I had to admit to myself, so far the sofa surfing was working great, and I really wasn’t feeling as awful about London as I had last year. I’d been spending my time after lectures investigating anarchist book shops, rediscovering my uni campus, getting catch-up beers with old friends and generally dodging actually living in London for a more chaotic, yet happier lifestyle. But after two weeks of sofa surfing there was still one thing missing that I found in abundance at home: The slow, simple, calm pace of life outside of the city, the happiness, the hippie-ness. I still needed to lighten up a bit, to have a laugh and be friendly and not get wrapped up in the London habit of everyone marching everywhere, angrily, all the time, without seeing how lovely life can be. It’s far too easy to ignore the outside world, the pollution and noise and traffic and weather and general misery, but in doing so I’ve always felt that Londoners can only perpetuate an individualistic and, quite frankly, very lonely city life.
I needed a true hippie saviour, someone who could really make me re-envision the way I see London, someone to walk these streets with me and paint the city with colour rather than dull and isolating shades of beige. And, extremely luckily for me, I’d already met the perfect person for the job.
I first saw Craig, the hitch-hiking Kiwi, before uni even started for the year on a solo car-camping trip I took to the Brecon Beacons and Gower coast in Wales. He’d just come down from the Rainbow Gathering happening in the hills next to Hay-on-Wye, England and Wales’ oldest book town, and by fluke I’d decided to pay it a visit on the same day as per a recommendation from a nice Belgian couple I’d car-camped next to. I took the opportunity of being in civilisation to buy a can opener for my tin of tuna, an apparently essential ingredient for the makeshift pasta I had fashioned on my camping stove crouched on the side of the road, and sat on a bench nearby to open it. A man with long dark hair, bare feet and a wooden staff approached me timidly and asked if I knew where the nearest shop was, because he fancied a tuna sandwich. Up until this point I was admittedly trying to ward him away, but as I cut my finger on the tuna tin I looked up at his comment and laughed. “I don’t have bread but if you want tuna, you’re in luck,” I said, and we shared the tin together on the bench.
He was trying to hitch-hike back to Croydon for an adventure post-Rainbow Gathering, but after hanging out in Hay-on-Wye for a few hours, meeting some old hippies and looking at a lot of old books, he ended up sticking with me as I drove further into the national park instead. We spent a bizarrely beautiful few days camping and exploring the Brecons together, hiking barefoot, drinking weird cider and washing naked in rivers. Picking up a hippie man from New Zealand in Wales was up there with one of the last things I’d expect myself to be doing, but probably because it was so strange, it was a lovely turn of events for my trip. The last time I’d seen him we’d driven back to Bournemouth together, where he caught a bus back up to his flat in London. I promised we’d see each other again soon and proceeded to go about ‘normal’ life, not really thinking that there could be an opportunity to hang out with him in a starkly different environment to the rolling hills, nosey sheep and stunning sunsets of the Brecon Beacons.
Fast forward a month, and I’m staring at my list of sofa-surfing names trying to summon up the courage to call on someone else for my third stay in London. I’m also craving some light-hearted fun, some barefoot rambles and socially unacceptable antics, which is when I think of Craig the hitch-hiking Kiwi. Back in Wales he’d asked me to write my number on a scrap of paper the old-fashioned way, keeping it as a souvenir of sorts, and texted asking if I was available to kidnap a hippie at some point soon. I look at that text conversation now and smile, before asking if he has a sofa and some time to spend with me in London. His flat is tiny, he says, and very limited in the way of furniture, but he has an idea. It’s a surprise. I hope by ‘surprise’ he means a sofa bed off Facebook Marketplace, but I don’t ask. It’s settled; I’ll come up in a week.
I’m sitting outside my uni building, smoking a cigarette, reading my book. I’m perched on a wall so I can watch everything, wearing my bright yellow flower jeans, feeling an ever-so-slightly nervous flutter in my stomach and throat. Considering Craig is pretty much a stranger, a man I met in the Welsh hills not even a month ago, it seems weird to be meeting him again, and weirder that we’ve now swapped scenery entirely to the Big Smoke. Waiting for two minutes feels eternal, but when I spot a hairy bare-footed man walking towards me I smile, and the worry dissipates. He joins me on the wall, asks what I’m reading, we giggle a lot.
“It’s really amazing to see you,” he says for the fifth time. “This is so weird.”
