I just got a box of old photos scanned, so I can now share pictures from the olden days of FILM. I know, you’re so excited, right?

Well, now I can blog about the best six months of my youth…May to November 1997. While I could write for days about it, I won’t torment you that much. But I do want to share a little. For posterity.

To give you some background…I was supposed to graduate from college in 1997, but because I was a bit of a slacker, I still had a few semesters left. I decided to take a semester off and move to Seattle for a little while. My brother and his wife lived there, and I loved visiting. I bought my plane tickets and was looking into apartments and jobs while two of my best friends, Kristina and Anne, were making plans for their own sojourn to London and Europe. They were going to work for a while, through an organization called BUNAC. They would get work visas, and would live and work just like any other British person.

One day, my Brit-pop-obsessed self thought, “why am I going to Seattle, when I could go to LONDON? Home of my favorite musicians?” and I pretty much decided then and there that I’d be joining Kristina and Anne.

So on May 26th(ish, it was a long time ago, after all), 1997, we all hopped on a plane to London. (And can you imagine? Kristina’s mom probably watched us leave from the gate. We didn’t have to take our shoes off! Olden days indeed.)

Okay, I won’t talk about how jet-lagged we were and all that stuff, because that would make this post literally a bajillion words long. Pictures, instead. Isn’t that the point?

We lived in a cute, tiny basement flat in Kensington, very close to Kensington Palace. We lived there when Princess Diana died. Very surreal.

 

We drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of cigarettes (don’t worry none of us has smoked for a long time)

Kristina and I went to an outdoor music festival and got locked out of our flat and had to sleep on the steps.

 

For our last couple of months, we lived in a different flat in Marble Arch with our friend Marianne. We spent many long evenings playing cards and drinking cheap beer from the liquor store across the street.

And we had a bit of crush on Tony Blair.

Oh, shoot. These pictures don’t convey what an amazing summer and autumn that was. We worked random jobs (I temped at an architecture firm, a boxing magazine, and a charity for the blind, among many other things) and spent many, many, many evenings in pubs. We would meet for lunch in a park off Oxford Street, hungover more often than not.

Good times.