Redden

Relocation

2008-05-11T12:55:00.000+01:00

This blog is no longer extant. Please visit me here.

Spring Clean

2008-04-26T18:48:00.003+01:00

Beloved readers,

I have become entrenched in a stale marriage with Blogger. The layout is just plain ordinary and we don't have exciting transmissions anymore. Thus I have decided to embroil myself in a torrid affair with Wordpress.

I will be moving this blog to the sexier environs of http://ladyredjess.wordpress.com in the near future. If, by chance, you click on this link and it transmits you to a black hole, that means the exporting has gone tits up and that I will be sitting quietly at my desk, trying to figure out what to do next.

Hopefully however, my vast and superior knowledge of all things technical will ensure a smooth breakup and an intact set of crockery.

ANZAC Day Nausea

2008-04-25T18:57:00.003+01:00

I was going to title this blog ‘ANZAC Day Ambivalence’ (which has nice alliteration) but after seeing the headlines on news.com.au this morning: ‘Gallipoli pilgrims pay respects’, I am changing the operative word to ‘nausea.’

It seems to me that each year the ANZAC Day celebrations become increasingly sentimental, distorted and obsessed with nationalism. In a country that has so little European history and therefore aspires to make do with what it has, the few events worth commemorating (and even those are dubious) run the risk of being blown out of proportion.

This year, it appears that they are trying to give the ceremony religious overtones, and this has made me very, very angry. Gallipoli was created by the mismanagement of leaders who wanted to create a back door entry by which to attack Germany. The terrain was inhospitable and almost unpassable and the ANZACs were fired upon as soon as they left their ships to crawl onto land. It was an absolute bloodbath which is not deserving of the respect of a religious ceremony. Yes, the soldiers were heroic and for that they should be remembered, but they were going into war and they were going to kill people. I am of the opinion that murderers should not be honoured as saints.

Often ANZAC Day appears to me as a celebration of war, or rather, a celebration of a bunch of men who played with their toys and territory. Adding to my reservations is the repellent term ‘mateship.’ For what of the thousands of women who supported the ANZAC forces? The nurses serving in Egypt, France, Greece and India; those working in auxiliary roles as cooks, nurses, driver, interpreters; and those holding together the country at home – taking on the emotional burden of keeping families together, and of making sure the economy dragged itself on by doing men’s work, whether in the cities or on the farms. Does ‘mateship’ celebrate them?

I do believe in respecting what these people did because they loved Australia and because they risked their lives for their country, but I think the commemoration shouldn’t focus so exclusively upon the Diggers. I also think we should look to the future rather than to the past. Australia, someone once told me, was different to England in that it had such an emphasis on youth. We encourage our young people, we are positive and we try to look forward. In this spirit, then, I believe there is another cause far more worthy of our attention: justice for the Aboriginal people.
Getup, always a practical organisation, have made a step in that direction into this by composing a song for justice. You can buy it here (but only if you’re in Oz). If Australians are determined to have ‘mateship’ as their defining characteristic, why not extend that to Aboriginals and do something about reconciliation?

A Gloomy Start to my Morning

2008-04-24T20:13:00.002+01:00

This morning at breakfast I read an incredibly dispiriting article about the discrimination women employees faced once they announced they were pregnant. One of the cases it highlighted was that of Ramona Jones, who worked in the human resources department of a county council, working her way upwards until she was a step away from a management position. Then she announced she was going to have her first baby. The promise of a move to a higher role disappeared and on her return from maternity leave she was shoved back into a boring role that she had held two years previously. By no means alone in this situation, she cited examples of women in senior positions who had been forced into a similar pattern or who, on arranging to work part-time, were expected to do their entire job in three days instead of five (can you imagine doing this with a new baby anyway?) and naturally floundered and were forced into redundancy.

It occurred to me as I read this article that the women were fine at their work – they did well and were rewarded for it – until the very point that their femininity became obvious. For what marks out a woman as a woman more clearly than her capacity to give birth? Women can be treated equally (though they are rarely paid equally, but that is another blog entry) as long as they act like men. As soon as their difference becomes obvious, they are penalised for it.

The thing that saddened me most was the colossal waste of talent that this practice encourages. The article ended with a comment from Ruth Holloway who was told to resign when she became pregnant and who, in trying to contest this, was forced to take a cheque and shut up rather than carry the case to a tribunal because she was so exhausted from fighting the company (and as a deaf woman who has to constantly stand up for my rights, I can totally empathise with this). Holloway said: ‘It’s great fun being at the school gates, and looking after my children full-time, but it’s not quite the same as the buzz that you get from running a massive team and being in charge of a £4bn budget. It’s not quite the same as leading a massive team project. If you’re the kind of person who can do that, then you enjoy it, and so I do miss it. I always will.’ The loss isn’t just Holloway’s, though, it’s also her company’s. Just from this comment you can see that the company has lost a bright, energetic and competent employee.

I recall a conversation I had with my father a while ago – one which didn’t, unusually, descend into a biting argument – in which he said that feminism had been around for thirty years and that good things had happened, but there were very few women in roles of power. He was of the opinion that women just weren’t cut out to lead. Actually I think the only reason why there wasn’t an argument was because I was still young at this point and hadn’t mustered enough ammunition to reply, so I let it drop. Now, however, I can see that at least one reason why there are so few female leaders: sexism is still rife and if it’s a choice between doing battle with a bunch of testosterone laden triceratops and looking after your baby, you’re obviously going to chose the latter, especially if it’s your first baby because you don’t really know what you’re doing and don’t want to fuck it up. This isn’t only detrimental to women, but to men as well: what if a man doesn’t want to spend hours at the office but wants to look after the baby too?

At the heart of it all is a glaring hypocrisy – the people who get to the top of a profession are often those who have been nurtured well. How can they then show such disregard for the job of parenting by keeping men at work away from their children, and by forcing intelligent women back into the home, where they may become bitter and bored (and looking after babies is incredibly boring, though few dare to admit it) and transmit that frustration to their children? And this is only one small aspect of the fallout from the poor treatment of female employees – I could go on for hours but I have a thesis to write.

The only hope I have is that gleaned from a newspaper I read a while ago, which said that companies will be forced to change to accommodate women because, as the population ages and the employment pool shrinks, companies won't be able to afford to lose their female employees. And it won’t, as my father thought, take thirty years. If, after three or four decades, sexism like this still exists, it will take generations to be rid of it.

Better than Mills and Boon

2008-04-20T22:11:00.004+01:00

This isn’t an internet dating blog entry, although one of them will be forthcoming in due course. Suffice to say it’s providing hours of amusement, but (because I am fastidious in my tastes) no romance yet. For that, where better can I slip than between the sheets of a book?

The Easter long weekend took us to a Woolacombe, where we stayed in a caravan with some friends and our cousin, who also brought along his retinue, the various members of which descended on us a varying times. It was bitterly cold, although not snowing as it was in the rest of the country. As we played beach volleyball, I began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation: the wind was horizontal and it was near freezing, but we were going to have our beach activity no matter what. Anyone other than the English would have just stayed inside and toasted their tootsies by the fire.

The next day I went for a walk by myself along the shore. The tide was out and had left pools of water in the sand which I skipped over. Coming back was tortuous, as the wind was icy and determined to fold me in half and then, joy of joys, it began hailing. I finally made it back to the caravan for a game of Scrabble, which I lost because someone helped H (again) and I subsided into a deep sulk.

On Sunday we went for a long walk along a headland, then down to a cove with black sand and a log smouldering from a fire. A dog, going bananas in the sea air, bounded around with a stick. I collected some rocks for my fish bowl, and on the way back H and I sank into the green grass at the top of the cliffs the way we used to do when we were kids on the farm, watching the birds freewheeling and the sea tossing up white balls of foam into the air above us.

We ate dinner at The Thatch and enlightened the English as to the anatomical meaning of this term in Australia, then played bingo at the vile club in the caravan park for novelty value. The kids’ games room was filled with brightly coloured slot machines and the adults’ room, full of pokies, was identical, thereby making for an obvious transition from one kind of game to another, more damaging one.

After bingo we settled down to watch Ocean’s Eleven. ‘Oh,’ I said scathingly as a car backed up with an enormous piece of equipment on board (don’t ask me what it was), ‘it’s such a boy’s film.’
A looked at me pointedly and said, ‘And what did we watch last night?’
I squirmed. It had been Pride and Prejudice. It was an otherwise beautiful film except for the scenes with Keira Knightley in them. Twiglet is clearly suffering from a want of vitamins because she has rictus of the jaw and can’t move her muscles properly. Unbelievably, she wasn’t as thin in this film as she was in Atonement, in which she closely resembled a coat hanger.

The next day we set off home via Doone Valley, which a friend had told us about during another clifftop walk. The road into the valley was steep, with trees crouching on either side, and I said that I wouldn’t like to be caught on that road on a dark and stormy night. We pulled up at Doone Valley Buttery for second breakfast, and came upon a sheepdog with a screw loose. It had a fascination for stones, but if you threw her a stone, she’d take it down to the creek and stand guard over it in the water. We drove onward over narrow roads through twisted trees and thickly grassed banks, pausing by a brook for photos. I expected Heathcliff to come striding over the grass and to pinion me against a tree but alas, the vision didn't materialise.

At lunch we stopped at Dunster, where there was a castle. We had lunch at a pub which had an African Grey Parrot called Nelson in a cage. Nelson wouldn’t talk if you were looking at him, so when the old men who were sitting nearby exited, he set up a whole little landscape of croons and whistles, and then erupted with, ‘Wanker!’
‘Nelson!’ the bartender scolded him.
Said bartender was similarly odd. Overhearing our conversation on facial and body hair (specifically on getting a free exfoliation when a girl kisses a prickly boy) as he set down our plates, he added, ‘I do like a good stache.’
After lunch, full of Cumberland sausages, we wandered down the road to a paddock and watched more dogs galumping about, then into the National Trust gardens, which were just beautiful, not least because of the magnolia tree that was in flower. We climbed the hill to the castle, and once at the top realised we had to get our skates on as none of us wanted to be left behind in the waiting room at Swindon train station.

And the romance? It began as soon as I opened the covers of Lorna Doone when I got home. There was tall, strapping John Ridd fighting the equally strong, but murderous Doones to get his girl, who had been born into the wrong family. That was a good enough plot to keep anyone reading, but what added to my delight was the way the strands that seemed to end in questions were caught up and woven back into the fabric of the work in that wonderfully logical, but improbable, 19th century way. And it wasn’t so much the characters themselves that lit up my mind, for John was faintly misogynist and Lorna needed a man to defend herself – but rather the quality of their love. It sprang up in their childhoods, then endured and made them stronger: John’s love pushed him to become braver, Lorna’s washed away her pride and breeding. It was the alchemy of love that made me fall for the book, and want to begin it again as soon as it had finished.

Part the XIV: In Which the Deaf Girl Resolves to Find a Bloke

2008-03-27T12:59:00.002Z

Given that the most risqué my life gets these days is going to bed smelling of Agent Provocateur Sauce, and that the most romance I can muster is singing along to the Elephant Love Medley from Moulin Rouge whilst eating peanut butter out of the jar with a knife, I figured it was about time I tried to find myself a bloke.

As you may have noticed, men and I don’t quite see eye-to-eye on many things. I’m a feminist and I make no apologies for it. This doesn’t mean that I hate all men – far from it – it just means that I refuse to compromise my beliefs for a more just society. H once had a go at me for being so dogmatic and I replied, well, if it hadn’t been for Emmeline Pankhurst and her hunger strikes in prison and her protests, English women wouldn’t have got the vote. Unless people make a noise about inequality, it will be conveniently ignored.

Added to this is the problem of having grown up with a sensitive, generous, humorous gay brother (aside from outbursts like the above, which are rare), which means that I expect every man I come across also to be sensitive, generous and humorous, and simply can’t fathom it when they aren’t. Clearly, there is something wrong with them all.

Then there is the problem of being an opinionated, outspoken, highly intelligent, attractive and articulate young lady, which many men, particularly reserved English men, find confronting. And finally, of course, there is the major problem of having a disability.

My friends just don’t understand why I can’t go up to a man in a bar and start chatting to him. ‘It doesn’t matter that you can’t hear, it’s so noisy that we can’t either.’ That isn’t the point. What is the point is that for nearly 30 years (having got meningitis when I was 3 and a half), I have been conditioned to try and fit in, to hide my deafness and to appear as ‘normal’ as possible, and that, therefore, the disclosure of a disability is something to be avoided at all costs. Even I can see how patently ridiculous this thinking is, and yet I can’t do anything about it – it’s become instinctive – I’ve become colonised and appropriated into the world of the hearing. It isn’t my parents’ fault either – we lived in a remote part of the country where they had little access to resources that explained how to bring up a deaf child, I was sent to a hearing school as otherwise I would have had to go to a boarding school for deaf children in Sydney, 7 hours’ drive away, and my mother could only rely upon her wits, which dictated that I should be just like everyone else. And this is one of the reasons why I pay so much attention to my appearance (aside from a incurable weakness for stilettos, handbags, cardies and lingerie): a girl that pretty couldn’t possibly have a problem, could she?

So why am I even bothering? Aside from the fact that I’m a healthy young girl who likes her Agent Provocateur, I’m conscious of becoming too selfish and too staid by spending so much time on my own. And then, of course, I’m an incurable romantic, in the tradition of Byron and Heathcliff, rather than namby hearts and roses, and I want someone to write poetry for. So I’ve decided that, rather than climbing up on my white stallion all a-clankin’ in my armour, I shall divest myself of my metal, sign up to an internet dating website and try walking, unarmed, with the hopefuls.

Insomnia and Illness

2008-03-18T15:20:00.001Z

I have forgotten how to go to sleep. It started the Sunday before last, and every night since then I’ve been kept awake by conversations with myself, new threads for my thesis, tirades against our flatmate’s boyfriend who, at 25, still can’t even aim into the toilet bowl correctly, and ideas for the endings of stories. I do exercises to banish any thoughts from my head (muscular relaxation, pushing thoughts out with a broom) but they spring back like bouncy young vines and keep growing and curling in my mind. I need weedkiller.

So, with not enough sleep, I have naturally become ill, and a few days this week were decadently (any time I have when I’m not writing or studying feels decadent) passed wrapped in my pink mohair rug on my bed, reading Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. Sometimes I felt as aimless as Frederic himself, wandering the streets of revolutionary Paris and thinking about his amour and generally not doing anything with himself, and other times I wanted to give him a good kick up the arse and tell him to get a job.

One of the things that makes Flaubert such an excellent writer is his attention to detail. Here is a paragraph describing Frederic in love:

‘They nearly always stayed out of doors at the top of the stairs, with the tops of trees yellowed by the autumn rising in uneven curves up to the pale horizon in front of them; or else they went to the far end of the avenue, to a summer-house whose only furniture was a sofa covered in grey linen. The mirror was stained with black spots; the walls gave off a musty smell; and they stayed there talking about themselves, about others, about anything and everything, in an ecstasy of delight. Sometimes the sunbeams, coming through the Venetian blind, would stretch what looked like the strings of a lyre from ceiling to floor, and specks of dust would whirl about in these luminous bars. She amused herself by breaking them with her hand; Frederic would gently seize it and gaze at the tracery of her veins, the grain of her skin, the shape of her fingers. For him, each of her fingers was something more than a thing, almost a person.’ (Penguin, 1964, p. 271).

It’s the grounding of love through the details of the particular – the spots on the mirror, the mustiness of the walls, the yellowing trees, the strips of sunlight – that makes this such an evocative piece. Also, I have a fondness for the way light falls through shutters and windows. I like Emily Dickinson’s ‘There’s a certain slant of light’ – her entire poem on a shape of sunlight in a room - and (for I am sometimes a popular culture whore), the line from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love: ‘Shuttered rooms/with sunlight breaking through.’ It reminds me of summer afternoons in the long holidays on the farm, bored out of my mind, lying under the fan on the prickly carpet and contemplating the light.

On Saturday H and I went to the National Gallery to look at Alison Watt’s exhibition Phantom which was, essentially, huge paintings of swathes of white fabric. The paintings were very poorly displayed and we didn’t think much of it at all until we watched the accompanying video. Despite an incredibly odd start, in which it looked like the painter was being stalked by her interviewer, it developed into an interesting depiction of her work and the ideas behind it. One concept was that the hole made by a fold in the fabric is about the possibility of all that is unseen. I like this idea – which is called ‘negativity’ – and I use it in my thesis, in the sense that those things which we can’t see or hear are not necessarily a loss, but rather something that is productive. The shapes in Watt’s folds were also undeniably feminine, reminding me of vulvas, and I was surprised that no mention was made of this. Perhaps she hadn’t intended it that way and it was, as usual, just my indecent mind. In the video the painting were arranged in her studio so as to take up all available space and it appeared as though she was working among a sea of sheets, but in the gallery they were hung solitarily upon the walls, and it felt very empty.

London and I

2008-03-07T15:37:00.001Z

I will never love London – the city’s streets harbour too much of my unhappiness for that - but recently we have been jostling into a ... slightly less aggressive relationship. I blame Tim Burton and the way his cobbles glistened in Sweeney Todd with the London damp and how, on an evening a few weeks ago, the fog rolled along the streets, reminding me of lamp posts and frock coats. I marvelled that our dingy East End suburb, which is Victorian if you approach it from one end, but perfectly depressing if you come through the council flats at the opposite end, could be so evocative.

This sentience has been augmented by a book of poetry I found on the shelves at the library – Sean Borodale’s Notes for an Atlas, an account of his walks through London. I am very particular about my poetry - well, I am about most things – and this work passes the bar. It’s a very visual piece of work (unsurprisingly, as Borodale is also an artist), grounded by wonderful detail and an interesting technique, whereby the writer puts his reader into his shoes, yet he rarely relies upon the sometimes clunking ‘you.’ For example:

‘Pass black railings and flowers
of iron set within the railings at intervals. See a
bed in a basement room. Read GIVE WAY. A
man with a snooker cue under his right arm,
walking, looks into a bag he carries and there is
a sparkle once. Pass men kissing in a room.
Over the window of the room in blue letters
read TAVERNA. Hear, “God some of the
blokes can’t hold the beer ... and language I
can’t understand.” Car. Hear the steps of a
woman. Crying horn of a siren. And hear, “I’ve
never seen you smile so much.”
(Isinglass, 2003, p. 126)

What delighted me most about the work was these snippets of overheard conversation. I once read in an autobiography of a deaf man that what he missed most was not being able to hear, but not being able to overhear. I would agree with this only up to a point – if I could hear the madwoman I work with wittering on all day (to herself, if not to some poor bastard unlucky to be caught in conversation with her), I’d be dragged down into her depths of derangement. However, it is true that there’s something almost exotic about banalities when you can’t hear them.

The poet relies heavily upon the upon the senses of sound and sight, and the effect of this is a certain detachment. The flaneur isn’t overcome or invaded by smells, and he certainly doesn’t touch anything – his body is sealed off and impregnable. This seems to be characteristic of Londoners in general – they huddle not only against the cold but against possible eye contact and – God forbid it – a friendly smile.

The work isn’t difficult to read, but it’s dense, so I only dip into it now and then. There isn’t a driving narrative, only my interest in where he walks and whether his language will change according to the socioeconomics of the areas he’s in. So far I haven’t read enough to tell.

I’ve also been reading Nabakov’s short stories, which make my own efforts at short story writing seem paltry. However some of the endings are far too enigmatic, and though I have guilty of doing this myself, I think it’s lazy on the part of the writer to let the reader try and make meaning of some abrupt, surrealist series of events. This might appeal to some, but I don’t like being left completely mystified.

Nabakov also uses second person sometimes. This style can be quite didactic, but when he uses it as a love letter, as in ‘Sounds’, it becomes touchingly intimate. I’m tempted to go back to Lolita, but I find it a disturbing work, not least because it’s so beautifully crafted that the subject matter is rendered less insidious than it seems, but I’ll leave all this for another day.

Lesbians in the Library

2008-03-02T19:29:00.001Z

I issue books to so many people at the library that I rarely remember a face, but I do get impressions about people when they come up to me. If I’ve had an altercation with someone (usually an elderly society member or an overbearing male academic), I’ll have a very bad feeling about them, but I still won’t recall what they look like. This is one of the reasons why I like my job: it’s as boring as batshit, but I leave everything behind at the door. However I always remember the pretty boys.

A few weeks ago two young girls came up (by ‘young’ I mean early twenties, because I’m starting to feel my age) and I could sense something about them, but couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I started issuing the books and came across one whose date sheet was all filled up, so I got another one out of the drawer. The date sheets are like postage stamps, so we can either glue them into the book, or lick them. I’m too lazy, usually, to unscrew the glue, so I just lick them. When I did it this time, one of the girl collapsed with laughter against her friend, and I remembered what it was about them: they were lesbians, newly in love and finding all things oral very amusing. I fought down a blush, and solemnly issued the rest of the books.

Since then I’ve been using the glue, and I have become very deft. I’m hoping that one of the pretty boys will see me with my hand on the shaft, and will delicately raise an eyebrow.

Spring and Dreams

2008-02-26T22:08:00.001Z

My supervisor has given me the licence to write my thesis as a novel and thus made me a very, very happy girl indeed. I had been using fragments of fiction in it before (or, more accurately, instances of autobiography), but he said that there needed to be more fiction, and that I wasn’t embracing the concept of fictocriticism. So, in order to be true to the style, he suggested I write the entire thing as fiction. I was exhilarated, and worked out how to write it while on the bus going home. Now I am more relaxed, more in control of my material and completely in command of the style. Which is useful, as now I have to rewrite everything that I have done, and produce 80 000 words in four months. How hard can it be?

And I seem to be happier in general, not least because spring is on its way and the trees are bristling and boisterous with blossoms, while daffodils and jonquils have sprung up in the parks, grinning insanely. It’s light when I drag myself out of bed in the mornings and today I went out to get my coffee wearing a cashmere cardi instead of a coat. As I wrote to an Australian friend, only when you have experienced the (comparative) horror of an English winter can you appreciate Spring like this.

My psyche is clearly undergoing some sort of shift as well, because I have had not one, but two, positive dreams in the last month. It is the norm for me to have disturbing dreams. Where H dreams about having sex in spaceships, or helping Flash Gordon fight enemies in the bush, I dream about people being killed, dismembered or lost. I once woke up crying from a dream in which my mother died of cancer; another time I was stuck on an exploded volcano in Australia, surrounded by blackened shrubbery and pools of lava (this dream is explained by there being an extinct volcano at the back of our property in Oz), and I have fought off men trying to rape or attack me more times than I can remember. However a few weeks back I dreamed of being in a car in a prehistoric landscape, with pterodactyls flying above (I am very fond of pterodactyls). It did end rather suddenly with me being crushed by an overly large bird but I still woke up excited because I never have fantastical dreams. And then, just recently, after dreaming of being in a house which was haunted, and after an attempted murder by a ghost (its hand rammed repeatedly into the side of my neck), I found myself outside with H. We were children again and we leaned over a fence, looking at the water which had overflowed from the creek into the paddocks and formed streams. There were about seven little platypuses wriggling through the streams, which was utterly charming. It’s rare to see platypuses – they come out in the evening and they don’t like noise – so to see seven small ones all bundled together and slipping through the water was delightful. I woke up feeling positively pleased.

Sweeney Todd with Subtitles and other Ephemera

2008-02-21T22:17:00.002Z

The week before last I asked H what he was doing on Tuesday night.
‘Going to the gym.’
‘Do you want to go to the movies?’
‘Yeah. What’s on?’
‘The barber of Saville Road.’
‘What?’
‘Sweeney Todd!’
He began laughing. ‘It’s the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There’s the Barber of Seville, and the tailors of Saville Road, but not a barber.’
‘Oh. Well it’s got subtitles, and I want to go.’

It was the first time I’d been to an English film with subtitles, and I sought it out because I knew I’d never be able to understand what was going on without the words. We went to the Vue in Islington, which I don’t like much, not least because the last time we went there and tried to get a hearing device we were told that they only had them for one cinema, which was showing some thuggish film of the calibre of Die Hard. What, they think deaf people don’t have intellect? Anyway, we got a refund (which didn’t compensate for a ruined evening) and the manager mumbled something about getting films with subtitles.

Evidently they can keep their word, because they showed Sweeney Todd with subtitles. P went in first while H waited for me to get there from work (I had to catch the vile 73 with someone breathing garlic down my neck) so I wasn’t in a what one would call state of grace when I arrived. H bought me ice cream, but knocked it from the cone onto the counter as he leant over to pay. You’d think the girl would have offered a new scoop of ice cream, but no, so I was left to thwack it back into the cone, now replete with salmonella bugs. Luckily I was brought up on a farm and have a tough stomach from drinking rain water into which birds and insects had fallen. P had texted H to say there were only 2 people inside (‘No wonder the ticket cost £10,’ P said), but when we went in this number had increased to 10. ‘Are all these people deaf?’ I whispered excitedly. You can tell I don’t get out much.

It was a dark film – visually and thematically - but the projection of the subtitles meant that there was an enormous, pale square in the middle of the blackness, with the words down the bottom. H, infuriated, complained to the doorman. The doorman consulted the projectionist and they wriggled the words around. The words disappeared and I missed some lines. The words came back, and the pale square stayed for the rest of the film. I ought to have expected no better.

M- told me I could sue places like cinemas if they don’t get their act together, and these days I’m sorely tempted to. If you advertise a product – any product, not just one with the hard of hearing symbol - you make sure it works, and having a frigging square in the middle of a movie just isn’t good enough. At least it was better than the time we went to the Trocadero to see Enduring Love. Naturally the hearing equipment didn’t work, so H took the back of it off and discovered there were no batteries inside. The poor boy went out and retrieved them from the bimbo at the counter, by which time he’d missed the crucial beginning. This is why I become so apathetic about complaining – you have to wait until the movie starts before realising the piece of shit they’ve given you isn’t going to work.

Anyway, it was a rare outing for me, as most of the time these days I remain chained to my desk, staring glumly out the window while trying to get some words onto the page, so that was something. I liked Johnny Depp, but Helena Bonham Carter, although she did a good 19th century Amy Winehouse, was far too simplistic. And there was too much blood. I didn’t like that.

Seeing as I lead a cloistered life, H provides most of my entertainment, and some of his stories are worth repeating, esp as he’ll never get around to putting them into his own blog, not least because they don’t involve willies. He went to Columbia Road last weekend and asked his favourite man (on account of his humour and cheap flowers, not his appendage or appearance) what he could do to stop his lupins dying, because last year they hadn’t come up.
‘What do you mean you killed your lupins?’ the man said. ‘Lupins are impossible to kill.’
H must have looked dejected, for the man softened and told him to put them in the soil as soon as he got home. Yes, it is a bit obvious, isn’t it ... but I digress. H had been walking behind a lady in a black burqua, as she had a pram and was clearing a convenient path through all the people. Then she stopped before the lupins man, who had his back to her. He turned around, took a backwards step, threw his hands in the air and cried, ‘Aw my gawd, I thought it was a stickup!’
The Eastenders tittered around him. God only knows what the woman was thinking.

And the other day H came home with a gem from the office – you can describe someone who is ugly, he says, as having ‘a face like a sackful of smashed crabs.’ I laughed and laughed.

The rest of my entertainment comes from reading fiction. I read Toni Morrison’s Sula, then The Bluest Eye, both of which were so engrossing that I didn’t even panic when the Tube stopped in a tunnel on the way to work. I found the former a little plodding, but its beginning and ending illustrate why Morrison is so good at her craft.

It opens thus: ‘In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood.’ From that sentence you know the book is going to be about uprooting, and the loss of a natural environment, which mirrors the loss of childhood. A good writer, for me, is someone who can encapsulate an entire novel in their first line like this. The closing sentence is also poignant: ‘It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.’ It’s a very feminine image, being circular, which hearkens back to Nel’s friendship with Sula. It also mirrors the rings on a surface of water which has been disturbed, and the continuity of the rings suggest the pain can never end.

The Virtues of Deafness

2008-02-09T21:34:00.000Z

It has now been a month since our sojourn to Thailand (the annals of which shall be written up if I ever find time). Positive effects of said holiday lasted one week, which was quite good I thought, considering that it pissed with rain for 6 out of 7 days, I was jetlagged and didn’t get enough sleep and was slotted immediately onto on my treadmill of library-thesis-research. Then the seasonal affective disorder returned and I went back to being my usual gloomy self.

Not a great deal has been happening, and not a great deal shall happen, for the next five months, whereupon I shall hand my thesis in. However, the thesis is going well at last, if nothing else is. I have also been cheered by the appearance of blossoms, daffodils and the absurdly sunny days. Elliot maintained that April was the cruellest month, but I always thought February was. This year it looks like neither of us it right.

I was ruffled however, by an incident at the corner store, when I finally had to explain to the pint-sized old Hindu lady, from whom I have been buying milk from for a year, that I was deaf. I wanted to buy a packet of Pringles, having one of my 6-monthly cravings for chips, but I couldn’t hear what the price was as she never speaks loudly. Eventually she rolled her eyes, and (on the verge of tears) I said that I was deaf and wearing a hearing aid.

‘Oh, you’re like that, are you? I never knew.’ she said. Ten out of ten for tact, wouldn’t you say? And of course you didn’t know you stupid cow, but that doesn’t mean you can treat your customers badly. So she can take her Pringles and her milk and shove it; I’m going to the Muslim guys whose shop is in the other direction.

I’ve been reading on the theory of disability for my thesis, so I’ve been thinking about these things more than usual. In a book titled Enforcing Normalcy, published in 1995, I came upon the following: ‘until now, American Sign Language was listed in the data base [of libraries] as an “invented language” along with the language of the Klingons of Star Trek’ (4). My oh my, haven’t we come such a long way.

Meanwhile, I loathe the word ‘disability’ and think it should be taken out of the English lexicon. Look at it – it contains the word ‘dis’ and is inherently negative. No person is disabled, they just have a different way of operating in the world. Yet a lot of the books I’ve read about deafness and disability have been quite negative. Sure, it sucks to be deaf, but there isn’t much point on dwelling on the bad things if there’s nothing you can do about it. And there are indeed positive aspects, such as not being able to hear your flatmate bonking in the room above you (which is occurring as I write, hence I have my hearing aid turned very firmly off). H, however is not so lucky, but God blessed him with a wonderful sense of humour, as evidenced by the following textual exchange, which took place during the day, as I was coming back from the Millais exhibition at Tate Britain:

To H
OK, so I officially have a problem. Have accidentally bought b’day gifts to self from Topshop but the dress is AMAZING. Shall wear it on b’day. Hope A ok etc xx

To J
Oh dear. Never mind, you deserve present for self. Just got back, fuckwit knobend is here. Currently locked [with A] in her room. Oh joy. xoxo

To H
Oh my god, how disgusting. On my way back now. Xx

To J
I think there may be a localised earth tremor in East London. Strange vibrations in the house. And screaming! Maybe a book fell on A.

To H
I need to write a blog entry titled The Virtues of Deafness and message it to e’one on Facebook.

To J
Doesn’t matter, it’ll be over in 38s ... like clockwork.

I have cautiously turned on my hearing aid. There appears to be ...silence. Maybe it's safe to venture out now and see if the foundations are still sound.

Time to open Facebook ... or not ... ought one to maintain a sense of civility in such situations?

Sainsbury’s Deliver Some Eighty Bananas Unto Us

2007-12-13T23:59:00.000Z

It’s indicative of how narrow my life has become that the highlight of my week is when Sainsbury’s, for a reason unbeknowest to this author, deliver two bags full of bananas with our usual shopping. Without charge. The delivery man looks at them askance, then I sign his form and he goes away.

‘Jess, where did all these bananas come from?’ H collapses against the door with laughter.
‘ I checked the receipt three times and couldn’t find any record of them,’ I protest.
It must be a gift, like the week of strange cheeses and lamb neck fillets, which are still in the freezer. I loathe lamb, but because of our parsimonious upbringing I can’t bring myself to throw it out.

At first the novelty is wonderful, because I love green bananas, but then they start to go brown. I refuse to eat ripe - let alone overripe - bananas, so H and our flatmate are left to fight the war against them. They lose, and now our house has become infused with a rank, tropical scent. So for those of you who care to see us over the next few weeks, be warned that you shall be plied with baked banana-borne bounty.

Our Houses are Full of Smoke

2007-12-13T23:50:00.000Z

This is the title of a book of poems by Deb Westbury, who taught me in my first year of writing at the University of Wollongong. It sprang to mind when, having taken the lid off the rice cooker prior to serving dinner, and having sat down to consume said dinner, I smelled burning. I dashed back into the kitchen and found the room hazy with smoke, while a small fire was in progress upon the cooker lid. I grabbed a teatowel and whacked it out, whereupon I discovered that I’d left the element on and the entire plastic handle had melted into black liquid. The tiny screws that had once held it to the steel lid had been released, tittering into the sink.

Who was the idiot who ever invented electric hobs? Why did our landlord not install a gas oven? For one can see gas burning, thereby avoiding the melting of implements. And when mummy said, ‘A bad worker always blames his tools,’ she was of course completely wrong.

I opened all the windows and went back to my dinner, thinking of my favourite book of poems, Bronwyn Lea’s Flight Animals, which has a poem with the line ‘Midnight is the smell of burning.’ I’ve unfortunately left my copy back in Oz, but from memory it’s about a woman whose husband has left her, and who constantly leaves the elements on and wakes up to burning in the middle of the night. It is a beautiful metaphor for a woman made vacant through loss.

Deb’s only son was killed by a train, and whenever I think of her I wonder how she is. I also recall the poem she wrote for Scarp, the Creative Writing department’s literary magazine, after the accident. In the last few lines she wrote of the cry of a crow, and it seemed to hold all of her sadness.

The theme of smoke and disorientated women has drifted into my own life, this being my first afternoon off in nearly a month, aside from the election weekend, when I was too sick to enjoy myself anyway. I’ve worked nonstop on my thesis and on my research project for a Queensland academic, as well as the usual work at the library. I’m counting the days until Christmas, when H and I go to stay with our friends in the country and I shall be without work, phone or internet (God help me, how shall I live?) for three days. Then there will be a few more days of furious writing, until we fly into the blinding sunlight of Thailand.

A Rather Long Synopsis of my Sojourn in Oz

2007-11-21T18:34:00.000Z

I am back in London again. I am despondent. How could it only have been a mere five weeks ago that I was trawling the shops of Bath, buying leaf-patterned thermoses for my Oz friends?

I flew into Sydney on a Thursday morning and was amazed, as always, by how friendly, healthy and attractive everyone is at Customs. Normally I arrive on a weekend and am received by the arms of a friend and ferried to Barzura in Coogee to acquaint myself with blueberry pancakes with coconut icecream, decent coffee, and of course, the morning sunlight on the ocean. This time I was met by lovely L, who dropped her boyfriend off at Qantas (he is an engineer making the new Marc Newton themed Oz Airbus) and conveyed me to an excellent café in Surry Hills, mere steps away from her house. This is one of the best things about Oz – good coffee is in abundance. Then L went to work and I had a massage in the afternoon to aid my recovery from jetlag.

The next day I had a hair appointment but, to my utter dismay, Blondes Brunettes and Redheads was no longer extant. Instead I had to make do with Brad Ngata, with whom BBR had merged. I didn’t like the feel of the salon – it had nothing of the intimacy of BBR - so now I have to find a new salon to frequent when I come home. I did have visions of chasing my previous stylist to Ireland, whence he has returned, but I think H would disown me if I did that as I am required (occasionally) to keep my obsessions in check.

In the evening, woozy with jetlag, I staggered to the Good Food Month noodle markets in Hyde Park. Chinese lanterns hung in the trees and there were rows and rows of noodle stalls. I was beside myself: how on earth did one choose? I made a random beeline for a random stall and bought some random pad thai, and then I- and I drank a bottle of wine out of plastic cups from Woolies. I met I-‘s boyfriend, who was sick with a cold and thus thought (as men tend to do when ill) that the entire world was coming to an end. He was a nice bloke though.

On Saturday was E’s wedding. I was picked up by Sj’s boyfriend and M, who I hadn’t seen for 11 years, since I left school. We drove to Katoomba and had a look at the Blue Mountains. I was impressed to find that, below the unprepossessing slabs of rock that were sculptures (for want of a better word) leading to the viewing platform, there were delightful quotes from people who had visited the mountains. The ceremony for the wedding was held in a garden in Katoomba, and then the reception in the revolving restaurant, which had a splendid view of the national park. Once I got over the shock of the realm of coupledom that presented itself when the dancing started, I danced my little heart out (in Collette Dinnigan, of course) and can’t remember the last time I had that much fun. I need to get out more.

Sunday I caught the plane to Canberra, and was met by J and P at the airport and taken out to dinner. I stayed with them later on in the week and was entranced by their Burmese cats, despite the animals’ penchant for attacking one’s ankles. I have decided I shall have a Burmese cat when I grow up. For three days I scanned microfilm copies of Nora Murray Prior’s letters to Rosa at the National Library, then I discovered that there was another bunch of archives I hadn’t noticed. I panicked and raced upstairs, and the lady behind the desk was most sympathetic and said that I could bring a digital camera in if I wished, to take photos of the documents. That saved my bacon, for Praed’s handwriting was almost impossible and deciphering it - as well as taking too much time - drove me insane.

Canberra is quite frankly the weirdest city I have ever frequented. It’s basically a number of important buildings shoved out in the bush. Or beside a lake. Any vibe which the place might have is dissipated by the space, and the lack of people with which to fill it. Also, most of those who work in Canberra are white, middle-class bureaucrats and thus there wasn’t much cultural diversity. And because it is mostly populated by people who work in well-paid jobs, the cost of living is inordinately high. Thus I was annoyed to shell out so much money for ordinary food, when that money could have gone to something far more satisfying, such as a piece of lingerie.

The rain followed me from England, which would normally have pissed me off, but the country needs it. A downpour ensued on the Friday that I finished at the library, and people hung about beneath the eaves, obviously expecting it to subside, as has been its wont over the last six years. It didn’t, however, and so they gathered their breaths and dashed out, newspapers held over their heads.

Although I had very much enjoyed J and P’s company, I was glad to leave the city on Saturday morning. The plane was delayed, however, due to the previous day’s storms, and I felt bad for J and P who had elected to get up at 5am to take me to the airport. My sister was also waiting for me at the other end in Brisbane with the kids, having bribed them with the condition that, unless they did a, b or c they couldn’t come to the airport to see Auntie Jess.

They weren’t quite crawling up the walls when I finally arrived, but they were close to it. G broke away from her mother and slammed into my legs with joy, which was somewhat startling, but still delightful. Mention was made of Uncle H, so we had to explain that he was still in London, and we are of course glad that he hasn’t been completely erased from the infant consciousness. B ran enthusiastic zigzags away from us and back again, and I wondered how it was possible for a tiny bundle to have so much energy. I wish I had enough steam to run run zigzags through crowds.

Since I was ready to commit violence for want of a coffee, my sister took us to a waterside suburb, the name of which I have forgotten, to appease me. Docked nearby was an enormous cruise ship, so B was overcome with excitement. There was also free ice cream to be had, although I couldn’t quite cope with the echelons which cruises seem to attract.

Most of my time in Brisbane was spent with my sister and the kids and this, combined with the heat, completely wore me out. However the jacarandas were in bloom and there were thunderstorms, which I always find thrilling, and the Indonesian geckos went clack-clack-clack in the evenings. On the Tuesday I went to the State Library to check a reference which Clarke had used in her biography on Praed. The staff there weren’t as on the ball as they were the last time I went, but they were still very helpful. One good thing about the horrible people who live in London is that they make you respect friendliness and helpfulness when you come across it.

At lunchtime I met up with the delectable SP in the café downstairs, which I love because it has couches outside – what better way to make the best of Brisbane’s beautiful weather? SP knew the name of the golden raintree which was in flower, and on the bridge to the city he stopped a man who looked like a Pacific Islander to check that he’d found a place alright – he’d given him directions earlier on in the day. I thought again, and it was hardly as though I needed reminding, of what a beautiful person he was.

I went home to mum and dad on the Thursday, having got in trouble from H for flying instead of taking the bus and saving my carbon emissions. However the bus took TEN HOURS and time was at a premium. On the plane to Armidale I sat next to a pleasant, fresh-faced country boy, which one could hardly complain about; boys with good manners are always so very pleasing.

At home I did a great deal of nothing in particular, being gripped by that ennui which is peculiar to going home to a country town. I stacked on weight (which must now be removed before I get into a bikini in Thailand), transcribed some of Praed’s letters, read four books, cooked lumberjack cakes and Russian teacakes, walked, slept badly, wrote a bit of my new novel, figured out how to fix a short story which wasn’t working particularly well, half-decided what my thesis was about, drank far more wine and watched far more TV than I am accustomed to and ended up in a car crash, because mum missed a give way sign. That spiced up my holiday no end. However, for the most part I was hugely bored, but that isn’t a bad thing, because it forced me to stop working and to rest.

And then I flew back to Sydney, and haemorrhaged some more money, and went out dancing and ate too much Thai. I was intending to do the Sculpture by the Sea walk from Bondi to Tamarama, but I was too tired, and instead wandered through Centennial Park, in which I used to run, and then lay beneath an old Moreton Bay fig tree and felt the breeze on my skin.

The flight back was fine – the last time I’ll have to do the Sydney-London leg thank God – apart from sitting next to a pimply boy from Blackpool, who insisted on telling me about his band, and wanted to follow me around Changi airport, although I fortunately foiled that one. He was an odd person, occasionally funny, but he irritated me immensely because he seemed to take it for granted that I would find everything about him fascinating, and he nudged me in the arm by way of getting my attention, which showed a total want of courtesy. In the end, having told him I was deaf, I just pretended I couldn’t hear him and absorbed myself in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria.

The Incursions of Wildlife

2007-11-18T10:05:00.000Z

Having lived in London for three years, where the only living creatures I come across are slugs and rats-with-wings, I am always pleasantly surprised by the fauna I encounter when I come home. In Brisbane there are Indonesian geckos which look like albinos, being all white, but are still adorable with their compactness and little hands. They come out in the evening and make a ‘clack-clack-clack’ noise which is startlingly loud for such small individuals. In Armidale, I staggered from my bed one morning to put the kettle on, and through the window I saw a white-faced blue heron hanging about the fishpond. Mum later said that it had been eating the goldfish and left me with instructions that, if I saw it again, I was to throw a shoe at it. Then, as I was vacuuming, I sucked up a piece of bark, only to realise that it was moving, and that I was inadvertently murdering a cricket. Well, I thought, if it was going to look like some bark in the 21st Century, then that was its problem for not evolving quickly enough to keep up with technology. Then there was the neighbour’s black Burmese cat which seemed to spend all its time at our place (but which killed three mice in one evening), and which woke me up at 7am by jumping on my bed twice. I was tired, and thus chucked the cat out the door in a fury. Only my father, in his wisdom, let it back in again, and so it woke me up a third time, after which much swearing ensued. I am not a happy bunny when I don’t get enough sleep, particularly when I’m on holidays, and when I couldn’t go back to sleep after this I decided I would have to walk off my violent mood. This was partially successful, until I got to the park and was attacked by a broody magpie, which scraped my scalp. I’d forgotten about the magpies; they always divebomb around the time of the high school kids’ exams, in Spring. I remember once when H and I were on the farm and I was learning to ride the motorbike, I decided we should visit our cousins. Not being very confident, I drove awfully slowly, with H sitting behind. As we neared a copse of trees, he said something to me but I didn’t hear it. ‘What?’ I replied, still putting along, and he shouted, ‘I’m being bombed by a magpie!’ I revved the accelerator and off we shot.

Backtracking

2007-11-08T05:18:00.000Z

I am back in the land of the living, holidaying (ostensibly) in Oz. I am enjoying (compared to England) abundant sunshine, although I seem to have brought the rain with me, as there were thunderstorms in Brisbane and now the skies of Armidale keep clouding over. However, one cannot complain because we are in the sixth year of a drought, which has been so bad and so constant that a miniseries has been made about it, starring a girl I used to go to uni with. All those European morons who believe that global warming is good for their climate ought to come to Australia, where one farmer shoots himself every four days.

Now I need to pick up the thread of my last narrative where I left it, viz., at H-‘s trivia quiz night. I only elected to go to this because I wanted to get out of London into the country and, unbeknowest to most I (because I do not broadcast my weaknesses) I am an utter failure at trivia and Trivial Pursuit. It ranks among the games that frustrate me most, second only to Pictionary in which I am always handicapped (yes, literally), because I can never hear what the other team is whispering, thus it takes me twice as long to figure out the picture. Make that three times as long if H is drawing because he is so literal and God forbid if he must draw a human, because it can’t simply be a stick figure but must be graced with ten fingers and ten toes and a willy if it is a man.

The night began well, however, because H and I covered most of the art pictures. After which we sunk into a bemused silence, although I broke out of it into song when I heard H whisper an answer to a question about which children’s TV show was about to be resumed. ‘The Wombles of Wimbledon womble again,’ I sang. I am quite sure that these are not the correct lyrics, but that was always what I heard, and what I always sang, and I was subsequently shushed furiously. I had had more than my customary 1.5 glasses of wine by this point, so I was not to be blamed: the friendly man next to me kept filling up my glass. However, the answer was something like Pokemon, and H- could not get it because she works until late and is never around to watch kids programs and I don’t know why Other Half knew not the answer, perhaps because he flagellates himself with his enormous bunch of keys around this time.

In order to overcome said handicap of not being able to hear questions, or of hearing the question incorrectly and shouting out a totally random answer, which I have been known to do at times, the nice MC gave me five questions at a time on a small slip of paper. Naturally my team took advantage of this and peered at the small slip of paper (seeing as I couldn’t answer any questions, I had to render myself useful somehow), until I noticed the neighbouring table getting antsy and asking the MC why I got the questions.

This is probably the most unfortunate thing about being deaf, particularly as I speak well and I am good at faking hearing (it’s amazing how many people think you’re hanging off every word when you smile charmingly and nod in the right places) – people just don’t know I have a disability until I tell them. And, when I do tell them, they don’t understand how severe my lack of hearing is, nor how difficult it is to cope with it, because I pull off hearing with such aplomb. Perhaps I ought to wear a t-shirt that says, ‘Yes, I’m deaf and have big tits, and I also have nearly four degrees and a published novel so don’t talk to me unless you have read Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came.’ Or I could (and this is H’s favourite suggestion) drag my leg around as though afflicted with a club foot. However I prefer to wear my killer stilettos and put up with people’s misconceptions.

And, I am ashamed to say, my almost-four degrees didn’t come in handy this evening, particularly when I was utterly convinced that the Franklin River was in Ohio when it lies, in fact, in Tasmania, and was one of the controversial environmental issues in the history of Australia. Naturally, when I heard the answer, all this came flooding back, and shall remain forever branded in my memory along with H-‘s look of complete incomprehension that I could not muster my own country’s geography. Well, no one can say that Oz isn’t a big place.

The next day however, I engaged in one of my better talents: shopping. I revisited my shoe haunt, Duoboots, and acquired a new pair of black suede shoes, and had to sadly relinquish the red shoes I’d found because they were almost identical to another pair I already own. Then H- did an evil thing and showed me a new shop full of many lovely expensive girly goodies, and I was persuaded to part with an unhealthy number of pounds for a new cardie. Bad, bad H-.

Tube Strikes and Celeb Spotting

2007-09-26T22:06:00.000+01:00

Having been swallowed up by a wave of work and socialising, and only recently been spat out, and coughed myself into consciousness, I am just now getting around to writing my first entry for the month. However, many more waves are looming on the horizon and I am frantically digging holes in the sand into which I can place my pate and the water keeps filling up the hole and the sides of sand are slipping in and soon I will be drowning.

Think happy thoughts.
Many happy thoughts.
Think about all the boots you’ll buy when you’re next in Bath.

So, getting a grip. Just when I was commending myself on going for so long without a rant, the London Tube went on strike. Now, my commute has only just become bearable, since the bus route has been extended and I don’t have to walk quite as far to get to the bus stop, and I am reading far more than I ever used to, because somehow one has to fill in the hour it takes to wend through London’s indigested innards. So to finish work at 7pm after doing overtime, and to get to Aldwych and be passed by three buses, all with Londoners breathing against the windows like fish, or spilling out the doors like a catch released on a ship’s deck, made me feel very, very tired indeed. Too tired, in fact, to be particularly angry.

The following afternoon I tried a different tack and caught the bus from Euston. Unfortunately, in my sheeplike rush to get to the door, I failed to see where the bus terminated: just down the road at King’s Cross. Lovely. At King’s Cross I poured out the door with many other unhappy passengers. The next bus that turned up was also terminating there and I thought, fuck it, I’ll just get on the next one that turns up. By this stage I was nearly crying with tiredness and harassment. So the next bus rolled up and I queued, patiently, in the manner for which the English are supposedly famed, but the bus driver wouldn’t open the front doors. He was having an altercation with a man halfway down the bus. I couldn’t hear what was going on, but I assumed the man had got in the back door without a ticket and the bus driver was telling him to get off. I could just see the man’s face, and it said, ‘I’m not going to do what you tell me.’ People in the queue started shifting their weight, and I hung onto the railing, ready to droop, when suddenly a big, burly old fellow sitting beside his elderly wife got up and rushed down the aisle with surprising speed, and barked, ‘Get off the fucking bus!’ The man was so startled he scuttled off immediately - almost with a hop and a skip - and everyone in the bus began laughing, cheering and clapping, and I got the giggles.

Seeing as it took two hours to get home, I only had an hour in which to cleanse and beautify myself for the GQ Man of the Year Awards party. That was irritating, but on the plus side I was too exhausted and busy to be nervous. H and I had dinner with his boss and lovely girlfriend at a fish restaurant near the Opera House, which was very pleasant but I’m not used to eating fish (having grown up 8 hours’ drive from the sea, pretty much the only fish we knew was that in fish fingers) and found it a bit rich.

After dinner we tottered up to the Opera House and found the paparazzi clustered around the red carpet like blowflies drawn to blood, and Jamelia walking out with a bloke on her arm. Then it transpired there was a queue, which annoyed H’s boss, although I wasn’t bothered by it, since the whole thing was all so novel. On the corner were some acquaintances of H’s boss, whom he and his girlfriend didn’t like much, and I could see why. ‘Oh, we don’t do queuing,’ one of the acquaintances said. What a twit.

I was glad I couldn’t hear the conversations of the people around us, because they were inane (H repeated one of them to me later: ‘Oh you know, now she’s going out with Mark, who’s the guy who went out with, you know, Shelly, you know.’). An annoying boy kept asking H’s boss for his lighter, and when I commented on this to H, he said very loudly (as is his wont), ‘Tell him that in exchange for the lighter, he can have some sex.’ I said discreetly that the boy had probably overhead this and H shrugged and replied, ‘Oh well.’

Inside, H and his boss’ lamps were lining the walkway leading into the bar area. Unfortunately, the overhead lights were on which meant that you couldn’t really see the way the lamp diffused light as it moved up and down. However, there was another lamp in the dark bar where Godiva chocolate was being dispensed, and there it worked beautifully.

So in we walked, and there was Lily Allen barking on her mobile phone in a floor-length bright red gown which I thought was rather boring, but H liked it because it stood out. As we sank into the crowd, we saw Elle Macpherson, Helena Christiansan and the beanied Edge, whom I knew nothing of, until H explained he was the drummer from U2. Later, I saw him again and said to H, ‘There’s that man in the hat who’s in that band,’ thus revealing my complete and utter want of knowledge regarding popular culture (thus I will be attending H-‘s trivia night for the Literature questions only). Then I glimpsed Orlando Bloom’s cheek (and my heart fluttered, even though he’s a brainless boy and has nothing on Tony Leung), and H saw Jude Law, although I sadly missed him. But perhaps the most exciting part of the evening was when I was waiting with H at the bar for another free cocktail and I made eye contact with Elle Macpherson. Oh, sad creature that I am, I was happy to be noticed by not only a star, but someone I respect and admire because she’s a brilliant businesswoman.

For the most part the eye candy was disappointingly dull. The men were good looking and well dressed, but they all looked like clones. Likewise the women were young and anorexic and dressed in the latest fashions, but no-one really had an individual style. Which made me think that money isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It was a fascinating evening, but I would hate to live among such superficial people; one would die of boredom.

... the mice will play.

2007-08-28T18:55:00.000+01:00

This week’s entry (if we do indeed now count my entries by the week, though I don’t think that wise as I am constantly losing the time amidst pages of research on botany or spiritualism) is not another discourse on pink-eyed, nimble-footed furry vermin, but rather a pointer to H-‘s blog, which I besieged – ever so politely, of course - over the weekend while H and I were dogsitting. Not only did the lovely H- allow us to reign over her wine cellar, the contents of her fridge and her chocolate-coated Labrador, she also left her computer up and running. Naturally, being an inquisitive girl, I worked out that one could also gain access to her blog, and proceeded to abuse my privileges thereof. I contemplated allowing H to write his bit, but not being bound by the parameters of good sense and breeding like his sister, I finally deemed this unwise and would not allow him near the computer.

Suffice to say, a lovely time was had by all in Bath, despite my carrying some variant of the 1918 Spanish flu which consigned me to the now-famous cream couch for much of my stay. I have to confess I was up one night vomiting, like my brother (see here), but naturally made it to the toilet basin in time, rather that floundering in the far reaches of the living room. Needless to say, this was not on account on the imbibing of too many substances, but rather a reaction to my flu drugs. If anyone knows anything about why one's left eye should be stinging and weeping whilst vomiting, please let me know, as I am somewhat concerned.

I even managed to burn a portion of my legs upon the roof, which was amazing as they have scarcely seen the sun this season (I refuse to call it ‘summer’), and then, arising from my deathbed, I made it into town to purchase a gorgeous pair of green suede boots, and felt as though I had reached nirvana, which surely had nothing to do with my semi-conscious state.

Rattus

2007-08-24T00:02:00.000+01:00

This is the name H* gave to her resident vermin when she moved into her new flat. I was reminded of it as I examined the jar lid full of dead slugs at the back of our cupboard. But there were little white pellets scattered about, and the paper of the flour bag had been eaten again, so I shall have to put out more snail bait.

And I have been thinking of rats in general, because lately I have felt like one becoming fused, Deleuze-like, to its wheel. I work at the library, then work at home, and have one afternoon and one day off a week. I’m fixing up my Salzburg paper because it’s been accepted for publication in a book, then (over the long weekend) I have to rewrite the paper for a non-fiction competition, then I must redo my Heidelberg paper for possible inclusion in another book, and on top of all that I have to write 20 000 words of my thesis before I am released from my shackles for a trip to Oz in mid-October.

Little wonder, then, that my body has rebelled and cast me into bed with a very bad flu. I’ve spent the day staggering from my desk and into sleep and back to my desk again. Then I gave up and finished Diana Souhami’s Mrs Keppel and her Daughter which is the most brilliant and gripping piece of non-fiction I’ve read for ages. It’s a biography of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII (the eldest son of Victoria), and her daughter Violet Trefusis, who was a lesbian and passionately in love with Vita Sackville-West. What makes the story interesting (aside from the excellent writing) is the intricacies of aristocratic society and how Violet’s relationship with Vita threatened the foundation of that society: marriage. It was a tempestuous and heartbreaking affair, especially because Vita chose conformity over Violet. She wanted to stay with her husband Harold, for her life with him represented calm and stability, even though Violet roused in her violent emotion and happiness. I was irked by Vita. Although I could understand her desire for conformity, I was angry that she shunned Violet for sleeping once with her husband (Trefusis), even though Vita had chosen to stay with her man. In addition, she often dangled the chance of happiness before Violet like a bait, and always withdrew it. Violet was constantly cast as a dangerous seductress and marriage-breaker by those caught up in the storm of the affair, even though her only crime was Othello’s – that of loving not wisely, but too well – and of wanting recognition of her love in an era which would never permit it. I was in tears by the time I got to the end of it and read the following extract from Vita to Violet, written after years of separation:

We simply couldn’t have this nice, simple, naïf, childish connexion without it turning into a passionate love affair again … You and I can’t be together. I go down country lanes and I meet a notice saying ‘Beware unexploded bomb’ so I have to go round another way. The unexploded bomb is you (275-276).

If you want a fascinating take on the tangled threads of class, passion and sex, read this book.

On Wednesday I had to work at one of the medical libraries because they were short staffed. After the hour and 45 minutes it took to get there in the vile weather that supposedly constitutes Summer, I was regretting having volunteered. However I’d gone because I wanted a change of scene, and it was vaguely interesting to employ the same processes in a new place. The only unsettling thing was being hit on by a doctor who gave me his mobile number and email address within five minutes of meeting me, when all I did was crack a joke, be friendly and helpful and smile when I took his money for a photocopy card – in short, be good at my job. H said he probably mistook all that for interest, since the usual expectation of customer service in this country is to be spat upon or grunted at.

Tomorrow we are off to Bath to dogsit Henry, which I am very much looking forward to. Not only because of Henry, but because I can go shopping in Bath’s lovely shops, drink some coffee and watch the people, and walk in nice parks, and generally see something other than the four walls of my room. It is supposed to be hot, so I am carefully deliberating over which of my many unworn summer outfits I shall pack. I also have to take my wheel with me, but at least the change of scene will do me good.

New Worlds

2007-08-10T21:22:00.000+01:00

Beloved readers, I am back from Germany. I am on a diet. This says everything that needs to be said about German food, but I shall continue. It is vile (as M- wrote, whoever thought of having cheese for breakfast?); everything is fried (as M* found, looking bemused at a plate of fried schnitzel and fried potato croquettes) and most of it contains cream. At one dinner a girl ordered a ‘salad’ and was handed a pile of cubed potatoes and meat. The only leafy greens were those in the forests, not on a plate.

But I digress from the fascinating topics of archives, media and narrative, which we were my reasons for visiting Germany. I was sent there by the Consortium, along with 5 other boys (to whom M swiftly began referring as my ‘harem’), with all expenses paid, to a conference titled ‘Ways of Worldmaking.’ So although I hate conferences, it would have been silly to turn it down.

Monday saw me getting up at 4.30am, to be picked up by a greasy-haired taxi driver and taken to Heathrow. It was actually a beautiful morning - the sun glinted off the spire of a church, the sky was still streaked with pink, and then it became so bright I could almost have been in Sydney. We flew into Frankfurt and were conveyed to Castle Rauischolzhausen, near Marburg. It was a very beautiful place, but much newer than it looked - the building being completed in 1875, but designed in the Gothic style. To an Australian, it still seemed pretty old. In the gardens was an arboretum, and, on Wednesday afternoon, when I couldn’t bear another conversation on someone’s thesis topic, I took myself into the grounds and walked through the trees, and became much calmer.

I hate meeting people en masse. I’m fine with a few at a time, because then I can recover the energy needed to listen and to enquire, but to do this hour after hour, for 6 consecutive days, was terrifying and exhausting. To make things worse, nearly everyone who spoke at the conference had an accent, which meant that hearing was even more difficult. There were people from France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Spain, as well as one little fellow, probably feeling even more adrift than I, who was from Chile. As an end result, I took in very little of what was being said. By the time I had figured out the words the person was using and put them into sentences, I didn’t have time to then piece them into an argument; it was all just too fragmentary. The paper I can recall most clearly, apart from that by S, my supervisor, was by an English guy who’d moved to Giessen University (who was hosting the conference) to study W.G. Sebald. His voice was so clear, and his delivery so charming, that for the first time in days I relaxed and listened well.

Having said that, I didn’t get quite as tired as I expected, and I did meet some lovely people. We were taken to nearby Marburg for a tour while at the castle, and a nice fellow asked me how I was going with hearing the tour guide. ‘Not very well,’ I told him, and added that usually, if I wanted to find things out, I just looked them up later on the internet. He said I wasn’t missing much, and I asked, jokingly, how long it would take him to repeat it all to me, and he said, ‘Two minutes. Actually, no, make that one, because I’ll forget half of it,’ and I started laughing.

The boys that I was with were fun, when I could hear what they were saying. S was a nice bloke, but I could never hear him because he mumbled. M spent half the week deliberating what to get his girlfriend, until there were jokes about needing a three-day seminar in the matter. Eventually, on the last evening, he went into a tourist shop full of tat and came out with a small plastic beer mug, which we looked upon with subdued horror and amazement. Each to his own, however, and I didn’t do much better, getting H chocolates at the airport. They had pictures of Mozart on the front, which was confusing as Mozart hailed from Salzburg, but I bought them because they looked so awful they had to be good. They weren't, as it transpired, because they had marzipan in them, and we both hate marzipan. However, I wasn’t prepared to make much of an effort, as the last place I’d got him a present (well, before the nice eggs I got in Salzburg) was in Istanbul, and I’d trudged halfway across the city with a tragic hangover to get him what I thought was a very nice print from the markets, only to receive a fairly noncommittal response.

To continue. B turned out to be one of the most gorgeous men I’ve ever met, second only to SP. But where the latter is all sunlight and golden skin, B had a stark Byronic streak, with dark hair and a 5 o’clock shadow, and with eyes that were fringed with long lashes, like a deer’s. He was studying Wordsworth, and I said to H that I didn’t understand how someone so attractive could be so obsessed with Wordsworth, but I found the contradiction amusing, and appealing. The only drawback was that he chainsmoked and he was ruining his lovely teeth.
R won me over by accompanying me in my stupid (but cute) shoes in Marburg. Normally they’re quite comfortable, but not, it transpires, when the town is full of cobbles. At the end of the day we had to walk up a steep hill to get to a castle where the restaurant was, and I found it so difficult I just took the shoes off and went up barefoot. Then, on the last evening in Heidelberg, he laughed at me in despair when I insisted on wearing stiletto sandals (they weren’t very high), and could barely negotiate the cobbles. ‘What were you thinking?’ he asked.
‘I want to feel like a woman!’ I protested. ‘I’m sick of wearing jeans, I wanted to put on a skirt and sandals.’
However the skirt (which was tight, but nothing out of the ordinary – I frequently wear it to work) had ramifications, because the waiter, who had been insistently trying to catch my eye all evening, dropped some coins down the back of my chair and had to slip his hand down there to get them out. R was indignant on my behalf, but I had thought it was an accident, and even if it wasn’t, it was still so pathetic a gesture that it didn’t even register on my radar of contempt. Later, R said to me, ‘Well, if you dress sexy, that’s what you get,’ and I corrected him, saying, ‘No, I have the right to wear what I want without being assaulted.’ H pointed out, when I repeated this incident to him, that if you wear provocative clothing then you haven’t the right to be affronted. I said that it was hardly provocative, and I was wearing minimal makeup, and if I’d wanted attention I would have worn something with a plunging neckline, and what did he expect me to do – wear a hessian sack? Honestly, this is the argument they try to use against women in rape cases – she was dressed inappropriately, therefore she was asking for it. Aren’t I allowed to be a woman, and to dress like one, without fear of reprisal, or at least without some fuckwit trying to get his hand near my arse?

After a few days of the boys’ company, however good, I sorely needed some women to talk to, and made friends with an Irish girl who lived in Sweden. She had one of the most beautiful, lilting accents I’ve ever heard, and told me that women doing their PhDs in Sweden actually get paid for maternity leave! Clearly I am in the wrong country. On another evening, when I couldn’t bear to face another plate of Fried Something in a loud, crowded room, I came across a lady to whom I’d mumbled a few words at breakfast (not being a morning person, that was the best I could do), and who later said she’d liked my paper. She was sitting on a bench, trying to figure out how to get to the designated restaurant for dinner, although she didn’t really want to go, and I asked her to come out for a drink and dinner with me. She turned out to be a barrel of laughs, and I was really glad that I’d met her.

On the Thursday we were taken to Heidelberg and the pace relaxed a bit. We did some sightseeing, and were taken to the ruined castle overlooking the town. Half of it was unfortunately covered in scaffolding, but it was surrounded by some pleasant parks. On the final day, Saturday, we walked up a hill, through some beautiful, dappled forest. It was amazingly green, and the light so soft. I didn’t talk to anyone really, because by this stage I had given up completely and just couldn’t muster any more energy, or even the inclination, to communicate. At the top of the hill was an amphitheatre which had been used by barbarians for their corroborees, and then the Third Reich came along and got their poor serfs to renovate it, brick by brick. Beyond this, further up the hill, was a crumbling monastery, with lots of rooms exposed to the elements. A family was picnic-ing in one of them. On the way down we stopped by a pub and had some apple wine, which was like cider and water, and didn’t even make me drunk, at which I was heartily pleased. When the light shone through the glasses, it seemed like they were holding gold liquid.

So all in all it was good, but I was a little disturbed by the infinitesimal amount of information my brain retained, compared to all the stuff that was going into it. I got one good idea for my thesis however, from Herbert Grabes’ master class, so that made it worth it.

The White Family Circus - Part 1: West Green and Salisbury

2007-07-25T22:26:00.001+01:00

My parents rarely take the conventional route when doing things, and thus it was that I found myself escorting them to King’s Cross, and then on a train to the sticks, where we were picked up by George’s mate and taken to George’s place in order to hire George’s car. I am not by nature a leader; I either tag along or do my own thing, so to be burdened with one’s parents made me so pale with stress that George asked me how long I’d been in London, clearly not understanding how an Australian could be so white.

George was about 70. His daggy shirt, left unbuttoned at the chest, was tucked into his Speedo shorts, which were held up with a bootlace.

‘You don’t drink the water in London, do you?’ he demanded of me, once he’d found out that I’d been here for 2.5 years.
‘Uhmmm … yes.’
‘The water’s full of chemicals. It’s got heavy metals, lime, God knows what. You mustn’t drink the water. And don’t go to the doctor either. If you go to hospital, you get sick. Tell you what I do, I buy those big bottles of water, wash under my armpits. You buy those bottles, don’t drink the water.’
I struggled to maintain an expression of beatification, whilst resisting a terrible impulse to laugh, the way I do when I’m in a church service and I start laughing precisely because I’m not supposed to.
George had got mum and dad’s arrival time wrong, thinking we were to turn up that evening, and so we were driven by his son and the bloke who’d picked us up to the town where the car was. I couldn’t hear much of the conversation, though I could tell from their tones that they were nice guys. At least until I heard one of them say, ‘I’m not a racist, but …’ and I had to resist the urge to laugh again. Later, mum told me that they’d said that lorry drivers have to drive around and around Paris without stopping, otherwise the immigrants jump on the back and wing it into England. I think that says it all.

We picked up the car, which was a delightful vomity colour, and drove to West Green House gardens. These had been restored by an Australian, Marylyn Abbott, whose garden at Mittagong is the most visited in Oz. Naturally, since summer finished in April, it was raining on and off, so we couldn’t sit outside on the lovely red tables and chairs, but had to eat inside, along with a crowd of Australians whose bus had broken down. They didn’t seem too fussed about it. Later, as we drove out, we saw the track marks in the mud and a tractor next to them; it had obviously been bogged and needed the tractor to get it out. The gardens were quite good but, always a stickler for neatness, I found them too untidy. Also half the grounds were flooded on account of the rain, which was a bit disappointing because the bridge over the pond, which looked very pretty, was out of bounds.

Once we were done, we sat in the car, mum and dad poring over out the map. Then dad said, ‘Jess, look,’ and pointed out a ute driving across the adjacent field. There was a wheelbarrow stuck underneath it, and the driver didn’t know. This time I was laughing, and hard. The driver parked on the other side of the field, and it wasn’t until he tried to set off again that he realised something was wrong. He found the wheelbarrow under the ute and wrestled it out. Then, looking somewhat sheepish, he carried it back across the field to the shed like a newborn calf; it obviously couldn’t be wheeled.

We drove on to Salisbury and had difficulty negotiating the city. Dad stopped at a service station and was given instructions by a boy with two hearing aids, then again by a lady at a shop that sold kid’s clothes. That was more helpful. H had found us rooms at a very nice old pub, except that the window didn’t close properly, the shower was so vigorous that it created a veritable flood each time you turned it on and the pipe for the portable heating system fed, inexplicably, directly out another open window. God knows how that was supposed to be effective in winter.

We had fish and chips for tea, and the chipperier was a very friendly man. When he found out I was from London, and that mum and dad had been there for a few days he asked, ‘Have you been to Camden Market?’ I replied, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t take them there, they’d get knifed!’ This was obviously not the right thing to say, as he looked a bit taken aback, then retorted with something that I didn’t hear, although it sounded humorous. Later, I repeated this conversation to H and he said how weird it was to ask if you’d been to Camden Market, rather than the London Eye, or the British Museum.

The next morning mum and I had a look at the cathedral, dad having been the evening before while we were reading. The wording about the entry donation was obscure: you didn’t have to pay to get in, but they’d phrased it in such a way as to suggest that you were obliged to. Mum and I walked in, the man reading behind the counter looked at us smarmily, then we kept on going through the sliding doors.

It was very convoluted inside – all buttresses and alcoves and partitions – or at least it appeared to be to a girl who is used to small country churches, and I couldn’t see a correlation between the architecture and the religion, which had always seemed to me to be straightforward. But then, I had never paid it much attention. Still, I liked the old tombs with the figures resting on them and the small animals on their feet. I’d once read in an article on Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess that men usually had lions at their feet, for courage, and women usually had a dog, for fidelity. You can imagine how well that went down with this writer. At the end of the tombs of Sir Edward Seymour and his wife Katherine, sister of Lady Jane Grey (queen for nine days), I think there were both lions. Mum asked a volunteer nearby about them, and although he forgot half his text, it was still a very sad story. Edward and Katherine had married in secret, but while Edward was away, Katherine lost the piece of paper proving their marriage. When Queen Elizabeth found out, she put Katherine in the Tower of London, and then Edward as well, when he returned to the country. The volunteer said Katherine died of a broken heart, which was probably an embellishment, given that the stress of having a child of out of wedlock in 1561, and in the Tower of London, was possibly more paramount.

After that we saw the Magna Carta, which was thrilling, and then we had to go as Parental Unit were getting neurotic about the parking ticket and I was savage for want of a coffee. The lines at Starbucks didn’t move quite as fast as they were wont to do in the city, so I gave up with waiting and went to Costa instead. That was my last decent coffee for 9 days.

Disorientated

2007-07-19T19:12:00.000+01:00

It feels as though I’ve been blown off course, and my usual faith in myself is failing me. I’m wondering if a girl who is a feminist, who has (almost) four degrees to her name, and more than her fair share of looks, style, libido and confidence is destined to scare off every eligible man who comes her way. But then I found an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which said that brains in women are an asset, not something detrimental, as centuries of patriarchy would have us believe. So maybe there is a way to navigate myself back to happiness.

Yesterday mum, dad and I went to the Hayward Gallery to see Antony Gormley’s Blind Light. I liked the figures captured and tangled in wire, and the upright men standing like calm sentinels, watching over the city from bridges and buildings. If I’d been in better spirits I would have stayed outside in the sun to watch them for a little longer, but I was tired again, and I tend not to get much out of art, despite dad being an artist and art teacher. He stalled in a room full of concrete blocks that represented the dimensions of various people, and said it was interesting how the artist had taken something organic (people) and made it inorganic (concrete blocks) and put it in an inorganic structure (the gallery). I blinked, as this would never have occurred to me, and realised that art is to dad what literature and poetry are to me. Apparently some of the blocks were eager or sad, but there were no discernible characteristics of eagerness or sadness, each block being the same slab of concrete with wood whorls on the outside and a few holes poked in it to represent orifices. The blocks stood close to one another like people in a city, which irritated me, as crowds in a city are wont to do, because I could not fit myself and my handbag through the slabs to get out for a coffee. While mum and dad dawdled, I sat in Starbucks and read Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World which, every time I pick it up, bludgeons me with its clichés and obviousness. Success seems to have poisoned Lionel’s writing.

The drawcard of the exhibition was the room full of fog, outside of which a little queue had formed. A lady was standing patiently by the door, holding a laminated sheet of paper which warned that those prone to claustrophobia or who were of a nervous disposition ought not to enter the room. Since I fell into both those categories, I held mum’s hand as we went in. Immediately, we were enveloped by a cloud of thick fog and, startled by the suddenness of it, I swore extravagantly. After a few steps I was completely surrounded by whiteness and I panicked and cried, ‘Where’s the wall?’ I stretched my arm to the right and found it, and when I calmed down I thought I’d walk a bit further, but as soon as I couldn’t see anything except that whiteness I chucked it in, and told mum I wanted to get out. Since my sight orientates me, helps me keep my balance (which was screwed by meningitis) and helps me to interact like a normal human being (by lipreading and watching body language), to lose that sense – to be blind while seeing – scared the shit out of me. I cannot cope without bearings, as opposed to M who, finding the fog calm and meditative, told me she could walk around in the box for hours.

I Remain

2007-07-17T18:49:00.000+01:00

I am officially gardened-, stately-mansioned- and leafy-greened-out. Yes, the Whites have returned from their Garden Tour of England. We managed not to kill one another, though things at times were somewhat fraught. An account of our rambles and attendant absurdities will follow, as soon as I see the parental unit off on the plane, catch up on my sleep and batter myself into a sturdier frame of mind, for coming back to London has seemed like returning to prison.

In the interim, those of you in the dark nebulae of cyberspace who are musically inclined might like to listen to my poem, I Remain, which was turned into a song by Sarah Chamberlain of the Guildhall School of Music, and performed at Wigmore Hall by Carleen Ebbs.

Since it's impossible for an author to be objective about their work, I don't know if it's any good, but I like it, so I'm not too fussed about its quality.

Mid-Year Entry

2007-06-30T21:50:00.000+01:00

Already it’s June 30th, and I have no idea where the time has gone. I’ve also realised that this is the first time I’ve stopped working and put my thesis away since I came back from Oz in February. That must have something to do with it.

I’m almost on holidays, apart from writing an abstract for a conference in August and a proposal for an edition of an online journal, and cleaning the window sills. I’ve just finished a short story for the Bridport Prize and sent it off. I wanted to submit my grass story because it was about England and Australia, but there was no way it was going to be ready in time, nor would it have been good enough, so I sent off a very Australian story about land and inheritance.

The parental unit are arriving tomorrow evening, so H and I have been meticulously cleaning every orifice of the house. I don’t know if this is a ritual particular to our family, or if it happens to every Australian whose family/friends come to stay. However when I flew over from Berkeley to visit my sister in London in 1999, she announced (with pride), that she had cleaned the mould from the bathroom ceiling. That was impressive.

On Thursday I had a very distressing meeting with my second supervisor, S, who also runs the Consortium. Where I- says only good things about my work and makes me feel appreciated, S is often very critical, although never in a nasty way. We spoke for an hour, and at the end of that hour I felt like he had completely decimated my entire argument on fictocriticism, feminism and the body and I was nearly in tears. However I managed to control myself, because I’ve cried before him once before and didn’t want to start a habit. Naturally, there was also my mascara to consider.

So I walked out stunned, not a little miserable, and with my confidence – which is usually unassailable – somewhat shaken. What was a girl to do? Uhmmm … go shopping, of course. Even better, go shopping in the sales! So I found a beautiful red wrap dress by Sticky Fingers, and a skirt by St Martin’s which I’ve had my eye on for a while, and felt a lot better. That night I went out with H, H, P and some more Australians to the Drunken Monkey, which was excellent, although too noisy, and then to another pub on Commercial Road which was even noisier, so we sat outside and shivered in the disgusting weather, until P thought his balls were going to drop off so we had to go inside, and of course I couldn’t hear, so took myself home. On the bus, there was a man standing next to me in a yellow safety vest who reeked of rotten meat, and opposite me was a man with greasy, greying hair who had shortened thalidomide arms. I was so drunk that it all felt wildly surreal.

Since then I’ve been thinking about what S said, and I think his contention was that I was forcing my material into an argument in which it didn’t necessarily fit. I could understand that, but as an English student I’ve always been taught that you can argue what you want, as long as you can back it up. However, I guess that if this means forcing it to the point of distortion, it obviously isn’t going to work. The other thing he seemed to be saying was that I was making statements without thinking about them carefully enough. This is one of the main reasons why I don’t think I can be an academic; I just don’t have enough intellectual rigour, especially compared to him and I-, and I couldn’t be bothered with investigating theory. S seemed to recognise this and said that I was using fictocriticism in order not to think about the other side of the argument; that is, by using fiction, I was giving myself the licence to say what I wanted without considering whether it was valid or not. He was right. All I want to do is write novels, not this PhD. But when I said this to him, his response was that Virginia Woolf, upon whom I rely heavily, used fiction as a way of getting away from that personal voice. He also said out that the point of fiction was to investigate other lives, and in that he is, of course, correct, and I felt incredibly stupid not to have seen it.

However there is, obviously, no turning back now, and after realising that all he was advocating was a little less sloppiness, rather than an entire change of approach, I felt better. I think what I need to do is stop justifying fictocriticism, and stop adhering so strongly to the argument I’ve devised and just write it the way I want to and see what happens. S suggested writing a dialogue with Georgiana, and while I can’t be bothered with that, I can see what he means: I need to be more attentive to her point of view.

I never wondered why I wanted to do a PhD until I got here and realised how difficult it was (although it shouldn’t be difficult, because I breezed through my other degrees). It just seemed to be a natural progression in something that I was good at, and of course, I want to be a genderless Dr, not a Miss or a Mrs or a Ms. In yesterday’s G2 there was an article about how Ms was created so that women wouldn’t have to be defined in relation to men, and yet in using it they still are – because by using a name that shows that they have no relationship with a man, they are still reminding people that there is a system to get away from, and therefore they remain implicated in it. I think we need to create a new title altogether.

Repressed Librarians

2007-06-26T21:49:00.000+01:00

When I* came over for dinner prior to the gay amateur strip night (which I was, of course, gravely sorry to miss and which, as it transpired, I wouldn’t have been allowed to attend anyway, as women were denied entry) he told me about a blog by a repressed New Zealand librarian, the writer of which was actually a man. Naturally I found this very interesting, but I haven’t been able to locate it yet. I found repressedlibrarian.com but it didn’t really light my fire.

Instead I found a very entertaining website titled Spectacles: How Pop Culture Views Librarians, which has a You Tube link to a song called ‘Librarian’ by the NZ band Haunted Love.

Here are the lyrics:

I want to be a librarian
I want to check out your books
Please give them to me
With the bar code facing up
Please don't bring them back too late
or I'll have to charge you fifty cents a day
(and you won't like that)

I want to be a librarian
Wearing glasses every single day
Don't you find me appealing
in a nerdy sort of way?
Please don't talk so loudly
Please
Please
Sshhhhhhhhhhhhh......

Meet me in the closed reserve
I'll let you read all the new magazines
I'll let you touch the first editions
If you promise me
If you promise me
If you promise me your hands are clean

I’m pretty sure I could do a better poem than that, and H may even be inclined to write some music to go with it. So watch this space.

I then mentioned (to the pre-stripclub gathering) that I was quite taken with the idea of stepping up very tall ladders in very short skirts and stilettos but there was never anyone in the library who I’d want to be beneath the ladder. P. offered to step in, but admitted that he wouldn’t be much use as my predilections tend not to lie in the direction of men who are fond of other men. And for the life of me, I can’t think where the eroticism of librarians comes from (aside from the obvious dominatrix thing). I wish it were erotic to work in a library; my day would be so much more exciting. Instead it’s a case of being pleasant and helpful, of stamping things, mending broken books and wasting far too much time on the internet.

Also in the course of my bibliophilic cyberspatial peregrinations, I came across the blog of an Australian girl who was in England on exchange, and who had a theory that the reason why the English conquered the world was because of their terrible germs. She had been incredibly sick with a flu, twice in quick succession, and this is what happened to me soon after I arrived, and to A- as well. A-‘s theory is that in Australia, there are less travellers and so less chances of nasty bugs, but an English colleague thought it was more a case of one’s immune system not having encountered those bugs before.

I also found (but not while looking for repressed librarians) the blog of a fellow disgruntled Londoner, who utterly won my heart with his phrase ‘The over-indulged Tom … [had] the sneer of a fox caught doing a shit on your rockery.’ You may read his blog here if, like me, you have too much time to waste and not enough students to stir by stepping neatly up ladders.

Dog tired

2007-06-19T22:05:00.000+01:00

Good lord I am tired. Part of it is insomnia: while other people lie awake thinking about their mortgages, I lie awake thinking about my word count. The rest is just trying to exist in this exhausting city with one day off a week.

For the past few weeks I’ve been corralling words into pens of meaning, barking after ideas which refuse to go in the gate and join up with other ideas, and chasing half of my writing out to pasture because it’s irrelevant. I’m desperate to just curl up in the sun and sleep, but there’s no chance of that, because it just keeps on fucking raining, doesn’t it? Where the fuck is summer? I have short skirts, frocks and stilettos that need wearing and a tan that needs acquiring.

And to cap it all off, the sow at work who DOES NOT STOP TALKING … EVER … wrote on the whiteboard yesterday; ‘The longest day of the year is June 22nd from then on it starts getting darker and my birthday.’

Aside from the fact that this is grammatically incorrect and the solstice is on the 21st, I do not need reminding that winter is back on its way. Winter means depression, and no light, and more tiredness, and horrible coldness … so of course her birthday would be on the day that it starts getting darker.

What a jolly barrel of laughs we are. But then, that’s nothing unusual.

So … to keep H happy we must think of some Happy Thoughts.

Viz: I have just finished the best book I’ve read for ages – and I’ve been reading quite a lot of good things lately. If you need something to read, pick up Helen Dunmore’s The Siege. The writing is bordering on exquisite, and the subject matter – an entire city of people starving to death during the siege of Leningrad in 1942 – is fascinating. But what makes it so captivating is that it’s a very feminine rendering of war, in the sense that it’s the women keeping everyone alive because the men are away. I’ve read other good war books – Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and the inevitable Birdsong (which has probably the worst sex scenes I’ve ever read, although the battle scenes are brilliant), but they don’t depict the experiences of women in war very well. Because of the attention to detail, and to the sights, sounds and smells which the female protagonist is feeling – there is this very delicate, almost sensual web laid across the utterly bleak landscape. As well as this, I had the sense that the author was handling the reader carefully by making sure that nothing really bad happened to the important characters, because if it had, it would have been too depressing to bear.

And on top of it all, Dunmore is a superb writer and I was feeling somewhat inadequate by the time I’d finished the book. But that was partly because I’d read a bad review of my novel on the web while I was bored at work. The reviewer, Gillian Dooley, is a librarian in Special Collections at Flinders University and reviews for the Australian Book Review. In the ABR website she says, ‘Reviewing is necessarily subjective and I will always express a forthright opinion, but I hope to tell readers enough to decide for themselves.'

She was certainly forthright when she wrote, ‘White might have done better to write the novel in the diary form, giving the narrative more immediacy than the conventional past tense she has used. But then again, there are so many things wrong with this novel that I’m not sure that any merely technical alteration could save it.’ But was she allowing the reader to make up their own minds? I should hardly think so. A good review finds the positive and negative things in a work and I believe this is also how you should approach teaching creative writing – never put someone down unless you have something with which to buoy them up. And the novel was in diary format, and it didn't work, so I rewrote it in third person, even though this meant writing it out again for the third time.

How does one learn to disregard their reviews? They almost precipitated Virginia Woolf into a relapse each time they came out. I guess it’s just a case of thickening your skin. Mine is tough, since I’ve been writing for years, but a review like this still makes you think, ‘Ouch.’ But then you forget about it.

On the plus side (since H likes all manner of shiny linings), on the website for the gay and lesbian bookshop in Darlinghurst, they had put three little icons next to my book which said:

Aussie
Staff Pick
Bestseller

The only other one (in the lesbian section) which had all three was Dorothy Porter’s new book El Dorado.

Hurrah!

Plateauing

2007-06-10T14:35:00.000+01:00

I’m feeling strangely flat, and I shouldn’t be because it’s warm enough to wear skirts and stilettos, I know what to write this week (kind of) and last weekend was utterly gorgeous. I think I need a holiday, but I won’t get a break until the beginning of next month, when the parental unit come over from Oz.

Last weekend was spent in M’s endlessly entertaining company in the wilds of England, exploring old houses, beautiful parks, gardens and ruins. Sunday saw us walking through the greenest paddock I have ever seen. Up to the skyline, everything was green, and above it were milky blue clouds. We had lunch by a pub near an old water mill with ruins in the distance, and I was in ecstasies. I never knew England could be so beautiful, and fear I may even be starting to like the place.

On the way back through the paddock, we stopped by a gate that led to an old church (although M maintains that a 19th Century church is hardly old) and waited for three young Goths to step through first. The first looked relatively normal, despite a halo of dry, brown frizzy hair, the second was black and the third had buck teeth. Even though I couldn’t hear him, I knew M was laughing behind me, and I was struggling not to laugh myself, but some adolescents do try so hard to be individuals, and we really shouldn’t mock their efforts.

Due to my perpetual state of impoverishment, H very kindly took me to see Equus on Thursday, along with the Magirrister of whom, like H- (March 10 entry), I profess to be very fond. When I met them, wearing my red silk Monsoon skirt and a black top, H asked, ‘Did you spend all day getting ready?’ I protested, somewhat annoyed because I had actually done some work, that it had only taken me 45 minutes. I’d read the play before I left, as from past experience if I don’t hear what’s going on I get very, very angry and frustrated. As it transpired I couldn’t hear much anyway. The loop system worked, but the microphones were at the front of the stage and the actors were standing quite a way back. So I did hear some things very clearly: someone coughing their guts up and a mobile phone going off.

The play was interesting to read but quite boring to watch. Daniel Radcliffe was good but I didn’t think Richard Griffiths had enough presence. The actors playing the horses were fantastic however, not least because they were dead sexy, but also because they’d studied all the movements of horses and they looked positively real. I really liked the theme of communicating with animals in some kind of unearthly, mystical way, just as I liked the fusion between human and animal love in Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime, and it gave me the hint of an idea for fixing a short story which has been stubbornly refusing to work for the last 10 years.

Obviously one of the drawcards for lots of people was Daniel Radcliffe getting his kit off, and H pointed out that there was a great deal of grappling for the opera glasses between the gay couple in the row before us. But it didn’t seem that necessary for him to get starkers, unless the writer was trying to drive home some point about the primal fusion between man and horse. I have to confess I was more taken with the muscles on Radcliffe’s back than his willy.

The Magirrister had bought a new pack of cards which he liked because they looked old, but they were so new and shiny that spreading them felt like rippling water. Halfway through dinner after the play (at a bright yellow Chinese restaurant in Chinatown), he told me to cut the pack, and that the person with the highest card could chose the last round of hors d’oeuvres. I teased him that he must have already figured out who was going to get the highest card, then cut the pack and came up with an Ace of Spades. The Magirrister looked utterly flummoxed for a few seconds, then conceded that there was no point in going on with his trick and had to put his cards away.

Things that are pleasant

2007-05-31T22:52:00.000+01:00

I am very fond of lists, particularly when they’re as poetic as Sei Shonagon’s, from The Pillow Book. I am less tired, and therefore happier, and have compiled a list of things that have pleased me lately.

1. I received my first fan letter today, from a 91 year old widower living in Albany, WA. His late wife was looked after by a lady who lived with another woman, and now they both look after him. The letter was written in January but because Penguin still don’t seem to have updated my address, it’s taken 5 months to reach me and I had to write back immediately, in case his years had overtaken him.

2. On my way to get a coffee yesterday, I walked through the Science section at Waterstone’s and there was a sign above a pile of books which read: ‘Sick of the beach? 3 for 2 on summer reads.’

3. On the bus on the way home the other day, I saw a Muslim man at King’s Cross with two huge armfuls of peacock feathers, obviously selling them. Then a bit further on I saw, on the front step of an office building, a collection of nine red fire extinguishers.

4. While running in the mornings, I pass various water fowl that make me smile. On the weekend it was the goose that hissed at me as I passed her half-grown goslings, and every other day it’s the collection of ducklings that sleep in the grass or on the cement by the edge of the water, all bundled together in a lump of snugly feathers. Although today a dog that looked like a kelpie came bounding along the path in a great exciting hurry and the ducks splashed into the water in fright. And then there are the aggressive black duck-like birds that are usually attacking another bird from their territory and pushing it underwater, or dragging bits of twig into their nests. One of them today was carrying a stick that was twice its body length, swimming very correctly.

5. And while running on Monday I saw a man untangling a net by the canal. Then on the way back the man was in the water, apparently naked, at least from the waist up. I dared not look; it was obviously some strange Bank Holiday ritual that involved nets and nudity.

Rarely, there haven’t been that many unpleasant things, except the fiction I’ve been reading, but that’s more because it’s been stressful. After Notes on a Scandal I picked up Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault which was dark and broody with tension. I don’t think I’ve ever been so depressed by the trajectory of a novel since reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and I raced through it in the hope that things would get better, but they didn’t. Lionel is an excellent writer, and I like her for debunking the myth of the American Dream, which she does with slightly more finesse than F. Scott Fitzgerald, but her characters disappoint me somewhat. It’s as though she’s grown them in a hothouse and, once she’s decided what character she’ll portray, she does all the research she possibly can on them, to the point where they become artificial. Thus Kevin from We Need to Talk About Kevin was too evil to be believable, and Eric too seemingly perfect to be real, and Willy too tortured over being a woman. At times it feels like someone has pulled her up on this, so she puts in paragraphs that make them seem human; in Kevin it was when he was sick, and Willy there was a paragraph about wanting to be like a boy, but these are isolated sections and she ought to have woven them through more seamlessly. I realise that one of the points she’s getting across is that the characters do seem inhuman to the other characters through their evilness or perfection, but it still rings slightly false, as though she’s trying too hard. The other thing she seems to do is put her characters together in the space of her fiction and see what they’ll do to each other; again it seems contrived, and I always maintain that if the nuts and bolts of a book show too plainly, you’ll lose your reader. Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam is a prime example of this; the ending was clever, but you could see McEwan being clever, and that spoiled the magic.

Anyway I’m sick of all these stressful books. It’s time for some Austen or a Bronte now; I want to read something pleasant.

London Launch

2007-05-29T20:50:00.000+01:00

On the morning of the launch I woke up from a bad dream about H going to the doctor for a checkup and being diagnosed with leukaemia. This did not bode well. I don’t dream about H (or other family members) dying as often as I used to, but it’s still disturbing, and I went to work accompanied by the most dreadful, morbid feeling. I was also abysmally tired and so struggled through the morning, misinformed various students about various things, then went home and slept.

Fortunately in the evening it wasn’t too cold, otherwise my legs (which my frock only half covered) would have done their unappealing mottling thing. However my gold, sparkly shoes, which I’d only worn once before, turned out to be another of those beautiful pairs that come from hell. By the time I reached the venue they had cut away a lot of skin, leaving coin-sized weals, and I had to ring C- to ask her to bring bandaids. Will this stop me from buying gorgeous-but-crippling shoes? What a stupid question.

The room was lovely, with big windows and comfy furniture, and it was wonderful to see so many London people there. To go from knowing no-one but my brother when I arrived 2 and a half years ago, to being friends with this roomful of people, was a really nice feeling.

I- (looking more splendid than usual in all black) gave an excellent introduction, apart from his joke about my doing good work only when I applied myself to it. I gave him a rather sour look at that, as it’s a sore point and my sense of humour fails me when it come to sore things, especially as pleasing I- is sometimes my sole reason for working as hard as I do. I was impressed by him referring to the novel as having sheer 'hard, feminine muscle' at its core; I liked that a lot. Then I got up and said my speech, which I’d finished writing on the bus, and I made people laugh, which always makes me happy. I’ve put the speech after this for those people who weren’t able to make it, and for those who are in Oz.

There was lots of chatting to do afterwards, and like the last launch it felt like a wedding with not enough time to talk to the people you want. For my mother’s sake, I forced myself converse with the B’s, who we’d known back home. Mr B is nondescript, Mrs B is a disgustingly outdated snob, whose hair was the colour and texture of straw. As we stood outside, discussing dinner, she brayed out options like ‘Hakamana’, which I can only assume was her version of Wagamama. M, leaning against a signpost, gave me a wink and I had to fight to keep my laughter from spilling out. We ended up going to my favourite Thai restaurant, and H, due to his foot-and-mouth disease, insulted the waiter within earshot again, so he isn’t allowed to go there anymore. Then we found a nice pub, which I’d been to once before. M entertained me with his witty banter and I borrowed some more bandaids off H_ in order to totter home.

So here’s my speech.

I need to start by thanking I- for his introduction, and for being the best supervisor I could ever have hoped for. His unwavering support and consistently positive attitude helped me to get through my darkest days in London, and I’m quite sure I wouldn’t still be here without him. He’s also been very patient, because I was editing this novel for the good part of a year, and in that time I was supposed to be writing my thesis, so am just a little bit behind now …

Anyway, I’m very glad to be having a second launch. The first was in Sydney and I was so nervous I was hyperventilating – the manager of the bookstore made a recording and on it I sounded very breathy. Also, I wrote my speech in the taxi on the way to the bookstore on a tiny scrap of paper, but this time around I’ve been organised enough to actually type it up and print it out, although I wrote half of it on the bus on the way here.

The novel is selling very well back home. It’s going onto its second print run, less than six months after it was published. This edition has 2 mistakes in it – one was found out by a friend back home, who pointed out that a property couldn’t be west of Busselton, because if you went west from Busselton you’d end up in the sea! So if you buy a copy tonight you might be buying a collector’s edition which will be worth millions when I follow in my relative Patrick White’s footsteps and win the Nobel Prize. Not that I’m a megalomaniac or anything like that.

So on my interminable bus journeys to and from work, I thought about what to say to an audience of Londoners. I do a lot of thinking on buses: I think about my life, about the lives of people who get on the bus, about my constant state of sleep deprivation, about things that make me laugh and, most frequently, I think about home. And so it was that yesterday I remembered my bus trips from our farm near Boggabri, to primary school, which took about half an hour over gravel roads through the scrub. Every morning and afternoon, five days a week, I would switch off my hearing aid to cut out the sound of screaming kids and concentrate on my book. Every now and then I’d look up and see my cousin punching my brother, or another cousin (at one point there were nine of us Whites at that school – that was almost one-tenth of the school’s population) sawing away at the plastic seat with a nail file, but I would ignore them and stare out at the landscape. And so it was that for all of my childhood there were journeys, the bush, and words.

These three things are now the foundations of my life. From becoming an avid reader of books, I became an avid writer, and now I can’t seem to be able to write about anything without referring to the Australian landscape. As the poet Dorothea Mackeller, who grew up not far from me (in Australian terms), wrote, ‘Core of my heart, my country’ and her words could have been my own.

In this novel, the landscape is one of the most prominent features of the book. It defines Ingrid, who is a botanist looking for specimens, it moves the plot along and it represents the central themes of growth and acceptance. At first, Ellyn, an Englishwoman, finds the Australian flora disturbing, because it’s nothing like the flora of England, whereas Ingrid, an Australian born and bred, thinks its strangeness is delightful. In this she was mirroring the views of English settlers in Australia, who were horrified by the bizarre flowers and animals that they encountered. However, as they settled in the country, they came to love it. This then became a metaphor for acceptance of what seems different, whether it is a flower, an individual, or a minority group such as lesbians.

And this brings me to the theme of growth. The characters of Ingrid and Ellyn were based on myself – Ellyn is as I used to be – shy and not very confident, and Ingrid is who I am now – headstrong, demanding, passionate and opinionated. You’re probably wondering what happened in between … and you can blame my mother. I’ve been deaf since I was 3 and a half, when I got meningitis. I have no hearing in my left ear and half in my right. Since it was so difficult to communicate with people, I was happier being left alone with my book, but mum forced me to go out and socialise. I absolutely hated it – and sometimes I still do – but because I loved my mother and because it was a challenge I wanted to beat, I did it. Which is why, now, people don’t realise that I’m deaf until I tell them. And during this process of gaining confidence – which took something like two decades, I learned to accept myself, just as Ellyn – and other English settlers - grew to love the Australian flowers. This doesn’t mean that it’s been easy. When Ingrid says to Ellyn, ‘Predictable people have predictable lives, but for the rest of us, it’s terrifying,’ I was drawing directly on my own experiences.

But why lesbians? people have often asked. Aside from the fairly obvious motivation that no-one had really written about two women in the bush before, I wanted to show how two women could exist on their own without the need for a man. People who know me – or more accurately, people who have heard me rant – have been tempted to accuse me of disliking men. On the contrary, I find some of them very appealing – and the relationship between Ingrid and Ellyn was also based on a relationship with a man back in Australia. However, I am a very strong feminist and I believe that, as a writer, I have a duty to write about - and for - those who don’t have a voice – not just women, but other minorities like Aborigines, people with disabilities, and immigrants. I’m aware that to be so outspoken is to run the risk of being disliked – particularly as feminism is becoming a dirty word, and particularly where a woman raising her voice is seen as something ugly – but frankly, I don’t care.

And what has all this to do with bus journeys and with London? It’s to do with travelling. It was through travelling, and exposing myself to new people and places, that I learnt to become self-reliant, and grew from that small, deaf girl into the woman you see before you now. Likewise, it was no coincidence that Ingrid travelled across the country on her own.

Writing the novel has been a journey too - one that I’m very glad to have finished because I was utterly sick of it by the end. When I describe the writing process to people, I tend to use botanical metaphors. The idea began with a seed – the question of what a woman does when a man leaves her. I planted into the soil of my mind and began to write. It grew for a while, and then it grew out of control – at one point it spanned 130 000 words, so I had to prune it severely, hacking out the first third of it. Then the voice wasn’t right, so I took it out of the soil of third person and put it in the form of journal entries – one written by Ellyn and one by Ingrid. However this still didn’t feel right so I transplanted it again, into the soil of first person, written in Ingrid’s voice, and that time it worked. For at least another year I trimmed and rewrote and trimmed some more, until I got to the point where I just wanted the whole lot to burn in a bushfire. Fortunately though, that didn’t happen, and now I have a beautiful novel to show for my pains.

Tiredness, Oysters and the Start of Summer

2007-05-25T22:30:00.000+01:00

Finally, the fog of exhaustion of the past few weeks is beginning to burn away. I’ve been working like a dog, and still have another 3000 words to write for this month. Actually it’s probably more than that because half of what I write is rubbish. I can’t remember the last time I felt this tired, except when I had anorexia when I was 13 and 14, and when I first turned up in England and I was so stressed my body went haywire. It’s a struggle to fight the impulse to just lie on my bed and read fiction, when I must remain upright and decipher the politics surrounding the Linnean system for naming plants in the 18th Century.

So, things that have been happening in the last few weeks: I lost my Oyster card. I was plunged into despair when this happened because I simply could not afford to lose my card, as I’d bought an annual pass at the beginning of the academic year and therefore didn’t have to budget for transport expenses each month. Ordinarily, one would expect Transport for London to simply issue a new card, since they would have had my record and photo from the other times I’ve applied for a photocard. But no, that would be far too difficult for such an enterprising and forward-thinking company. So, as quickly as possible I posted off an application for a new card. A week later I got a letter from TFL saying that my application was rejected because the payment couldn’t be authorised. So I rang them up to find out what had gone wrong. The woman couldn’t tell me. I asked if I could pay over the phone and she replied forcefully that they weren’t authorized to take payments over the phone. Clearly, such a simple procedure defies all common sense and no, we aren’t in the 21st century either, so how could I possibly expect TFL to use a process that has existed in Australia for at least the last 10 years? How is it that Sydney Uni can offer payment for library fines over the internet, yet one of the major transport corporations in the UK cannot implement applications via the most ubiquitous telecommunication systems ever invented? Whatever the answer, I haven’t the slightest shadow of a doubt that TFL has an utterly sound, wholesome and sensible rationale behind their actions.

Back to my telephone conversation, in which the woman told me twice that they were going to introduce payments over the phone ‘in the near future.’ On the second telling I said sarcastically, ‘Thank you very much for your help,’ hung up on her and burst into tears with sheer frustration. So then I had to submit another application by MAIL (since TFL clearly believe themselves to be inhabiting the glorious days of Empire where nothing can be swifter than a franked letter), and await my refund with much scepticism, since M had a similar problem last year and her refund never arrived.

Oyster cards and the moronic clams that issue them aside, A has left for Russia and China, so he had a barbeque at his digs on Sunday, where I met some nice Aussies, and we had a collective whinge about the banking system, and wondered at the process whereby you could take money out of your account when there was nothing in it, whereas in Oz if there is no money, you can’t take anything out. A_ related the story of how she bailed up a banker at a party (to complain about this same thing), and came out of it with the understanding that the banks still work on the cheque system, so they won’t know if there’s no money in your account until three days later. K then related the amusing anecdote of how, after ringing up to complain for the third time about being fined for having his account overdrawn, the man on the phone had said, ‘Now, Mr H, before you begin, please don’t preface it by saying, "But in Australia …"'

After four hours of small talk, however pleasant, I was desperate to get home, but H looked disappointed when I suggested this, and said that perhaps I should go home on my own. I was fine with that since there is sometimes nothing better than reading a brilliant book (Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal) on a long bus journey, but there were some other people at the bus stop from the party so I had to concoct yet more frothy conversation until they got off at Elephant and Castle. They were lovely people (they were friends of A’s after all), but I was a tired, deaf girl who finds listening hard and who wanted to be left alone with her book.

On a happier note (since H has instructed me that for every bad thing about England, I must think of a good thing), summer is coming, which means that the fruit is tasting better (as it hasn’t been hauled from Ecuador during the wrong season and polluted the atmosphere in the process) and soon there will be my favourite yellow-fleshed peaches and nectarines in the shops. And today I got into a filmy skirt and sandals for the first time since February (in Oz) and saw my physiotherapist. Alas, I was felt up by his delightfully sensitive hands for the last time, since my knee is probably as good as it’s going to get and I refuse to go to the gym as he recommended to strengthen the surrounding muscles with weights. I told him I would rather put up with the pain than go to the gym.

And of course there was my London launch on Wednesday, which was splendid and which deserves its own entry, after this.

My Life at Work

2007-05-09T22:17:00.000+01:00

It’s the end of my working week. Tomorrow I start my second job (thesis) so on Wednesday nights I revel in the luxury of doing nothing. Since I lead a tremendously wild and extravagant life, to pass the time I usually read (Huxley’s Brave New World at the moment; I don’t like it much), flaff around on the internet or tidy up my room which looks like a bomb after three days of - on account of my sheer tiredness - dropping clothes on the floor instead of hanging them up.

Ordinarily I have Wednesday afternoons off too but this afternoon was spent on a course entitled ‘Coping at the Counter’, which I attended in the hope of learning how to keep myself together in conversations with patronising male academics at the library. During such exchanges (which usually arise because I can’t hear said academics properly, on account of their mumbling), my first impulse is to grab the stapler and knock them over the head with it and staple their bovine faces to the desk. However, Mother’s continual exhortations over the course of my childhood to always remain polite hold sway, and if I swear and make a scene it is in the sanctuary of my boss’ office.

It isn’t always academics to fluster me, although it is usually a man. I can only recall one woman being revolting to me, and that was mostly my fault because I wasn’t assertive enough to tell her that I was deaf and that was why I hadn’t spelt her name properly. However, to give an idea of the kind of person I sometimes deal with, I offer the following exchange:

Man in his late twenties comes to the desk. Doesn’t smile. ‘I’d like to know how many books I can take out,’ he says.
‘Sure, I just need to check your status.’ I take his card.
Computer shows that he’s doing a PhD.
‘Which university are you at?’
He mumbles something and I hear two words, ‘royal’ and ‘art.’
‘Royal College of the Arts?’ I ask, to check.
‘Art,’ he emphasises as though I were stupid. ‘Royal College of Art, not Arts.’
I blink and don’t look at him, but my lips are thinning. I check the membership manual and tell him how many books he can take out. I am very pissed off.
He gives me his books and after I’ve stamped them I slap them back on the desk, slightly louder than usual, and he looks at my face to check my expression. He must realise that he’s offended me because he attempts a thankyou as I give the books back, but I scarcely acknowledge it. I like people with manners; people without manners don’t deserve my attention.

Now, I know a big part of my problem is my ego. I’m a smart girl and I loathe people treating me as though I were dumb. Also I often forget that I’m deaf, so the problems which are caused by my deafness I tend to take personally instead of dismissing them. To counter some of these problems, I wear a very unattractive badge which says ‘I’m hard of hearing, please speak clearly.’ On account of this, I sometimes have (again, mostly old men) speaking to me as if I were not only deaf, but also slightly retarded. In other words, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Usually when this happens I have to suppress an insane urge to giggle, again until I reach my supervisor’s office. The last time this occurred, the deputy supervisor suggested that I wear another badge on the other side of my chest saying, ‘I’m deaf, not stupid.’ Then (because it was winter and I was in the habit of wearing tight skivvies) he added, ‘And then you can have another badge down here,’ (he patted his pecs), ‘which says, “Stop staring at my tits!”’ I burst out laughing.

But mostly my job is very nice, not least because of the people I work with (and indeed, yesterday at lunch I was in a state of beatitude because B was in the staff room; he has such a charming sensibility and delicious smile that it was like being cast in the glow of an angel), and I only remember the ugly incidents because they’re the ones that upset me.

I have three weeks to write 10,000 words (my self-imposed goal for the month). It is awful to think that I have another 9 months of this, and that the pain has only just begun, and that it can’t be relieved because I have no money with which to go shopping. However over the long weekend I did nothing, so now I must work.

Bank Holiday Meanderings

2007-05-09T22:04:00.000+01:00

We had a very quiet long weekend, which I needed as after my presentation I was feeling like a donkey (the Marrakeshian variety) flogged to within an inch of its life and left for dead by a road, circled lovingly by blowflies.

On Saturday H and I had been intending to visit Kew Gardens, but the weather was vile so instead we went to the National Portrait Gallery. On the ground floor was an interesting exhibition on the lead-up to the Iraq war, and I noticed the following: a) it was Tony Blair who was gung-ho about war and he seemed to be convincing many other people, both in his party and abroad, that it was worthwhile to attack = so much for democracy b) there were very few women in the pictures, and if there were women they were usually on the edge of the clusters of people c) all the decisions were made in opulent offices, which couldn’t be any further removed from the debris and squalor of Baghdad.

Then H and I went upstairs and came across a picture of George V and his family, which I had though was the Tsar and Princess Alexandra. ‘Ah well, they were all interrelated anyway,’ we said to one another. Then we tried to figure out the lineage of the royals, failed hopelessly, and moved onto the Modernism section. This I was very impressed with, not least because I saw lots of famous works (incl. the bust of V Woolf and paintings by Vanessa Bell), and a group of photos of women writers. After that I was hungry and wanted another coffee, so we crossed the road to St-Martin’s, as H had been told about a café run by homeless people that was there, and he wanted to have a look at it. I had initially wrinkled up my nose at this, but after being told off by H (‘Don’t be such a snob; we’re going and that’s that’) I resigned myself to it. However the café appeared to be closed during the renovations of the church, so we went on, though not before examining a disturbing statue of baby Jesus immersed in a square slab of stone, the umbilical cord still attached to his stomach.

We walked on to find the Temple Church, stopping by the courtyard of the Courtauld, which H hadn’t seen before. He played around with his new camera while I sat on one of the chairs in the sun and, being exhausted, envied the sprightly little sprogs running in and out of the fountains, then dozed off.

Eventually we came to the doors of the church on Fleet Street and were told by a sign that it was only open for two hours on that day, and to go around the back to get to it. The surrounding buildings reeked of money and law, but I wasn’t that impressed by the church, and I was knackered, so I went home and H went off to walk along the river.

On Sunday I woke late after a night of insomnia, then accompanied H to Columbia Road because I badly needed exercise. Never again will I go to that place at 2 in the afternoon. It was swarming with humanity, unbearably crowded with people trying to get a bargain, there was too much shouting and a rude woman knocked over the rhododendron I’d placed on the ground while waiting for H and didn’t apologise, and I hated London all over again. I’m not allowed to complain anymore though. H says I’m allowed to say 5 bad things a day and after that I have to censor myself. In the afternoon I worked on a short story about grass.

The following morning I went for a run (my wonderful physiotherapist has largely fixed my knee, bless him) and continued my short story about grass. Then H and I caught the bus to the Barbican to meet G and have a look at the conservatory. It wasn’t as ornate or exotic as the conservatory at Kew, although it was larger and housed a selection of wildlife, namely some turtles, some very weighty carp and some birds huddled in a cage, puffed up against the cold, ‘tropical’ air.

We had lunch outside, where the wind blew over one of the umbrellas shading the tables, knocked it inside out and sent a smaller umbrella flying into one of the ponds. The Asian boy to whom it belonged decided it couldn’t be retrieved, though H later fished it out with his own umbrella, dried it out and took it home (Father’s sense of thrift is evidently present in him, to some degree). We ambled on to the Museum of London and my eyes watered from pollen drifting from the surrounding trees. The Museum was pretty boring. It was mostly filled with bits of flint and brick, although it had a good 3D simulation of what London was like before it was filled with people, and also an interesting exhibition on the Great Fire of 1666. There was a video showing in a small room and, to my amazement, it had a loop system installed, and it actually worked. After that were exhibitions with more brick so we gave up and went home.

Oh, I forgot to mention the cacti garden in the conservatory, which had me in raptures. It was full of hanging baskets of cacti that spilled over the edges and burst out with red and pink flowers. I love cacti – I like their weird shapes and their unfriendliness – but H refuses to buy them because they don’t grow fast enough or provide enough variety.

In a similar vein, by the end of the weekend H was sick of me and wanted people around for dinner to liven up his life. We got our cousin A over and H made a meatloaf which, while it looked spectacular, didn’t taste so brilliant. My cinnamon teacake, on the other hand, tasted fantastic but didn’t look so hot, as it fell apart when I tried to get it out of the cake tin because I hadn't put in enough flour. Oh for a decent set of measuring cups and something better than a wooden spoon for stirring, the £10 beater purchased on Boxing Day from the Muslim man down the road having failed utterly in its primary task, by blowing up whilst beating butter and sugar.

Weeks of Wonder

2007-05-04T22:00:00.000+01:00

The unthinkable has occurred. In response to H’s complaint, the TV tax people sent us a letter – actually signed by a real person, with a real pen – apologising for sending us threatening letters. They did still say they would come around and verify that we didn’t have our TV tuned to the telly, but in a much nicer way than previously. I told H we should frame it and put it on our wall.

Then British Gas came to look at the boiler. The man who came around had a name – David – embroidered in dark blue on his shirt. He was polite, and he even rang H to let us know when he was coming around, rather than leaving us waiting (on tenterhooks, of course) from 6 till 12, or 12 till 6. Furthermore, British Gas sent us a questionnaire for the previous visit to see how the service had been, and it was with much satisfaction that I was able to report that the man had made the problem worse rather than fixing it. However, I was very impressed that they were bothering to ask at all.

A few weekends back, H, H-, A, P, F and I went out on the town to a gay club. Prior to this, H and H- saw The History Boys (stage version), and I met them outside the theatre. Prior to this again, H had suggested that, in case we couldn’t get past the bouncers into the club, I should wear something that showed a lot of cleavage. Since there was no immediate response on my part to this proposal, H amended it to, ‘Just in case you were, you know, trying to decide on one outfit over another.’
‘But they’ll be gay, it won’t make any difference.’
‘Well, all men in general like cleavage.’
So I pulled out my dark pink Sarah-jane top (which, naturally, is one of my favourites) but I couldn’t locate the excellent cleavage-enhancing bra which I’d worn at my launch. I fear it is lost among the debris of L’s room, from whence, no doubt, it shall never return. I found one that did the job almost as well and then, looking like a prostitute, went into town to wait for the H’s.
As it happened, the club didn’t open until 10.30, so we met APF and had a drink in a gay bar, where we were exposed to the somewhat awkward sight of a compact gay man dancing on a stainless steel cube in front of us. Now, while I didn’t mind the sight of his arse (which was attractive), I’m not normally exposed to small, dancing gay men, so it was difficult to ascertain the appropriate response. Should one stare openly? Should one avert one’s eyes? Should one laugh? As it was, we engaged in a smattering of the latter, then downed our drinks and made an exit.
The person at the door was swathed in some kind of Egyptian headdress, with a black wig, 3-inch false eyelashes and a moue. H engaged him (for it was a he) in conversation, and managed to get a friendlier look out of him than the moue. As we walked away to the cloakroom H whispered to me, ‘I don’t think your tits would have worked on him somehow, Jess,’ and I got the giggles.
What followed was very interesting. We saw a three metre tall transvestite, with hair like a yellow bird’s nest, a man as large and as round as a beach ball with a tiny hat perched on his head, a female pole dancer with enviably pert breasts, an albino male pole dancer, and then some bizarre cabaret act involving a plump young woman in a skimpy outfit with an enormous, oval, green papier mache mask (for want of a better word) who did a striptease. However, none of that bothered me as much as the slimy man who tried to take my hand. I immediately shook him off and he left in a hurry.

Speaking of sliminess, a few weeks ago I got a packet of flour from the cupboard, only to find it had a very large hole in the bottom of it. Summoning all my knowledge of entomology and vermin (acquired from life on a farm in the back of beyond), I decided that it couldn’t have been weevils, as there were no little black bodies in the flour, and there was a strange sheen like dried saliva around the hole. So, expecting a mouse or some other wet-mouthed mammal, I gingerly pushed aside the packets and there, at the back of the cupboard, was the second-biggest slug I had ever seen – it was enormous and hideous. The biggest was a leopard slug from mum’s garden (see here for an image of one of these enchanting creatures). Now, when it comes to things that might potentially kill you (redbacks, brown snakes, funnel webs), I can keep my head and remain calm, but with things that are slimy (yes, male forms included), I feel like a pack of teenage punks are jumping on my grave. However, as H wasn’t around to be all manly and remove the offending item, I had to take a breath, shove a magazine into the cupboard, squish the slug and wrap it up and put it in the bin, all the while keeping it at arm's length - just in case it suddenly developed primeval strength and leapt out from the pages of The Week and attacked me, à la Dune or Dr Who.

So, aside from prostituting myself and encountering megafauna, there was one other thing of note I needed to mention, which I forgot to put in my previous post. Setting out for Hampstead Heath last weekend, H and I discovered that the Northern Line wasn’t running, so we had to bus it. All well and good, and while waiting for buses we stared at the street and dreamed of owning a car. But then we got as far as Angel and lo and behold, the road was congested (by Clancy Docwra doing the drains – they will no doubt go down in history for drilling their name into the mind of every frustrated Londoner who was made late for work by their cordoning off of the roads) and the traffic way too slow for our liking. ‘Fuck I hate this city,’ I muttered for the nth time, and H suggested catching a cab. So we bundled out and H flagged down a cab on Upper Street.
‘We need to go to Hampstead Heath,’ H said to the driver.
‘Hampstead Heath? Where’s that?
H paused. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
‘Dunno where it is.’
‘Umm … it’s a really big park … in the north of London.’
‘You’ll have to tell me how to get there.’
‘O….kaay,’ H said dubiously, and we got in. I was oblivious of this transaction until we finally got out at Parliament Hill, and when he told me I was staggered. Here was a man who ought to have failed The Knowledge! The only conclusions I could come to were that his cousin was ill and he stepped in for the day, or he had bumped off the driver and taken his car. As mum likes to say, wonders will never cease.

The Light and the Greenness

2007-04-30T21:46:00.000+01:00

How lovely London is now that the trees are bristling and unfurling with leaves, and the wind and the light fall through them - it’s all so lush it seems decadent. When I walk past Tavistock Square on my way home after work I’m amazed and gratified by all the dappled greenness, and I realise that Narnia could never have been written in Oz.

The sunshine is gorgeous too, though makes me homesick. Despite my avowals not to become a burnt little biscuit this summer, but to sensibly apply my newly purchased tanning moisturiser (which is making me look jaundiced), I sat in the sun for two hours last weekend and burnt the bejeezus out of my back. It was only TWO HOURS, from 10am till 12pm – only one hour into the zone they say you shouldn’t sunbake in (11am-3pm). Would I have done that in Oz? No. But I thought the sun was benign here – I didn’t think that it was possible to get burnt.

And Saturday was the most joyous of joyous days, for I put away all my winter clothes, sprinkled with cloves in tightly knotted plastic bags, for last year the fucking moths ate through a £90 cashmere jumper, a good part of my dark red coat and a piece of my double breasted brown coat. I was absolutely gutted, especially about the red coat. It isn’t beyond repair - it just needs some artistic embroidery, which I can do - but I didn’t have time to attend to it this season. I know I ought not to be so fond of my clothes, but I spend so much time researching, saving for, shopping and wearing them that it’s hard not to become passionately attached to them. And now I'm just waiting for it to warm up some more so I can get into my lovely summer frocks.

Sunday afternoon was passed at Hampstead Heath. This was only my second time there and I’d forgotten how lovely it was – there’s something almost erotic about all that soft grass. We set up camp beside a pond and innumerable dogs wandered by, hoping for a bit of roast chicken, until their owners called them back. H repeated all their names to me – there was Benjy, Winston, Fudge and Sonic among others. The latter was a Scottish Deerhound, I think, who came up to us rather mournfully, and didn’t seem very animated. It moped around for a bit, then all of a sudden it inexplicably shot off back over the hill.

I drank too much champagne and Pimms, then stupidly enabled H to win Scrabble by making 22 points out of ‘zoo’ when he asked for help. I’m a bad loser at the best of times – especially at Scrabble – and if I hadn’t been inebriated I would have been very angry with myself. As it was however, the bubbles had given me the giggles so I laughed it off. Indeed, I am becoming quite mature in my old age.

Then A. and her new boyfriend turned up, and 5 Australian boys followed in their wake and began a game of soccer, and I mulled over the conundrum that I had suddenly seen more attractive men in one space than I had in all of the last 6 months in England.

Oh, and my novel is going onto it’s second printing after just 4 months. What bliss! If only Jane Campion would make a movie of it, with Cate Blanchett in it, of course.

Things I’ve been reading …

2007-04-21T18:12:00.000+01:00

Seeing as I have 45 library books stacked in my room while I write a presentation on fictocriticism (in fact while I attempt to write something of my thesis at all), I thought it would be apt to write about some of the things I’ve been reading. Naturally, since a professional student achieves nothing without perfecting the art of procrastination, many of these things are completely unrelated to my research.

I finished another Daphne - her collection of short stories, Don’t Look Now - which was disappointing. When she can keep her sinister overtones under control, like in Rebecca, she’s superb, but when it tips into melodrama it just doesn’t work. Before that, though, I read the utterly brilliant The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst. Such superior characterisation, setting, writing and structure, and the sex scenes were excellent (and if someone tells you women can’t get turned on by two men getting off, they’re lying; it’s no different from men finding two women together appealing). Plus Hollinghurst had many more interesting things to say about beauty than Zadie Smith in her hugely overrated On Beauty.

After a conversation with M- at the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant situated precariously close to Soho Square (how can these people run such a place without irony?), I’ve been trying to find rape statistics on the Guardian website. M- had said that, if you include the prison population, more men are raped than women. I’d looked at him askance and he said, ‘What, prisoners aren’t human?’ and I conceded that that was a pretty stupid thing to think. Then I read a whole lot of articles about rape while trying to find this statistic and got so depressed I had to stop reading. Since I doubt many will be interested in reading the articles (for what are we if not an apathetic society that prefers to turn the cheek?), here are some facts:

• One in 20 women over the age of 16 have been raped; one in 10 have experienced some kind of sexual victimisation. These aren’t crazy men jumping out of bushes and randomly attacking women - they're "normal" guys like friends and boyfriends.

• A survey found that one in three people in the UK believe that women who behave "flirtatiously" are responsible for being raped. More than 25% think that women are at least somewhat responsible for being raped if they're wearing a sexy outfit. Not only is this statistic appalling, but it’s offensive, I’m sure, to most of the men out there who can keep their dick in their pants.

• If you report your rape in the UK, there's only a 5.6% chance that your rapist will be convicted. My word, I am glad that I live in England.

Just in case you do want to read this article, the link is here.

There are definitely more men raped than women within prisons, but whether this equates to more men raped within society as a whole, I couldn’t find out, and now I can’t bear to read any more about it.

However, I do have to mention that at the evening’s close at the Gay Hussar, one of the waiters handed us – unfathomably – two red peppers on a plate. Following on from a conversation we’d had about H and our sister travelling in Hungary (in which the family they’d stayed with offered H 15 goats, 5 sheep and some chickens in return for R’s hand in marriage) M- thought this may have been some obscure means by which the waiter was asking us to become his betrothed.

More Guardian reading (and how I am going to miss this paper when I go home, particularly the Unsettling Animal Picture of the Week in the Saturday edition): in this week’s Society Guardian I read about the UK Miss Deaf World pageant, which was set up to help young deaf women make it in the modelling industry. However the girl who organised the show made a shambles of it, yet she was doing deaf studies and had worked with the deaf community for 10 years. I’m wondering if she was just completely stupid, or if the problem lay with a lack of experience in events organization. They’re screening a doco about it on telly, but as since we don’t watch telly (AND THEREFORE DON’T PAY TV TAX) all I had was the article to go on. But if you have a stylist shouting at a deaf person (and believe me, that’s never a good way to make yourself heard – try just speaking clearly, you idiots), things can’t be going very well. And the gem was the MC trying to get the mostly deaf audience to sing along to a Frank Sinatra song. I have to admit, when I described this to H, I started to laugh – after all, if you can’t laugh at yourself when you’ve got a disability you haven’t got much hope of a happy life.

On this note, however, check out this site which T (who was clearly doing less work than I) sent me the link to: How to Insult Someone Using British Sign Language. It’s hilarious.

Still on the subject of newspapers – H brought home a copy of The Sun for my edification. I had never read a copy before, and never intend to again. Our environment is disintegrating at an alarming pace, and all they can write about is Prince William’s next sheila?

Oh, and how can I not mention my first love, to whom I am returning after God knows how many years: Virginia Woolf. I struggle to enjoy her fiction, but her essays are exquisite, and they make me laugh. I urge anyone with a moment up their sleeve to read A Room of One’s Own. It isn’t a feminist rant, but a delightfully dry and shrewd examination of what makes women write the way they do (if at all). Take this passage as a taster:

‘Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in the blood. The desire to be veiled still possessed them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it, as Alf, Bert or Chas must do in obedience to their instinct, which murmurs if it sees a fine woman go by, or even a dog, Ce Chien est a moi [‘This is my dog’] … It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her’ (p. 65 Oxford UP, 1992).

Meanwhile, writing my thesis is like trying to get blood out of a stone and I’m wasting an inordinate amount of time shopping for lingerie on figleaves.com. I don’t understand what’s happened to me. I used to be such an eager little bean while I was doing my undergraduate degrees; I drove myself so hard that I got a university medal and while I was writing my novel I was scribbling down 3000 words a day. I seem to be getting old, tired and disillusioned and I’m not even 30 yet. It doesn’t bode well.

This country's fucked.

2007-04-19T18:28:00.000+01:00

This, as H will testify, is one of my most oft-repeated phrases, and of late I seem to have been uttering it more frequently than ever, largely because of:

a) Sally Clark (see earlier blog)
b) the washing machine
c) being Put Through to India
d) TV tax

A friend once sent me a forward headed ‘You know you’ve been in England for too long when …’ with various endings, one of which was ‘You’ve forgotten what customer service is.’ After two months of wrangling with the lame ‘engineers’ from Indecis over the washing machine, H, A and I had not only forgotten about customer service, but we were so frustrated we were ready to stab someone. The phone representatives placated us by saying they would send a senior engineer, but then they sent the same imbecile who had turned up the first two times (and who had made the fuse blow up with sparks and smoke). H said that when he opened the door, the engineer had cautiously looked around for A, in case she jumped out and attacked him. Eventually we managed to get a person who knew what he was doing to look at it. He said he would have to send away for more parts and I got angry and started to raise my voice, before realising that this wouldn’t get us anywhere. We did lots of shouting in those two months and it achieved nothing, because nothing can shift the creaking behemoth that is English bureaucracy. When the parts turned up our friend came with them to install them, and H said that he still had hardly any idea of what he was doing, because when he went he left the pipe on the ground, when it’s supposed to be higher than the machine to help the water flow; H knew about the pipe and he isn't even an engineer.

However we now, to my eternal delight, have a working washing machine. It still leaks a bit, but to expect a perfectly functioning machine is clearly asking too much.

Another shitty aspect of English customer service is Being Put Through to India. I hate ringing my bank because I can’t understand the people on the other end and it’s incredibly stressful just trying to get a pin re-set (hence I never forget my pin – how efficacious is that??). H loves his bank because he’s put through to Ireland. However the other day, while trying to change a train ticket, he was Put Through to India after the customary half-hour wait, and the following conversation ensued:

India: Good afternoon sir, how can I help you?

H: I’d like to change the date of my train ticket please.

(H gives existing, and new, dates of travel.)

India: That will be £40.00, with a £10.00 administration fee.

H: But the original ticket cost £20.00.

India: That’s right.

H: So I need to pay another £20.00 just to move my ticket?

India: Yes, that’s right.

H (in most sarcastic voice possible): Thank you very much. You’ve been most helpful.

India: You’re welcome.

And in the Guardian a few weeks back I read of a woman who rang BT about getting an internet connection set up in her office in the back yard, and when she got Put Through to India she realised the person to whom she was speaking had no concept of back yards, or of phone lines travelling through them.

Then there are the TV licensing people. We have a TV, but we WATCH DVDs on it. H has phoned and written to these fuckwits to explain that we WATCH DVDs and have tuned it (according to their verbal instructions given over the phone) so that we can only WATCH DVDs. Instead they have sent a variety of threatening letters, all neatly threaded-through with the prospect of court action.

I don’t understand TV tax. I’m guessing that it’s been implemented to be fair to those people who don’t watch telly, but surely after all the expense of the aggressive letters, door knocking and court appearances, they might as well tax everyone, like they do in Australia, and then put the money towards Aunty.

Also, I don’t appreciate that they’re so aggressive and negative in their campaign against non-users. Why not have a sense of humour about it, people?

Other ways you know you’ve been in England for too long are:

•You’ve given up complaining about the Victorian banking service.

•You’ve given up explaining why you are half an hour late to work.

•You believe that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday are all good nights for drinking. Sunday day is also entirely reasonable.

•You don't even bother looking out of the window when you get up to check what the day is like. You know it’s overcast.

•You expect men to actually cut, comb and style their hair (using hair products). And to wear decent clothes. Jeans and a T-shirt are no longer socially acceptable.

•You think £40 for a haircut is quite reasonable for a bloke.

•You’ve stopped calling people 'a dag' because you don't want to have to explain it.

•After a big night out you find yourself looking for a curry house, and not a Hungry Jacks

•More than three hours sunlight on summer days seems excessive.

•You only just realise you have lost your sunnies and that you left them in Greece 2 summers ago.

•You are on to your 6th umbrella and your second overcoat.

•You buy a disposable baby BBQ from Argos.

•You realise your sunburn cream is the stuff you bought with you from Australia.

•A day at the beach means wearing the warmest clothes you own while standing on golf ball-size pebbles and the thought of swimming doesn't even enter your head.

•You always call soccer football and you have a team and it's not Manchester United.

•A sunny lunchtime means searching for a patch of grass and stripping off practically down to your underwear

•You start to accept queuing as a way of life.

In case you’re bored (or need a point of comparison), read on …

You know you are in Sydney when...

•Your co-worker tells you they have 8 body piercings but none are visible.

•You make over $100,000 and still can't afford a house.

•You take a bus and are shocked at 2 people carrying on a conversation in English.

•You never bother looking at the train schedule because you know the drivers have never seen it.

•You can't remember....is dope illegal?

•You've been to more than one baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

•You have a very strong opinion where your coffee beans are grown and can taste the difference between Sumatra and Ethiopian.

•A really great parking space can move you to tears.

•You assume every company offers domestic partner benefits.

•Your boss runs in "The City to Surf"....it's the first time you have seen him/her nude.

•Your child's 3rd grade teacher has two pierced ears, a nose ring and is named "Breeze." And, after telling that to a friend, they still need to ask if the teacher is male or female.

•You are thinking of taking an adult class but you can't decide between yoga, aromatherapy, conversational Italian - French or a building your own web site class.

•You haven't been to Darling Harbour since the first month you moved to Sydney and you couldn't figure out how to drive to Sydney Tower if your life depended on it.

•A man walks on the bus in full leather regalia and crotchless chaps. You don't notice.

•You think any guy with a George Clooney haircut must be visiting from the North Shore.

•You know that any woman with a George Clooney haircut is not a tourist.

•You keep a list of companies to boycott.

•You are genuinely surprised when you meet someone who was actually born in Sydney (but then, they are Swiss/Thai/Brazilian).

•You order organic fruit and vegies online, but eat out every night anyway.

•You spent more money on your coffee machine than on your washing machine.

•You spend $500+ for your room in an apartment with stunning harbour/beach views and European appliances; and then spend a total of 40 hours each week there (37 of which you are sleeping).

•You contemplate calling a cab from your home to where you managed to park the car the night before.

•You spend 30 minutes in a traffic jam next to a car with more power to its speakers than its wheels.

•You meet friends for coffee at 1am at your local Netcafe/Laundramat/Bookstore/Bar/Alternative healing centre and go for drinks and pool at nine in the morning.

•You go out each Saturday for breakfast and the paper...at 3pm.

•Your shiatsu therapist is headhunted by an Internet Startup and your accountant becomes an actor.

•You know everyone's e-mail and mobile number but not their last name or home address.

•You can roll sushi, make pasta and keep your red curry paste recipe under lock and key...but couldn't roast a chicken to save your life.

•Your cab driver was a micro-surgeon before he moved to Australia.

and finally - "You know you live in Sydney, when....

•Your hairdresser is straight, Your plumber is gay, The woman who delivers your mail is straight.... and your Avon Lady is a drag queen.

.........................

Our shopping arrived this afternoon, and we now have 9 pots of yoghurt, 30 bananas and 5 cartons of soup. And after three weeks, the ‘ripen at home’ bananas have finally morphed from a luminous green to something resembling yellow. However, they are still so hard that they could be used as a weapon against TV tax people.

It's true!

2007-04-13T18:38:00.000+01:00

Redheads have more fun.

See here for an in-depth scientific explanation and supporting quote from my favourite Sydney salon.

Sally Clark

2007-04-12T21:33:00.000+01:00

I found the book ‘Stolen Innocence’ on the shelves of the Law section a few months back, before I left for Oz I think. It then sat in my unstable Ikea bookcase at home until I came back from Austria and, having read two Daphnes (‘The Glass Blowers’ and ‘Frenchman’s Creek’, which bordered on bodice-ripper territory; it was so overwhelmingly romantic I wasn’t sure if I liked it) I thought that I would read something grittier. Well, I got something far more disturbing than I bargained for.

Sally Clark had 2 kids; one died when he was nearly three months old, the other at two months. The post-mortem of Harry, the second child, was performed by Alan Williams, a Home Office pathologist. The paediatrician on duty at the time of Harry’s death had recommended a paediactric pathologist, one who specialised in post-mortems on babies, but unfortunately this recommendation wasn’t taken up. If Alan Williams had been cut out of the equation, Sally Clarke would never have gone to jail on the conviction of killing both her children. There are many ‘if’s’ in her story, so many that it seems impossible to be true.

In the post-mortem Alan Williams identified retinal haemorrhages, which are a classic symptom of Shaken Baby Syndrome. He took the detective on the case to meet his friend, Michael Green, the Professor of Forensic Pathology at Sheffield University (and I was struck that they were friends; it suggested an accordance of mind, of one backing up the other’s suppositions). According to John Batt, the author of ‘Stolen Innocence,’ Green ‘teaches that many mothers murder their babies and pretend they are cot deaths’ (p. 2). Something that occurred to me when I read this line, and often throughout the rest of the book, was that the majority of the trials and investigations pertaining to Sally Clark were prevailed over by men. I couldn’t help but wonder if they understood how foreign it was for a woman to consider killing her child. Even the female prisoners in the prison to which Clark was eventually sent thought that child killers were the lowest of the low, and tormented her accordingly.

Because it seemed suspicious that both children had died, Clarke was taken to court. Initially it appeared that the case would be dismissed because there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute her: the deaths of her children simply couldn’t be ascertained. However, the prosecution brought in Roy Meadow, editor of the ABC of Child Abuse, and an intimidating presence, not least because of his style which, according to Batt, was persuasive and forthright. Meadow produced the statistic that the probability of a two cot deaths in a family was 73 million to one. The chance of winning Lotto is 14 million to one; so the impact of the statistic on the jury was unavoidable. Later, it was revealed that other studies showed that this statistic was wildly incorrect, and that the chance was 214 to one, and that there may be familial factors which predispose children to cot death. In addition, because of the lack of evidence it was unknown if Clark’s children had even died of cot death, and therefore the statistic didn’t even apply.

It also became apparent that Green had misinterpreted the slides which supposedly indicated the retinal haemorrhages. The defence found another expert to look at the slides, and he concluded that the macrophages in the slides were due to the rapid delivery of the baby at birth, rather than Shaken Baby Syndrome. Green recanted, but Clark was still convicted. The public was also against her - perhaps swayed by Meadow’s erroneous statistic, and also because Clark dressed as she would for work, in her solicitor’s suit. Like Lindy Chamberlain, she didn’t seem the mothering, nurturing type. This kind of thing just shits me – a woman doesn’t have to be a fucking earth goddess in order to love her children. Christ, people can be just so fucking stupid.

Anyway, calming down now:

Clark’s first appeal was dismissed, but she was finally released on the basis of medical evidence which indicated that Harry had died from staphylococcal septicaemia (blood poisoning which had given rise to meningitis). A forensic pathologist, Professor Byard, stated that that if this bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, was found in two sites in a body, ‘I know I have a probable cause of death; if I find it in three, I have an actual cause of death’ (p. 425). Prof. Byard found it in eight sites in Harry’s body.

In addition (yet again), it was found that Williams knew about these results but had failed to disclose them.

Due to the incompetence of the supposed ‘professionals’ involved in this case (and I have refrained from using their titles of Sir, QC, Dr and so forth for these people because I don’t believe they deserve them), Sally Clark spent more than three years in prison. She had another child before she was taken to court, but had to leave him in the care of a foster family while the case was being heard. Eventually her husband was able to get custody of the baby but by this time Clark was in prison.

Clark ought to have been allowed to grieve in peace, but was instead forced to endure three and a half years away from her husband and son in a gaol. Her husband was similarly denied the chance to grieve. He sold their house to pay for the court costs and to be close to the prison and his wife, and in this move he also gave up his partnership in his law firm and consequently moved five years down the ladder of promotion. His devotion to his wife seemed to belong to the realm of fiction, it was so strong and magical; I didn’t know that men like that existed.

My rage, while reading this book, was insurmountable. