The Odyssey of Jugaad

In November 2023, I crossed the land border between Nepal and India, which marked my second entrance into the country that has changed my life. My first time in India, in September 2023, was brief and painful, marked by a whole host of issues including Delhi Belly, bedbugs, and a near kidnapping, but this time I knew it would be different. I hitch-hiked and took trains through Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan with friends, and then decided it was time to do something a bit different, a bit radical. This piece reflects on the solo journey I undertook afterwards:

Bleary-eyed and desperate for a place to charge my phone, I collapsed into a chair at Indian Coffee House, Indore, and took out an old paper map from my bag. It was early in the morning and I’d spent the entire night at the very back of a sleeper bus, flying around my cabin every time the driver went over a slight bump or took a corner at 100 mph. After travelling by train through Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan I’d seriously forgotten how terrifying Indian driving was, and now I was just happy to still be standing. 

I squinted at the map, a map of India, which I’d found in an old bookstore in Udaipur. The distance between the small ‘X’ I marked in Indore and my next destination, Goa, was intimidatingly large. A vast chunk of the unknown stood between me and my cliche backpacker Christmas plans, areas which even my Lonely Planet couldn’t tell me about. But I had two weeks to kill, and I’d be damned if I was going to take the easy route south.

In my journal I’d started calling it ‘The Great Solo Indian Odyssey’, this insane plan of mine. I intended to spend two weeks solely travelling by local bus, taking a slow and obscure route through places I’d never heard of before, just to see what happened. And obviously, I was completely alone.

A confused woman came up to me in the coffee house as I tugged my masala dosa apart with my hands. “Are you a journalist?” she asked, peeking at my map and journal and the scarf covering my hair. I replied no, just a tourist. “I’ve never seen a white woman here before.” 

I did not yet know, but this was to become the statement of my journey: I was to be the first white woman, the first white person, period, most people would see in their lives, traipsing around their hometown lugging an oversized backpack with a battered yoga mat strapped to the side. And while this would have its thrills, obviously it would come with challenges.

I was definitely not in a hedonistic bid to prove myself as a danger-loving solo female traveller, but more than anything, I just wanted to know some sides of India other people may not. I had spent the previous month battling insane culture shock, Delhi belly, and moments of overwhelming confusion through my travels, only to come out the other side bearing my entire soul to this country. Mother India is a driving force; she pushes you past your limits, guides you down perfectly designed paths, and I was ready to completely let go.

And so I got on a bus. I left Indore behind, the last semi-secure city I’d see in a while – a nice, clean place, I’d decided – and before I knew it I was hurling down highways, passing heat-soaked barren flatlands, in what I can only describe as a huge tin can death-trap with the dashboard missing. Dust flew around the bus like stars in a washing machine sky, and the driver, a short barefooted man perched on the raised seat, slammed his feet on exposed pedals, holding the shaking handbrake as if it would snap off at any moment. 

At the next town he accidentally drove into the back of a truck, smashing the entire front windscreen. The men all filtered off the bus to argue and discuss a solution. Heads were nodded, glass was cleared from the floor of the bus and anything remaining of the windscreen, and then we began again, flying through India now missing two significant parts of the bus. Only the frame was left, and that too was rattling dangerously. And yet I arrived at my next destination, Maheshwar, perfectly on time. I later learned a term in Hindi for this madness: jugaad. It means a ‘quick fix’, to make something work even though it technically shouldn’t, to improvise and adapt. Understandably, jugaad is a very fond way to describe India.

The next two weeks unravelled in the same comically confusing way, and I learned a hell of a lot – about myself and about India. Mostly, I was struck time and time again by the kindness of strangers; people I met in obscure places who wanted to help me out of a tricky situation or enjoyed speaking English with me. In between my moments of being intensely alone, these people provided connection and warmth, and they reminded me that you are never truly solitary when you move through the world with an open heart.

However, I also learned a lot about safety, and mostly through my own mistakes. The route I took gravitated around domestic tourist sites – from Maheshwar to the Ellora Caves to Bijapur and then to Hampi – but I also spent a lot of time in strange towns in between, mostly arriving in the dark or taking a government night bus to another unknown place. These were my scariest moments of the trip, and I was humbly reminded – and frustrated – at how vulnerable I was as a woman travelling alone. I learned to thoroughly research or ask about the next town I would arrive at, to triple-confirm my place in a hotel for the night (to avoid walking around at midnight with no place to stay, which was definitely not my favourite experience), and to generally just avoid local night buses where possible. 

