REVIEW: Staying with Family

Day 1 of the experiment didn’t quite go to plan. Couch-surfing was slightly harder than I expected so at 5pm with the only offers being dubiously sexual and nothing locked in I caved and decided to spend the night in Chateau de Addiscombe.

Staying with your family is a complicated business, but not in a bad way just in a complicated way. My aunt and uncle are wonderful, and at least to my eyes as English as they come. I love the countless cups of tea and digestive biscuits and I can talk about the weather all day. Over the last few years they have generously let me drop in and stay whenever I am in town with not even a whiff of hesitation — when I was here recently and they had a guest visiting and my aunt was planning on giving me her bed and sleeping on the floor! It’s British hospitality and family kindness at it’s best — and it’s confusing as hell.

When you stay with friends or friends of friends, you bring a bottle of wine, you take them out and you are done. The exchange is simple — a bed for a dinner or thereabouts. But with family it is more complicated because my Aunt and Uncle don’t just give me a bed. They give me dinner and consolation when I get home wet because I am woefully naive about London rain. They come in and wish me a good night with a kiss on the cheek (even when I am on a work skype to the US — much to everyone’s delight). They sometimes act like surrogate parents reminding me to take an umbrella, asking me if I have any washing to do, and checking in when I stay out too late.

For a 33 year old this is weird, and confronting and lovely. It’s also easy to get sucked in to the comforting warmth of a single bed in a sewing room and endless cups of tea and sympathy. I heard myself saying to a new friend that everything in London is at least an hour away from anywhere else, and she replied that’s because you are coming from Croydon. And she is right.

London isn’t a place for the faint-hearted. It’s tough and grey and always a little bit damp, but you don’t come here for the climate, you come here for the people, the culture and the possibilities.

Staying with family is a welcome island on a long and arduous journey to your dream life, but stay too long and the island becomes home and you forget the promised land you were on your way to.