CITY OF PRETTY Welcome to London

Hello I am Lee, 26-year-old model. I’m addicted to the lifestyle it affords me: instead of watching my behind deteriorate in tick-tock time slouching over an office desk – I could use said derriere chasing after everything, infinitely.

Here’s to London. It is where I have been four weeks now and for me it seems the greatest city in the world. Most of South Africa has spent some time in London at one point or another churning the graft wheel, squatting it up in their gap year. To me this time feels completely new, I feel new. Anonymous among millions of heads bobbing, pushing to and fro, on tubes, off tubes, up and down stairs, into busses and onto high streets. I was living in Cape Town for the better part of 10 years before London. The transition from salty haired surf girl to presentable socialite in waiting has been efficiently effective all right – thanks to them darned high streets. One has to look the part, no?

I am making my way. In three weeks I have shopped alongside Florence Welsch; had too many Martinis with an American pop phenomenon perched with impaired willpower on a bar stool; shook my assets alongside Jefferson Hack at a Gang Gang Dance gig/Dazed & Confused culture festival; attended a party hosted by Mick Jagger’s offspring; listened to Holy Mountain’s director Alejandro Jodorowsky lecture about reading fortunes from one’s rectum in an old church and, finally, splashed rear first into a hot tub at a member’s club alongside London’s fashion who’s-who. I was only in there for two minutes  – girls in 40s bikinis and feathers on their heads pulled me in but I pulled myself out soon after, sopping top to tush. Guess I did land my bum in the butter then. What would Alejandro say?

Hailing from a German colony in Namibia, I was bestowed with a well-preserved Aryan look. My blood looks more German than our own kind. Or Scandinavian. Whichever meets the brief better. I’m not ungrateful to the genetic lottery my parents must have got some digits in. And it might be easy money, but the job is not. You constantly have to look the part, act it and be the more dazzling, beautiful and captivating woman in the room.

No pressure, none!

And always the tube when it’s hot and your face is melting off and coming undone, and busses being late when you are already really late for that special request casting… It’s a relentless chase. And London is full of ridiculously good-looking women and/or models.

I don’t rely on my looks, however, I most definitely would be somewhere different right now if it weren’t for these pins. I have never taken for granted what I have. It helps that my tenacity runs on the inside. For now, instead of waves, I am riding my 15-minutes for all it’s worth.