No, I had not completed a daredevil odyssey that would make headlines, but I’d pushed myself further than I’d gone before and been sincerely rewarded. I fell utterly in love with Central India, with the process, with the fields slowly turning from yellow to green as I watched from a window, with the tongue and dialect changing in each state I moved through. I had empowering conversations with local women, I took (and equally refused) many selfies with stricken domestic tourists, and I was astounded at how chaotic yet effective the Indian public transport system is. 

By the time I reached the safety of Hampi, where an old friend waited for me with open arms, I didn’t quite know how to feel. I’d travelled over 1000 kilometres south, through Madhya Pradesh, Maharasthra and Karnataka, alone and without seeing another white person. Now it was time to step back onto the tourist trail and make the last journey to Goa. Goa, where many things awaited me, like comfort, familiarity and a lot of beer. Goa was the yin to this yang, this wild and terrifying unbeaten path I was treading, and the two together were in perfect balance. 

So, along with my friend, I decided to hitch-hike west and say sayonara to middle India in another bold move, knowing that the road would always be there to welcome me back.

The Dance of Everyone’s Everything

I have just spent a few months – very unintentionally, but very blissfully – in Kerala, South India. I settled myself in Varkala, a small surf town near the capital of Trivandrum, and found myself in a beautiful community of Indian surfers. We talked of waves, of social projects to come, of love and joy, and we shared everything. It is a community strung together by unconditional kindness, and somewhere I will be returning to very soon.

So, although I don’t pride myself on my poetry, I wrote a poem about my friends and community in Varkala. It is called ‘The Dance of Everyone’s Everything’:

People of the ocean, gifts from the ocean.

Sharing wounds, waves – it’s everyone’s everything here anyway.

Howls into the night, into the young morning sun, we watch the horizon all day.

Go on flow, drink chai in the gasping heat of day or in the heavy light of dusk,

let’s share a cigarette, have you got wax?

It’s everyone’s everything here anyway.

And I don’t know what I did in my smal life to deserve this love but it must have been good.

We dance to the music like it belongs to us all, the same song filling our bones.

It is not inward but outward!

And we dance to the pure joy of the sun, just like Rumi told us to.

Dance on waves. Read the newspaper, touch only the top rim of the glass so you don’t burn your hand.

Sip the sugar, the heat.

The sweat never leaves, it is a companion on our brow all night.

We dance by the moon and then by the sun.

A porotta torn apart by rough hands, flesh grazed on sand and bleeding,

it is so human. So loving.

I want to weep for all its beauty.

CR0, the hitch-hiking hippie hero: Craig

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.

EN6, my double life fix: Theo

I pull my car into the drive at home, Bournemouth, and open the front door to greet my mum. I haven’t seen her much since I went to London and started my sofa surfing project, and I want to tell her about the impromptu night out I’d had with Zsofi and some old uni mates in a Polish restaurant, which ended in me getting wasted on the train home and walking for half an hour at 2am back in Bournemouth without shoes on. But she asks me about my day at work, where I’m a relief support worker for a housing association, and instead I find myself moaning about having to report a client missing today – a pretty regular occurrence at work. For the next hour I absent-mindedly switch from Bournemouth stories to London ones, mentioning the potential for surf tomorrow in between remarking at the extensive selection of second-hand bookshops I’ve yet to try in the city. My mum smirks at me while I speak.

“What?” I ask, confused.

“You’re living a double life,” she says, bemused. “Surfing support worker in Bournemouth half the week, bookworm vegan student in London the other half.”

I laugh back at her comment, and then can’t get it out of my head for a while. One blink and I’m writing peace signs on lamp posts in the Big Smoke, quietly people-watching as life all around me flourishes, and in the next flutter of eyelids I’m rushing to get my wetsuit on and go for a surf before it gets dark, having spent all day walking my dog and meditating. 2 hours on the train and I’m trying as hard as I can to refrain spending money in Pret, and another 2 hours later I’m sitting at a desk writing handover notes at work. In London I hang around uni bars to study and snag free drinking water before they get annoyed and kick me out, in Bournemouth I sprint out of the door to make it to my yoga class in time.

My double life. It’s working pretty well for me so far.

Before I know it, I’m back on a train, back watching Bournemouth disappear, back on the commuter route to London. This time, though, I’m ill, so socialising with strangers and sleeping on sofas is sounding less appealing. If I lived in London I could skip a lecture or two, rest until I felt better, go to my next one in the afternoon. But with this lifestyle, I commit or I don’t – if I don’t go now, I’ll miss the next two days’ worth of content. And I’m not one for quitting early, so I stock up on painkillers, haul myself around the city, and warn my next host that I’m not down for a big one tonight.

