10 Years Of Living In London

It crept past me the other week, and I wish I had clocked in advance – but I have now managed 10 years of living in London.

It really doesn’t feel like it, and it really feels like I’m still at the beginning of my journey – I’ve achieved and am certainly a part of London, arguably the greatest world city.

Yet it still feels like I’ve got so much further to go. I walk past the mansions on the outside of Croydon, let alone those in Mayfair, or heck a terraced house in Hackney and realise that I’m still just a peasant. A peasant who’s climbed a little, but still so much to dream and achieve.

But maybe let’s look at what I have achieved in my 10 years of living in London:

Career

I moved to London to take a job as a junior software engineer, 10 years ago.

I flunked it, and they let me go after 3 months (though sent me a steak 6 months later in the post – they were nice people). Yet now I’m a senior engineer at M&S, pushing the level above, and actually really damn good at my job. Granted, AI is even better at my job.

Salary

I’m not going to tell the internet how much I’m on now, but you can Google the average salary for a senior engineer in London if you want to, and then remember that I’m not working for a tech company or a bank. But it is far more than the £23,000 a year I started on in my junior role.

Housing

I own my own flat and am only in around £30,000 of negativbe equity, woohoo!

And this is infinite times better than the room in a shared house in Harrow, that had a rat/mouse problem towards the end, and a housemate that I, hmmm, kind of got on with but we were very different people wanting very different housing situations.

Friends

When I moved to London I didn’t know many people, a few but not many. Gradually I’ve built up my circle but I still don’t have anything like the plethora of friends I had in Reading during the Mango days, with the core hub places we’d all go to.

Maybe London isn’t like that, but I suspect it can be. I think also I was pretty lucky with that in Reading, and also my lifestyle has changed now.

That said, I have met some people that are hopefully life-long friends, and are great fun. More can be done, and I’m working on it.

Enjoying Life

£23,000 a year, oh and 6 months unemployed, didn’t get me much of a social life at the start. But it was just an investment.

Now I can enjoy life, but also London is hard-work. Full-time working and then having a little midweek moment, and midnight bed time, takes it out on me in my middle 40’s.

Am I making the most of London? Probably not, I’ve been to theatre maybe 4 times this year, 10 really good restaurants, one festival, a lot of pubs…like most things in life, I can do more. But compared to 10 years ago, it’s a joy.

Being A Part of London

I don’t just want to consume where I live – I want to create something.

I’m not sure you can judge Roast Dinners in London as anything but a success. Humble beginnings with 20 followers on Twitter (before the Nazi times) – now with circa 14,000 website visits a month. I, as Lord Gravy, actually am a little part of the fabric of London.

I feel like I’d like to do more, maybe some roast dinner events, or pub meet-ups, or something (ideally with a little earnings from it) – but time gets the better of me on this one. Maybe a collaboration somehow? Hmmm.

Would I choose to do it again?

Hell yes.

London is tiring. London is expensive. It teases you and makes you think that you have to do so many things, and you never have the time and money to do everything, so even though you are really living a good life, you feel like you barely touch the city and its charms. And occasionally, you need to rest. What? Waste a Saturday…RESTING? Urgh.

Where will I be in 10 years?

Another 10 years of living in London? Quite probably.

Currently I’m on holiday in Kotor, and yes I should probably be out in the sunshine enjoying a beer, but I needed a shower from my mountain hike, and here I am writing. I will go back out soon. Beer will be consumed.

Anyway, so I wonder, maybe I don’t need such a complicated, busy life. Maybe I could enjoy an easier life near the beach, chilling out, occasionally doing some work – and maybe I can when I’m older. Maybe I will.

Hopefully in 10 years time I will still work in software engineering – if it still requires humans, possibly it doesn’t. Ideally I’d have my own income from something web-based by that point, some SAAS thing that AI made for me, or something like that. Granted that won’t happen with a full-time job, nor a desire to go on holiday, theatre, run a roast dinner blog, etc, etc.

I wouldn’t be upset if I still lived in my flat in Croydon, but it would be nice maybe to have a house. Or a flat somewhere more desirable, with things happening that I actually wanted to go to, and restaurants that were exciting instead of…occasionally acceptable.

I very much want to be semi-FIRE, there is a savings plan and I reckon I can not need to work within 10 years, but absolutely I will still work. Unless its 5 days in the office shit, in which case no. Think of it as my AI-protection plan that hope AI doesn’t take my job in the next 5 years.

Sometimes I do wonder if maybe I should change into a more people-facing job at some point. Run my own craft beer and roast potato place? Who knows.