Perhaps even weirder than everything is Craig’s history with Hare Krishna, the religious and spiritual movement whose volunteers give out free food next to SOAS and IOE every day at lunchtime. They roll up with a painted cart and a box of out-of-date bananas and apples to give out, followed by orange and white-clad monks who hand out copies of the Bhagavad-gita. I’ve been a proud Hare Krishna-goer since moving to London in 2019, so when I mentioned it to Craig in Wales, thinking a hippie might’ve heard of the movement, you can imagine my surprise when he told me he’d lived with the Krishna volunteers for two years. Two years. In an underground ‘castle’ underneath Holborn viaduct, in the middle of London. You literally couldn’t make it up. I still didn’t fully believe him, that is until we walk up to the cart barefoot in London after my lecture and say hi to the volunteers. Craig chats with them; I let it sink in that he wasn’t lying about living in an underground fortress outside the margin of the law with a load of spiritual food-making Krishna followers.
We’ve sworn an oath of bare feet, so as we walk towards Regent’s Park, making use of the sunshine, I pinch my fingers in the Uggs that I usually wear (to emulate the feeling of being barefoot, and no I will not be apologising) and swing them around while staring at my white-ish toes. I’m instantly grateful for Craig’s company. He breaks out into a run unexpectedly, flailing his arms and shrieking in the midst of a lot of solemn and serious Londoners crossing the road, and I let out a laugh as I run to catch up. Don’t take yourself so seriously, lighten up! Life is too short. Far too short to care. So I decide not to. And suddenly, a little bit of weight is lifted off this city’s shoulders, the sun spreads a little further, my lungs breathe a little deeper, and there is more space to play with. More fun, more happiness, more life.
We lounge in the grass of Regent’s Park, turning our faces and closed eyelids to the sun, digging into the dirt with our toes. I read him something I wrote a few days ago, when I was hanging out with my friend Dori after a lecture. As I read I enact the scene, twirling and miming and laughing in the autumn sun, orange leaves falling all around us, Mother Nature rewards my eternally bare feet with incredible textures and senses. He tells me it’s beautiful writing, I blush and realise I’ve not really ever read something of mine aloud to someone before. We keep walking towards Camden, get a pint in the pub I used to work at, I say hi to the security guard I used to make coffees for every day just to make him smile. Next, a hippie Kurdish bar with amazing food. Then a thrift shop; we try on stupid hats and blazers and laugh. Then home, and I’m excited to see what Craig’s ‘surprise’ for me is.
Above the Croydon high street shops, an old, crumbling, slightly prison-looking housing association looms, and Craig guides me up the stairs. His living room makes me burst out laughing and I realise why he told me about the unconventional furniture situation in the flat. There is a stool, a worn-out pink armchair that sits about an inch above the floor and looks like it’s about to collapse, and a broken gaming chair, on top of which perches a tiny TV. Aside from that, and a garden table pushed back to the wall, the space is comically empty. It has the impersonal plastic-coated floors and ceilings of a classroom, and the walls are painted a slightly sickly yellow. His flatmate walks in, a loud and strange Irish man with a stammer and probable autism, and I introduce myself. We walk down the corridor to Craig’s room, and I notice that he no longer has a lock on the door, and instead has stuffed the hole with tissue. I laugh again, and ask where this mysterious sofa is. He points to a boxed up airbed in the corner of the room excitedly, and I silently thank God that I’m not taking the floor.
Craig is in a bit of rut, you could say, and desperately wants to get out of London. He’s been struggling with money for years so hasn’t really been able to leave, and for some reason ended up very much stuck in a housing association flat in Croydon before seemingly giving up. Behind his happy hippie camaraderie is someone quite lost within themselves, and I can sense it. He went to Wales to detach from London for a while, and now is much more motivated to get out of the city, do a Workaway somewhere and get back on his feet. It’s happening soon, he promises me. Maybe Morocco. We talk a lot about our lives, about how weirdly ours have intersected with each other, and I say goodbye the next day promising to come back.
I do. A few times. We go to my favourite anarchist bookshop / bike workshop, share a bottle of wine at the Barbican at night, make a bed out of the comfy sofas on the top floor of Waterstones, write weird quotes on walls in Sharpie, all the while being completely barefoot. Being able to place Craig in my bizarre little London life has brightened the edges a lot for me, and now I see the whole picture quite differently. It is full of a lot more laughter than I thought possible, it is not as serious and the city is much more peaceful. I start speaking to the Krishna volunteers every day as we hang around to eat our lunch with them, I watch funny characters go about their daily lives, I smile into the sun. It’s November when we say goodbye for the foreseeable, and Craig leaves for Morocco to teach English and hitch-hike and start over. I’m proud of him, I wish I could join, but there are things to do here. He gives me his wooden staff to look after while he’s gone.
my silly little solo trip 