...and since the HTML formatting is all over the place, I will no longer be using Posterous. Future updates via Facebook/LJ and Denniblog (mainly travel).

But I have to. I the past years I have enjoyed extraordinary freedoms, despite having no rights to do so. But with these freedoms come obligations. My urge to travel is conflicting with my instinct to set up home, which has resulted in this whole mess in the first place. And 'home' is rarely a place we can choose, on our own terms.

I have to go to Kent for a while. All mid-week social engagements for the next 3-4 months are hereby cancelled.

I understand that urban fantasy stuff a bit better now. I have always been an outsider—my life hasn't exactly been a conventional one—but lately I have allowed myself to become lulled by middle-class comforts and to forget the dark side that is my ever-present shadow.

Most people go through life unaware that they are a gnat's breath away from the streets, except for a few sharp moments of heartbreak and rejection, or perhaps the blow of redundancy softened by a pay-off that dwindles by the day as they sign up for online job services, sifting through thousands of vacancies.

There is a movie, Falling down, starring Michael Douglas, which disturbed me deeply when I saw it in the nineties even though I can barely remember the plot. What I remember is the protagonist disintegrating while stuck in a traffic jam. The chrysalis hatched and the monster emerged from the suit.

The streets are a gnat's breath away. One bad day means the difference between being a model citizen and being an outcast. Easy, in a city as crowded and as confusing as London. Easy for somebody like me. Can I be somebody else for the years it will take to find and sustain employment? Can I maintain the pretence? Can I wear that suit and conform and keep my rage, my insecurity, my anxieties penned up safely behind that façade?

It would take an inordinate amount of trust for me to begin to go back out into that world, particularly while I feel like an alien. I don't trust myself to be able to do that yet. This is why I'm lying low.

This isn't about choice, this isn't about what feels right: this is the stark naked truth. I cannot remain in this country. I have no right of residence here.

In the eyes of the system, I am not someone who has lived in the UK continuously since 1987 and who has been married to a Brit for the past twenty-one years. I am not working and therefore I am regarded as a 'self-sufficient person'. However that means that, without 'comprehensive sickness insurance', I have no right to remain. I can find a job immediately, or I can leave. Immediatedly. Do not pass the doctor's surgery.

This comes as a shock. I didn't know about it. For the past six years I haven't worked because we've lived in the middle of nowhere and I have failed to make any money from my writing. John pays his taxes, claims his married couple's allowance, and assumed that I could just live with him.

I could, if he were French or Spanish or from any of the other 'old' EU countries woking in Britain because then he would be 'exercising his treaty rights' and I would be here legitimately as a family member of an EU national. But you can't 'exercise your treaty rights' in your own country and so I am here as an illegal, unless I exercise my own.

And how am I going to go about that? There is no career waiting for me. I don't know where to start. I can do casual work but those jobs are patchy and short-lived. There wouldn't be any point other than desperation.

Or I can jump on the TEFL train. They are desperate for English teachers in Spain, and if I'm in a foreign teaching environment it won't matter that I'm not a native speaker. I have a degree from Oxford. I could be 'exercising my treaty rights in no time'. Or I could chose to continue my itinerant travels around the world, teaching in Thailand and in South America, never settling down. Because the latter is sure as hell not an option.

Why does this matter? More about that later.

We live practically next door to Thailand. The Picadilly Line runs from Manor House all the way to Heathrow from where I could be in Bangkok in a matter of hours. It's just a short stroll away.

Even so, one thing I did not expect is the bugs. In the ghetto there've always been plenty of rats, but I can't recall any insect problems aside from the odd giant moth. But this year, and the last, is known as the Year of the Wasp (we had a nest in the attic in Tadley. I left it alone.) and London has apparently been infested with bedbugs during the last decade. They have been termed the 'Eastern European Bedbugs' even hough they are as British as Steak & Ale Pie. Oh, and then there are the cockroaches. Did you know that the German cockroach is known as Russian cockroach in Germany and Polish cockroach in Russia?

The term 'cockroach' is often dropped from the discussion. “Germans are hard to kill. If you want the difference between German and Asian, throw them; the German will fall and the Asian will fly”

It isn't either the Germans (or Russians, or Poles) that we have to worry about at the moment, and neither is it the pesky Americans—so aptly named Periplaneta—at least not that I have seen. The dead cockroach that I found under the bed the other day and its mate which John spotted in the bathtub this morning before it dove down into the plughole is the Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis). Secretive, flightless, often known as 'waterbug' due to its propensity to seek out dark and moist places where fumigation can't reach. Or to put it in another way, "the Orientals are hard to get rid of."

