Category Archives: Personal

Student Loan Overpayment

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Recently I have had the misfortune of discovering how student loan repayments actually work in the UK. For those paying out of their salary the Student Loans Company calculates the outstanding balance at the beginning of the tax year. If you still owe money they instruct HMRC to continue to receive payments, these payments are then kept by HMRC and only sent on to the SLC at the end of the year.

This means that if at the beginning of the tax year you owe some small amount, around £100 in my case, you will pay off your debt in the first month but continue to pay for the rest of the year before anybody will take any action to stop the payments. In my case by the time I noticed what had happened I had overpaid by over four thousand pounds!

Given how the system works it’s not surprising that the SLC collected £15 million in overpayments in the 2009/2010 tax year. Another report had the total overpayments at £48 million as of March 2008 with the average graduate overpaying by £533. It seems former students are expected to track repayments closely and contact the SLC in advance of paying off the loan to make sure payments are stopped in time.

The system is simply bizzarre, causing overpayment of student loans by design. I’ve spent today faxing off (my first encounter with this arcane technology) payslips to the SLC in the hope of speeding up the repayment process. I’ve been told to phone again on Friday to check my fax actually got to someone and is being acted upon. I have now joined the 57000 graduates waiting for a refund from the SLC. One of the worst aspects of which being that the SLC never contact you if there is a problem, for example if they are awaiting more information, they will just put your claim at the bottom of the pile and forget about it. This means you have to keep checking up on the progress of your claim in order to get it processed efficiently.

Fortunately the SLC does now accept payment by direct debit allowing you to avoid the old overpayment-by-default system. I only wish they promoted this method by perhaps sending me a letter warning of overpayment and how to avoid it. Given that the SLC knew at the start of this tax year that I owed much less than I paid in the previous year I feel a courteous warning is the very least they could have done. It would be interesting to file a freedom of information request to see what percentage of students have switched to direct debit and how many are unknowingly still on the current broken system.

San Francisco

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For the last week I’ve been in San Francisco, commuting to work in Silicon Valley. Attempting to explore the city as much as possible I’ve been making use of mornings and nights to wander around before succumbing to jet-lag and retiring at sometimes ridiculously early hours. This probably wasn’t helped by attending a James Ferraro gig in London the night before catching the eleven hour flight. My first activity, a five hour walk from the city to the Golden Gate Bridge, left my muscles aching for half the week. I’m heading back to London on Sunday so there is only one full non-work day in the city left but I’ve enjoyed my visit and managed to see quite a bit in a short space of time.

San Francisco

My arrival in the city was a little scary as I disembarked from the BART at Civic Center without any idea where I was going. The huge number of homeless people on the streets was startling and I was more than a little concerned as I wandered around not really knowing which direction to go in. Checking up on Google reveals the city has somewhere between two and three times more homeless people than London despite having a mere one tenth the total population. There doesn’t seem to be any easy answer to the problem and the city appears to be running out of ideas; they recently banned people from sitting on the sidewalk between 7am and 11pm.

Despite being too tired most nights to check out the local bar scene we’ve managed to visit some really nice restaurants. Absinthe, located on a particularly nice part of Hayes Street has been one of my favourites where I indulged in an exquisite duck breast and finished the meal with one of their many cocktails. At each restaurant we’ve visited I’ve opted for a Californian wine and they have all been gorgeous.

Golden Gate Bridge

Our visit has coincided with Chinese new year and on Saturday morning I wandered through Chinatown to see the setting up of flower stalls for the Chinese New Year Flower Fair. On the eve of the Year of The Rabbit I returned to Chinatown to find the streets beautifully lit by lanterns as warm light and laughter poured from the many cocktail bars and the occasional firework exploded to the applause of car alarms.