Host Number Two is a very good friend of mine, who I’ve known for years and have always adored. His name is Theo and he goes to RVC, making him a) much more dedicated than I could ever be, and b) a sucker for the uni sports night. Luckily, said sports night was yesterday, so he, along with his whole flat of football guys, is nursing a hangover and planning on a quiet night in watching Game of Thrones and making risotto. I take a Thameslink to Potters Bar, where Theo is studying at RVC’s second campus, and pick up a 12 pack of beers as well as a cheesecake from Sainsbury’s to say thanks for his hospitality. Expecting to be positively intimidated by staying at a house full of testosterone-filled football lads for the night, I’m pleasantly surprised at their wholesomeness after the antics last night, and start catching up with Theo while he introduces everyone and tends to his prized risotto cooking on the stove.

The house is busy tonight; one flatmate has his girlfriend over, and another friend is there staying for a few nights. We laugh over football sports night rituals, chat about our uni courses, and I repeatedly try and wrap my head around the vet procedures the boys all have to master to pass their never-ending exams. If anything, it feels like a mass sleepover, and while I get my sleeping bag and travel pillow out of the obnoxiously large backpack I have to carry around London before getting to my bed for the night, Theo sets up the TV for our Game of Thrones session. One flatmate has only just started watching and doesn’t quite understand why we’re all obsessed with it, much less what on earth is happening in the lengthy confusing episodes. We spend the hour trying to explain the plot without letting anything slip, which is pretty unsuccessful. When it’s over we all prepare for an early night, with Theo and another flatmate sneaking off to complete their nightly crossword puzzle – “We have to do it every night, Cerys, it’s important” – and the friend who is sleeping over blowing up his air bed next to my sofa abode. I giggle to myself as I watch it all unfold, enjoying the wholesome turn of events.

I wake up feeling rested and slightly regretful about having to run off back to London and then Bournemouth so quickly. Theo’s flat ask me to come back soon and wish me luck with my uni / sofa surfing experiment, and then I’m back on the Thameslink and off to my classes for the day.

Squeezing a sleeping bag, travel pillow, towel, toiletry bag and change of clothes in a modest 40 litre backpack is no massive feat for me, given my extensive experience backpacking and painful practice having to pack up and dash out of the hostel door within minutes to catch my bus on time. But something I’ve never done carrying a backpack before is walking around central London and rocking up to lectures with it on. The first few times were hilarious, a novelty, something I would do only half-subtly while sniggering at myself and ducking into a seat at the back of my lecture hall, so no one would get annoyed at me unloading all the goods on my back. But this time round it is getting more embarrassing, and while I heartily try to keep my chin up and stop the flush coming from my cheeks as I cause a commotion in the seminar room trying to find somewhere to put my stuff, it’s hard to be that confident about it. I feel the need to sheepishly explain to my classmates my predicament, and am met with anything from wild stares to comments of support.

On the streets though, it’s worse. I find myself being shunned, or at least that’s what it feels like to me, by people who would usually not even notice me. The simple adornment of a backpack has suddenly shone an uncomfortable spotlight on me, and I start getting lightly shoved, glared at or murmured about as I walk the streets. It’s a bizarre feeling, accompanied by a wave of empathy and appreciation for the homeless, the hidden, those on the margins of urban life who must experience this every day without the safety of a home to return to at the end of the experiment. Yes, in London I may be temporarily homeless, and a lot of the time I really do feel the vulnerability of it too, but I’ve never been looked at like this; the privilege is a wake-up call. On the way to a lecture a man in a suit holding a disposable coffee cup jogs up to my stride and asks me if I’m camping. “I’ve just never seen someone like you walking around London with a big backpack before,” he says, and I laugh in annoyance. I make an attempt at explaining myself and then decide that life is too short to listen to businessmen from Essex, and swiftly take a turn into my uni building.

At lunch I’m in the Russell Square Tesco and, as if by an irrational impulse, I pick up two pastries instead of one. I’m unsure what I’ll do with it until I pay, leave the shop, and stand above the homeless woman who sometimes sits outside begging. I offer the pastry to her and she takes it quietly, and then without thinking I offer her the pasta I’ve just bought. She refuses, she doesn’t like the sauce, so I walk back towards Russell Square park and find another homeless man sitting by the gates, who is usually camped out there. I wordlessly give him my other pastry and pot of fruit, and he thanks me with a huge gappy smile. I’m not quite sure when I decided to become a serial Tesco philanthropist, but doing it feels right, so I decide to do it more often. Those who are so often ignored or looked down upon can be great conversation, it turns out, and funnily enough they are incredibly ordinary human beings with flaws and loves and laughs too.

N7, in haircut heaven: Zsofi

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.