Anyway, I guess that is the price I pay for enjoying the profusely growing cordylines and even the odd palm tree, and for still being able to wear short sleeves in October. The urban jungle has come to London.

No it wasn't me who said it, but John with his cute English accent as he showed off the keys to our new flat. But it's true for me as well. London is my adopted home. And it isn't by choice.

I'm a small-town girl—a village girl, really—and when I first moved to the UK I tried to avoid London at all cost. Its ugly side was all too plain in eighties' Thatcherite Britain and still is. The term 'rat-race' was never more aptly coined. People rushed past with their brick-like mobile phones held to their ears and grim expressions on their faces. The suits they wore looked out of place on the tube. Maybe it was the contrast with the classic D-stock carriages with their upholstered seats and slatted wooden floors, but they really did appear like an invasion of city rats. Nobody paused to look. Meanwhile the row of homeless sleeping underneath the bridge at Charing Cross brought Delhi to mind and there was an honest-to-god slum underneath the Hammersmith flyover (I suppose it was a traveller site, which is perfectly alright, but bear with me. I was new to Britain).

But there is a third layer to this city, between the office blocks and the streets.When London finally drew us into its orbit it became apparent that I was no longer the only foreigner in town. Here almost everybody is a foreigner.

I went a little crazy when we went back to look at the flat lat week. I bought armfuls of food: plantains ("you realise that these are not bananas?"), pickled fish, cucumbers that taste of cucumbers, blood-red wedges of water melon, fragrant tomatoes on the vine from shops that sell no other kind, kick-arse parsley in fat greeen bunches and strange little green peppers that you only get at certain Middle-Eastern shops. I stopped short of stewing goat this time. Only when I loaded the food into the car and wondered how we were going to eat it all did it occur to me that I would never be short of these things again.

Or of the music. Reception would no longer be dependent on the weather. There would be Soca. We will be able to make and receive calls from our mobile phones even when we are at home.

Or of colour. Our move coincides with the Notting Hill Carnival. Eid follows hot on the heels. And even on rainy days there is colour in the streets of London.

It will be odd, mainly because it already feels so much like coming home. We have never lived near Finsbury Park, but we've lived near Barnet, Hampstead Heath, Lewishham, Ladywell and New Cross and I've stayed in a Hackney squat for a memorable time. Anywhere that isn't Knightsbridge or Chelsey feels like home to me.

But no, it wasn't by choice. We've lived in London—on and off (but more off than on)—since 1991 and I figured that it takes about five years to bond with a place. Except that I failed to bond with Tadley where we have lived for almost six years and was homesick for London a lot sooner when my studies took me to Scotland and John remained at UCL. Homesickness has a lot to do with it. There is a little corner of Tadley where we stayed for the first six months until the owner decided to sell the property. It was before I felt like an outsider and while I was still travelling abroad and I ended up being fond of it even though it's part of the same town I have grown to detest.

I found the little cat again. I think she belongs to one of the houses by the bridge,but she <i>is</i> undernourished and the collar is too tight. Oh well, another bout of guerilla feeding. But I think I'm attracting stares...

No sooner than we have repatriated Buzz, another starving stray shows up in the neighbourhood. There are now at least three ginger cats around here: a large male that once gave Buzz a fright, a female with a skewed head as if she was constantly looking up and to her left, and a tiny female that can't be more than 2.5kg and is so thin that I feel I can encircle her with one hand. I haven't seen this cat before, but it wears a collar so must have an owner. It walks around quite openly and comes when called, but startles whenever somebody walks past. No wonder: it's small enough to step on. The cat is in pitiful condition, with sunken flanks. But although the fur looks a bit scruffy there is no sign of disease. I think it has either run away or somebody has neglected to feed it. Anyway, I bought a pack of catfood and fed it near the bridge where I found it. So now I'm running around with catfood in my bag...

...Glastonbury, the World Cup, T-bone steak BBQs and 30 degrees in the shade.

Is this really England?

Buzz has been grooming himself for the past fifteen minutes or so, out in the garden—in the shade—where the vet said he shouldn't be. But he wanted to go outside to be away from us and it took him about 30 seconds to convince us to open the door.

This morning he made a feeble attempt to lick his flank then gave up and stared at it as if he didn't have the strength to stick out his tongue. I was convinced that he had internal bleeding. He didn't flinch when John picked him up, but he escaped from the box and tried to run down the stairs, dragging his hind legs like Milo had done when he was dying. Then he started to pant with his mouth open like he was having a heart attack.

All that drama and it was just a scratch on his leg! *Phew*