My walk took me out the other end of Chinatown and into City Lights Books. A painfully hip bookshop spread over three floors stocking everything from mainstream classics to weird outsider fiction and non-fiction categorised into philosophy, women’s studies, queer studies, music, stolen continents, science and so on. I explored the shop floor by floor and settled with a book in a chair in their beat and poetry section. Grabbing a mixture of staff recommendations and books that caught my eye for the flight home I headed to the till and back out into the city. As I walked back to the hotel past Union Square a busker played cool jazz into the night and the city danced to the rhythm.

Women's Building

On Tuesday morning I managed to head down to The Mission district and explore some of the awesome murals including those in Clarion Alley and the Women’s Building. We grabbed breakfast at Dolores Park Cafe and I skimmed the San Francisco Chronicle while waiting for the bus to take us to Silicone Valley. I’m pretty sure if I ever moved to San Francisco this is the area I’d like to live in. The Mission is slightly warmer than the rest of the city and walking through a sunny park filled with palm trees in early February is a great feeling.

We’ve been staying in the Hotel Adagio where the rooms are clean and spacious but lacking any character. The nearby Hotel Triton which I passed one evening looks much more interesting although I’m unsure how much a room might cost. I’ve still to visit Blue Bottle Coffee which was recommended by a colleague, take the cable car, visit Fisherman’s Wharf and cross off the rest of Time Out’s 20 things to do but there is still time.

All my photos of the trip so far live in this Flickr set.

2010 Retrospective

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As the year draws to a close it’s common to take stock. Best albums, films, gigs, personal experiences. For me it’s been an important year. Strictly speaking I moved to London and started my current job in Autumn 2009 but this has been my first full year in the capital. It seems I’ve spent about £1000 on gigs, you can see a partial list on Songkick. Highlights have included Ben Frost setting fire to the equipment at The Luminaire, Carla Bozulich lying on top of me during a set at Cafe Oto, the reactivation of Swans, Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides, Richard Youngs, Oneohtrix Point Never, The Sun Ra Arkestra, Throbbing Gristle, Cafe Oto’s Japanese New Music Festival and a huge number of improv sets involving the likes of John Edwards, Evan Parker, Tony Marsh and Chris Corsano to name a few. On top of that I’ve eaten at a bunch of awesome restaurants visited numerous galleries, exhibitions, pubs and a bunch of other stuff I went on about in a previous post.

Japanese New Music

At the start of the year I bought a record player and have been doing my best to keep up with what’s available from Volcanic Tongue. Some of my favourites have been Call Back The Giants, Autre Ne Vuet, Ducktails – Landscapes, Forest Swords – Dagger Paths, Vulcan - Meet Your Ghost, Tashi Wada - Alignment, Flower-Corsano Duo - You’ll Never Work In This Town Again, Part Wild Horses – Blew in the Face, MV & EE – Liberty Rose, Bill Orcutt – Way Down South, a few Heather Leigh Murray releases and a couple of awesome Richard Youngs LPs.

Not everything great was new though. I got acquainted with Kate Bush by listening to Hounds of Love on loop for a few weeks. London punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald was brought to my attention and Grey Echoes became one of my favourite tracks. On top of that I’ve been listening to pretty much every album mentioned as I read through Rob Young’s excellent history of British folk: Electric Eden. Some awesome reissues I’ve picked up include: Doug Snyder & Bob Thompson - Daily Dance, Vertical Slit - Slit And Pre-Slit, The Dead C - Clyma Est Mort/Tentative Power, Lula Côrtes - Rosa De Sangue, Nihonjin – Far Out, Catherine Christer Hennix - The Electric Harpsichord and Crass – The Feeding of the 5000. Simply put I’ve listened to so much awesome new music this year I can’t even remember it all! That’s not even counting films. I signed up to LoveFilm and watched a bunch of them too, old and new. To top it all off The Wire will publish their end of year list next month and as usual I won’t have heard half of it and will spend the next month or two catching up.

On the down side I spent a little too much money on gadgets and didn’t get the holiday to Tokyo I dream about. However I now have a shiny 13-inch Macbook Air which I love, a Kindle and my prized Nikon D90. Unfortunately I failed to become a great photographer in my first year but I did get contacted by an agent asking to hire me and a venue wanting to use some photos in their press-pack so I must be doing OK. My personal life hasn’t exactly gone to plan either but hopefully I’ll survive.

