Money (Retrospective)

Money

Then there was the matter of money and prices.

The exchange rate was basically two to one, pounds to dollars. And I was a graduate student, making my way on grants that would have barely been enough to scratch by had I been in the US. They were about half as much as I needed to scratch by in London.

I distinctly remember my first evening there. I had gotten in in the afternoon, taken a nap, drugged myself up with coffee, and wandered around to find somewhere to have a reasonable meal for dinner. The flat where I was staying was right on the river, not far from the Tate Modern and the Globe Theater. For some reason I mistakenly concluded then that the restaurants near these institutions would be catering to tourists and therefore more expensive than usual. Little did I know that they were in actuality standard prices for London. I wandered around side-streets past these bigger attractions to try to find someplace smaller and more reasonably priced to eat.

I ended up at a gastro-pub not far from London Bridge. I ordered chicken and a glass of wine, no appetizer, no dessert. No bread on the side. It was around 14 pounds total. While I was waiting for the food to come, I felt both a bit self-conscious about sitting and eating alone—and nervous and overwhelmed at how foreign this city felt and how downright intimidating the prices were.

Twenty eight dollars for dinner for one— not an upscale dinner, a pub dinner. A tube pass for zones one and two for a month: close to two hundred dollars. Rent: A thousand dollars a month for a tiny little room in someone else’s flat. Add council tax, and utilities and it would be a few hundred dollars more. Mobile phone: given that I needed to use it for work and interviews, at least a hundred dollars a month, probably more. My budget: less than two thousand dollars a month. Which meant I had only a few hundreds dollars left for food and entertainment. Was I going to be able to afford to eat?

I spent the entire evening trying to work out a budget for myself, using a pencil and scratch paper to work out sample spending plans. What if I spent fifteen pounds a day or so, on average, on food and entertainment? Could I keep to that?

I started out with the strictest of budgets, staying at home as much as possible, cooking for myself, eating in, only going to shows or events that weren’t free very infrequently. But it didn’t take me long to realize that this altogether defeated the purpose of being in London. I was only here temporarily- and moreover, as an anthropologist, I was here to experience as much as possible of it… to really get to know the culture and to write about it. I found that it was really rather miserable to stay home all the time, in a city I didn’t know, in a place where I had few friends and little social contact on days that I didn’t go into an office to volunteer.

I began easing up—figuring that there was a reason for credit cards and savings. I’ve spent my entire life as a relative spendthrift, so I could probably afford to supplement myself a little bit here to make the year enjoyable. That was the first step down a very very slippery slope.

The second step, which pushed me into a mini landslide, was the fact that I actually needed to travel for my research. I had interviews to do and fieldwork to conduct, all over the country, not just in London. Amongst the list: two visits to Newcastle and environs, visits to Kent and Gloucestershire, and too many visits to Birmingham to count. Thanks to privatization, train prices were often more expensive than flying across to continental Europe. But what choice did I have? I didn’t have the money for it, but I needed to do it.

I don’t remember exactly when I stopped mentally translating prices into dollars. It probably happened about four months after I’d moved there. It was a self-preservation technique—it was too depressing to keep calculating what this was all costing me in real terms. There were still things I didn’t do- I never went shopping for clothing, for example, and I very rarely went to remotely upscale restaurants (although I was so amazed by the range of great food- Turkish, Lebanese, Italian- that I did try some of these places.) And I had to stop myself, over and over, from the urge to treat people to lunch or dinner when I went out. As much as I wanted to, as much as it would give me great joy, I couldn’t afford to be as generous as I would like.

And this, to be honest, is what most Londoners have to do, not just someone like myself, living on dollars. The cost of living, relative to salaries, is far higher in the UK than the US. To this day, it remains a bit of a mystery to me how ordinary people (who don’t work in finance and earn six figure salaries) can have any kind of a life. I remember seeing an advertisement on a bus boasting that bus drivers could make 500 pounds a week plus overtime. Twenty four thousand pounds a year. Subtract hefty taxes, high rent, and high food costs and there’s not much left to raise a family or do anything fun. This was worth boasting about in an advertisement? I asked people over and over how people managed to make ends meet here—and the answer was always the same. They squeeze by. They don’t go out much.

But at the end, I had gotten so used to life in London that I’d all but forgotten to be offput by the ridiculous prices. One of my last evenings there, I went out to dinner with a friend, and it was my turn to treat. We went to Belgo, a Belgian restaurant, not known for being expensive—and had a huge plate of oysters, appetizers, bread, and beer. The bill came to 45 pounds.

“45 pounds, how reasonable!” I thought.

And then I pinched myself. One year ago, I would never ever have considered ninety dollars for dinner “reasonable” or affordable.

I had obviously gotten way too used to London… now to the detriment of my bank account. It was time to leave.