Coming to London, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with the normal tourist experience, with window shopping at Harrods and throwing small rocks at the Buckingham Palace guards. I wanted to experience the London that Dickens talks about, that teams with masses of unwashed flesh, with Jacob Markelys and Mr Fagins. I wanted to go to the places where the city itself becomes a character, a breathing, mechanical Frankenstein, who sits much too close for comfort to you on the underground. I wanted to feel myself an insider in a foreign city, to learn the tricks and trade of survival there. I wanted, in short, to become a London bum.

You might think, at first, that this is an easy thing to do, that people become bums merely from lack of effort, and particularly through a lack of bathing – you would be wrong. If I have succeeded in any measure during my time here, it has only been through a most constant and determined effort. But I knew that going in. I had a plan.

The first step, as in any career, was to dress for success. Luckily, thanks to backpacking for the past seven months, I was already halfway there. I’m now the proud owner of eight pairs of socks, every one of which has a hole at least the size of a quarter (or here in England, a two pence). My nineteen-eighties vintage zipper sweater, bought for three euros at an Edinburgh charity shop, was also now ideal. It’s true that I did have a rather expensive gore-tex jacket, but thanks to a bit of barbed wire and the bright green thread that I used to sew up the resulting tears (all the while pretending I was Aragorn in Middle-earth), that too suited me just fine. Still, I knew looking like a nineteen-eighties reject wasn’t enough. I needed to look like a dirty nineteen-eighties reject. The opportunity for that came when I was instructed to paint a hall closet as part of my deal for lodging in London. Jackson Pollock couldn’t have done a better job if he, like me, had used his body as a canvas. Now paint splattered and smeared, (and with just a bit it my hair for good measure), I was ready to face the world, and smiled inwardly as people mistook my canny plan for mere clumsiness.

The next step, I felt, was to discover where the bums of London congregated. Drawing from my experience in Ann Arbor, I suspected the public spaces would be my best bet. With a brave disregard for the fine time I might otherwise have been having, I relentlessly made my way through every museum and gallery that London had to offer, every monument and park, every palace and piazza. It was only my perseverance that kept me at each one for hours on end. Their charms, from the Rosetta stone to Rembrandt’s self-portraits, which they displayed like cheap whores, held no power over me, for my eyes were on a higher goal. I found the best sleeping corners, where you could sit without being disturbed, what provoked the crowds, and more importantly, the police, and most importantly, where the free bathrooms were.

Of course, finding warm places to sit down is not enough. One also needs food. The opportunity for that came at a private gallery showing that I was invited to. The viewing was held near the Old Street station, a newly trendy part of town where the rich and poor are strangely intermingled. Social tensions can run quite high, and there was something quite unique about stepping over human urine into a building where the first painting I saw was being sold for fifty-five thousand pounds (that’s $96,912 with the current exchange rate). The painting, a series of squiggly white and pink lines over a red and black background, was merely incidental, however, to the free snacks that were on a table below it. I quickly grabbed myself a plate. With the door having been left open, I also noticed two of my fellow bums who had also infiltrated this ritzy crowd, and were busily carving themselves huge chunks of French cheese and large glasses of wine. With a mutual understanding that speaking would keep us from our suppers, we didn’t talk. I particularly enjoyed the grapes and the hot pepper crackers. With over seventy commercial galleries on London, such showings are regular opportunities for a harmonious mingling of the classes.

Part of being a bum in London is breaking the rules. For instance, on the Underground, one does not talk with one’s fellow passengers. One does not even make eye contact. Instead, one either listens to one’s iPod, or admires the newest fashion in shoes. Pointy shoes among women, if you’re interested, is the current trend. To be a success at panhandling, however, you’ve got to breach that invisible wall. When I accidentally shrunk my sweater to the size of a prepubescent girl’s tee-shirt (or rather, when my canny plan made it seem like an accident) my first thought (or so it seemed) was to go to a charity shop. However, when I went and found out used jumpers were being priced at upwards of fifteen pounds, I had to (seemed to) rethink my plan. I asked myself, What Would A Bum Do?

And then it came to me. Yes, I went door to door asking people if they wanted to give me a free sweater. Well, I went to two doors. At the first door, no one was home. At the second, after explaining that I was a poor retarded orphan girl (okay, okay, so I just explained that I’d ruined my sweater in the wash), the lady at the door told me to come back at five, and she’d see what she could find. If the cynical among you think she was just trying to put me off – you’re wrong. “After all, you certainly need a jumper,” she said, “and my husband has lots of clothes he never even wears.” This was almost certainly true; we were in a very posh neighborhood. And so, by the end of the day, I was outfitted in not just one, but two high quality wool sweaters. I would have had a third, but it’d been too large for me to wear. London, it must be said, is bitingly cold in the winter. But, if you’re canny enough to realize it, I suppose it’s pretty warm at times as well. Didn’t Dickens say something like that?