Now I need to find a new place to live in London before I head back to Glasgow for Christmas. Wish me luck!

A weekend in Ukraine

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I have just returned from a weekend in Kiev with some work colleagues. Having slept at most five hours over the whole weekend, including the occasional nap on a bus or plane I’m incredibly exhausted and conscious of the fact that a two day visit to Ukraine doesn’t allow much time to really explore. Due to arrive late on Friday night our flight was delayed, landing at one in the morning local time. Adding to that the slowest passport control I’ve ever encountered and our taxi running out of petrol somewhere outside Kiev meant we were asleep on the couch (don’t ask) of our hostel at half past four in the morning. That gave us about an hour of sleep before the sun burst in through the curtain-less windows.

For Saturday we had planned a visit to Chernobyl and Prypiat. Chernobyl lies within a 30km exclusion zone requiring permission and a guide to pass government checkpoints so we joined up with a group in Kiev which we had booked prior to our arrival.

The guided tour started in the city of Chernobyl which has some inhabitants who work in the exclusion zone as well as permanent residents who have returned at their own risk. We then make our way to the power plant and subsequently on to the abandoned city of Prypiat stopping at various sites along the way. In Prypiat we walk around the city, crumbling due to a mixture of nature and vandalism, and are allowed to enter a few buildings and even climb onto the roof of the hotel for a panorama of the area. Over two decades since its evacuation the city is a post-human jungle with trees everywhere, even inside the buildings.

On returning to Kiev we are introduced to a local bar by one of the owners of our Hostel. As with the hostel itself the bar is down a dark alleyway with no external evidence of its existence. Somewhat magically we descend some stairs, a door is opened and a burst of light and noise flows from the stylish interior. After several drinks we move on to a club on the outskirts of the city and forsake our second night of sleep.

We awake early on Sunday morning and proceed on a whirlwind tour of Kiev before our 4pm flight. We walk through a massive park taking in various monuments and impressive buildings as well as gorgeous views over the city. At the Holodomor monument we encounter a local girl who gives us a very eloquent and touching account of Ukrainian history. We then carry on to the enormous Mother Motherland statue where we catch a taxi and our short encounter with Ukraine comes to an end.

Along with the locals that we met we encountered a large number of travelers in Kiev. We even met one man who was driving to Mongolia in an old ambulance he planned to donate on his arrival. A weekend break seems much too short in comparison. Perhaps it is an appetiser for a future adventure.

Life in London

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After nine months living in London I’m finding myself in an increasingly reflective mood. Life in the capital is pretty amazing. A trip to one of the many markets always has me returning with something cool like the Stylophone I picked up last week at Brick Lane Market or the yummy cheese and salami we grabbed at Borough Market the week before. The city is full of restaurants serving food from all around the globe and if I had a bit more money I’d probably try and eat through as many of them as I can. However, probably my favourite thing in London is music. Gone are the days when I flicked through the listings at the back of The Wire and lamented the number of cool gigs that I would be unable to go to. I’ve also discovered Cafe Oto and its amazing programme of new music which makes me think about moving to East London more and more each day.

Chelsea, London

It’s cool to just take the tube somewhere random and go for a walk and see what you find. Quaint little lanes in Chelsea, an independent record shop at the end of Portobello Road, stunning views on the South Bank or the awesome Dalston Peace Mural.

There are downsides to life here too, rent is ridiculously expensive and the quality of housing very low. It seems the demand is so high that landlords can be pretty much guaranteed a particular price based on area and don’t need to bother maintaining their property. My commute, although thankfully brief, usually involves being crammed into a smelly metal tube with a few hundred fellow Londoners. The hectic nature of life and work here can be tiring and a little stressful at times. Despite all this, I think it’s worth it to live in a place where I have the chance to discover something new every day.