inescapably and inevitably arrived. Today was always coming, but somehow it came too fast. Back to London.
If I’m completely honest, I always knew I wouldn’t commit to moving back here in a real flat for 12 months of my life. After travelling, after discovering how invigorating it is to be on the move, to not have a base, to keep going through uncertainty and make it adventure, I couldn’t inhabit a single space for a year and not get incredibly stuck again. I belong to the unknown, it belongs to me, and the only thing I was certain of coming back to London was that I needed to do something radical. I needed to paint ‘FUCK THE SYSTEM’ across my forehead, or at least something to that effect.
Hence, my sofa-surfing experiment. I’m curious; I want to know if it’s possible completing final year of uni while being technically homeless in your uni city. Of course, I’m not homeless in every sense – my amazing parents let me base myself at home for the year for free, but ‘home’ is at least a two-hour commute away from London, as so many of my professors’ emails relentlessly reminded me. But I was fully aware of the stakes. Fully aware of the risks. And I decided to do it anyway. Why not?
I curated a list of sofas and who they belonged to – friends I’ve picked up along the way, all of whom now live in London. I debated the actual feasibility of doing this, of bouncing from sofa to sofa in between working in Bournemouth and attending lectures and writing dissertations and studying for exams and maybe squeezing in a bit of yoga or surfing too, but I figured it was worth a shot. Fuck it. So I called Name Number One on my list, my gorgeous Hungarian friend Zsofi, who I’ve known since my first day of uni, and who I haven’t seen since I left the city over a year ago.
“Have you got a sofa I can sleep on?”
“I actually have a box windowless room which only has space for a double mattress, and it’s all yours if you want it.”
Everything I wanted to hear and more. I was starting to feel good about this stupid plan.
Until I was sat on the London Waterloo train at 8am on a Sunday in the shitting rain wishing I’d never even agreed to go back to uni. I never thought I’d feel this sentimental coming back to London, but as I stepped off the Tube at Camden Town, my old home stop, and walked out into the wall of tourists and locals sprinting around like there was this insane urgency to be moving all the time, a wave of nostalgia hit. I saw Parkway, where I’d walk every day, the cafes I used to go to, the Sainsbury’s I basically inhabited, the bars I’d put on my list to try. It’s just a city Cerys, for God’s sake. But it is much, much more than that, and I wasn’t sure how I felt. So I walked, down Camden Road and towards Holloway, letting the memories wash over me as I went, until I was further away from my little former stomping ground and they slowed down. Then I walked past the skate park at Cantelowes Gardens, pausing to smile and watch the kids learning how to drop in from teenagers and dads, falling and laughing and fist-bumping. Tearing myself away from the beautiful scene, I saw more precious droplets of life everywhere, gifted to me ever-so-briefly, by people passing on the street arm-in-arm, people hovering outside shops sharing a cigarette, people laughing getting off buses. London is alive with life, and it constantly amazes me.
Another thing that constantly amazes me is Zsofi, who somehow always manages to light up my life. She brought me into her third-floor flat, made brunch for us to share over a catch-up and asked if I wanted to accompany her to a haircut appointment. I, still besotted with the ordinary everyday London scenes going on outside, enthusiastically agreed, and spent the whole time at the hair salon bemusedly watching people living their lives outside the window. The salon was right next to Caledonian Road station, and according to Zsofi, promised the cheapest price she could find online. Its employees sported trendy haircuts, had strange accents, and took an immediate interest in our conversation, which had turned to my stupid sofa surfing plan.
“Are you visiting London then?” the manager asked me, a funny and outspoken Scottish woman.
“Sort of,” I laughed, looking at Zsofi’s smirking reflection in the hairdressers’ mirror she was facing. “I’m visiting Zsofi but I also go to uni here.”
“But you don’t live here?”
“No, I’m staying on people’s sofas and commuting.” I furrowed my brow, trying to think how better to explain it. “In other words, temporarily homeless for half the week.”
“Right.” Silence, and then the hairdresser started giggling. “That’s brave.”
“Or stupid, I haven’t figured out which yet.” Zsofi and I started laughing back.
The day was a mindless, pointless but beautiful meander around London, back and forth from Zsofi’s flat collecting Facebook Marketplace furniture, eating homemade vegan toasties, drinking coffee in the park in the sun, walking down the canal. So simple, so peaceful. We spent what felt like hours inside the famous bookshop barge at Kings Cross, comparing political essays, biographies, classic fiction and travel writing, buying second-hand books that made us feel intellectual and studious. As we skimmed yellowing pages and gently swayed in the rhythm of the boat on the water, behind us the sun set and cast orange rays into the glowing canal. The air was fresh, with a bite to it like a splash of cold water on your face in the morning, and I swear I’d never felt more energised. As we drifted away from the book barge, Zsofi and I started passionately discussing our shared favourite topic: Changing the world. We talked education, social justice, anarchism, empowerment, travel, our life’s purpose. Since coming home from backpacking and taking up a summer job as an ESL teacher in a language school at home, I’d been inspired to make a difference in radical ways, vowing to simultaneously travel, educate and change the world. No point dreaming small, I suppose.
Within the hour we’d met up with Dori, Zsofi’s flatmate who just so happened to be on the same course as me and, like me, heavily lacking in course-mate friends. Together, we all walked to a secretly massive loft mews flat inhabited by two cool Irish girls, picked up some odd bits of furniture for Dori’s room, and struggled to walk back down Camden Road, a long mirror hooked under my arm and an awkward clothes rail being shared by the two flatmates. Back at the flat, a humble top floor establishment with no hot water at present – not unusual for London – and a lovely jumble of mismatched furniture and flower sprigs in empty wine bottles, we admired the walkway view over London, pointed out the neon red tip of the Shard, and gratefully dumped the Facebook furniture into Dori’s room. She’d made a bright green pasta dish with salad while we were out, and as I guzzled up the luminescent noodles on my plate, I couldn’t help thinking that if all my sofa-surfing locations were like this I’d be in literal heaven for a year.
my silly little solo trip 