Chapter 38 #2
I’d spent so long existing in a bubble where he wasn’t a part of my daily life – or, apparently, my daily commute, that I had gotten used to the kind of peace in his absence.
That peace seemed to be at an end.
June
In the summer, I was invited to freelance for an indie publication.
Somewhere around mid-morning, my laptop pinged with an email with a bizarre subject line. I opened the email, fully expecting it to be a scam, but kind of hoping it wouldn’t be.
The further down the email I read, the higher, and higher my eyebrows went.
An independent music magazine had offered me an unusual freelance deal. I sat back in my chair, and snorted at the audacity.
They didn’t have the budget to pay me, but they did have hospitality tickets for the Route Du Rock festival in Saint-Malo, France.
I re-read the email three times to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood. Who pays a journalist in festival tickets?
Still… hadn’t I just been telling Becka that morning that I needed a break from London? The city had just entered that stage of summer where it got to be so hot that even the pavements were radiating heat, making the city feel like a sweat box.
The idea of a trip suddenly had some appeal.
I filed the email away and told myself I’d think it over.
Thirty minutes, and one argument with my desk fan later, and I had responded to the editor, taking him up on his offer.
The magazine – Showcase – was so utterly grassroots they might have just crawled out of a garden centre. They emailed me back almost immediately to say they could either pay my airfare, or my daily food budget. Not both.
I actually laughed.
“Of course you can’t do both,” I muttered to myself, oddly charmed by the hustle.
I decided to roll with it, told them to book my flights so that I had one less thing to organise, and I’d live off food van rations for the two days I’d be in France.
My flights were booked by the end of the day.
I told my editor what my plans were, packed a backpack with the bare minimum of essentials and grabbed my passport.
During the short flight over, I listened to a podcast to brush up on the rudimentary French I’d retained from school, mouthing phrases silently, trying to re-familiarise my tongue with the language. “Où sont les toilettes?” seemed essential.
Showcase had only given me one, very broad brief.
‘Write it up like you did that piece on Glasto’.
I stood in the middle of Dinard Pleurtuit airport, staring down at my phone, wondering if they were serious. Deciding they were, I sighed, hoiked my bag up on my shoulder, and set off for the coaches.
My piece on Glastonbury had been a full two-page spread, not including the few photos I’d taken that the editors had cherry picked and polished.
It didn’t take me long after arriving at the festival grounds to realise, however, that Route Du Rock was not Glastonbury.
This smaller festival was alternative, clinging to it’s indie roots, and more folk scene than mass appeal, so I decided to approach it from a different angle and lean into what made it special instead of comparing it to the festivals it wasn’t trying to emulate.
I spent the two days there sitting happily in a dry field, eating festival food and listening to bands I’d never heard of.
It was actually a relief. For two, whole days, no one reminded me of things I didn’t want to think about.
I barely got phone signal, and I was reminded of the reasons why I wanted to be in this industry.
The experience that went so far beyond hearing a song and liking the way it sounds.
For two days with no showers, questionable food choices, no idea what anyone was saying to me, and a lonely two-man tent pitched in a field of prickly, stubby corn stalks - I was happy.
It turned out I’d made the right decision to forego a paycheque for the plot. I wrote the article, and Showcase were delighted.
I’d also vlogged nearly my entire trip – on a whim, really. It wasn’t exactly a new concept, but in addition to being able to use use it for my own social media, it also gave me content rights over my experience at the festival.
Showcase got their article, and I also got to publish independent content that didn’t infringe on my content agreement with them.
The vlog series catapulted my content even more than even my series about living and working in Korea. Probably because that series hadn’t shown the kind of things people wanted to watch, which, going off the comments, had mainly been the talent at ENT.
Content creation wasn’t something I took all that seriously, but it was proving useful to my career.
In the weeks following my trip to France, several different kinds of music related media platforms reached out, from other publications, to podcast hosts and – perhaps most excitingly – the BBC.
Well, to be more accurate, a producer who worked on one of the smaller shows for BBC Radio 4 called to ask if I’d be interested in going to Broadcasting House to guest-spot on a segment they were doing on K-Pop.
Apparently, a researcher for the show had come across my social media from watching one of the vlogs from Route du Rock, saw that I posted a lot of K-Pop content, looked into my published articles and had passed along my details to the show’s producer.
Eagerly, and with no small amount of awe, I agreed, and a date was set for July.
Mum screamed when I told her and Dad. I’d decided to take the weekend out of London and head up to Cumbria – and breathe some real air for a change.
“Oh my God, Ky, the BBC?” Mum shrieked, launching towards me, hands outstretched to cup my cheeks.
“Good job, kiddo.” Dad clapped me on the back, pushing me further towards Mum, who took the incentive to plaster kisses all over my face.
“Our little girl, the real life BBC journalist,” she crowed.
I eventually managed to disentangle myself.
“First of all,” I asserted, straightening my rumpled shirt. “I’m twenty-six years old, a fully-grown adult. Secondly, I’ve been a ‘real life journalist’ for three years, and finally, I am not a Beeb journo, I’m just doing a guest-spot on one of their radio shows.”
Dad elbowed my mum while they both looked at me indulgently, as though everything I’d just said amounted to me stomping my feet and asking for a lollipop.
I rolled my eyes.
I only stayed two nights, but it was refreshing to be somewhere that wasn’t permanently on in the way only a city could be. A perpetual beat of motion wove it’s way through London like a heartbeat whether it be 3 pm, or 3 am. Cumbria was decidedly less… constant.
It was the perfect reset, but it made me think on Patrick’s words back in February – questioning whether London was right for me. I wasn’t sure if I had an answer to that.
There was also another, quieter part of me that reared it’s ugly head to snidely suggest that perhaps London wasn’t the problem. That perhaps I was the problem.
But that was too much introspection for the three hour train ride back to the city.
I shoved it down. Instead, I called Tae, who was on tour with Sol8 in Germany.
Since he’d moved into a timezone more aligned with mine, he’d taken to regularly sending me nonsense, like memes, or videos of him and his group doing dance challenges.
I pretended to grumble about how often he blew up my phone, but I didn’t really mind.
Since last summer, we’d fallen into the easy habit of a kind of pen pal relationship. Sometimes we didn’t talk for weeks, and then he, or I would suddenly send a block of text, just to catch up. Being in an adjacent time-zone was a novelty.
“Hey Pom, how’s tricks?” He greeted me when he picked up.
“I just spent the weekend with my folks.” I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window, watching the countryside stream by.
“Oh yeah? How’s your mum?”
“She’s good. Threatening to get her hair permed now that it’s long enough.”
Tae groaned. “No! Tell her not to! Her poor hair is still recovering!”
I laughed quietly, conscious of the people in the carriage around me. While I wasn’t in the ‘Quiet’ carriage, talking on the phone was still a bit of a faux pas.
“I already told her, don’t worry. How’s Deutschland?”
“Ky, it’s fucking amazing! You should have come like I told you to. The show isn’t for another couple of days, you still could!”
“And like I told you, Mr International, I have commitments in the city.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He sighed. “I guess I just wanted to put eyeballs on my mate.”
I chuckled. “Weirdly graphic. Hey, did I tell you about the Beeb?”
“The boob? Ky, we’re not that kind of friends.” He sounded scandalised.
I rolled my eyes, but grinned.
“Not boob, you boob. Beeb. As in, BBC.”
“No… Ky, are you working for the BBC? That’s fucking awesome!”
“No, I’m not working for the BBC,” I huffed. “Now my news isn’t exciting anymore.”
“Oh. Well, in my defence, that was a pretty fair conclusion to jump to. Come on then, what’s your news?”
“I don’t know if I wanna tell you anymore.” I sniffed.
“Pom,” he cajoled, “come on. Tell your old mate TaeTae-”
“TaeTae?” I scoffed.
“I don’t pick the nicknames, the nicknames pick me. Don’t get distracted. Tell me about the ‘beeb’.”
I conceded. “I’m doing a guest spot on one of their radio shows.”
“Ky, that’s wicked! What’s the spot about?”
“The cultural impact of K-Pop on western media.” I rattled off, feeling like I’d said that title so many times that the words had started to jumble into one, long word.
“Wow, you’re really getting pigeon-holed into K-Pop, huh?” He laughed because this wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation. I gave him the same response I always did.
“It’s hard to get mad about that when it’s something you feel so passionately about. You should know a little something about it, no?”
His laughter eased off, and he said, “There are certainly worse things than being consigned to a life you love. Anyway, I’ve read all your recent stuff, you don’t always write about K-Pop. Is that a choice, or…?”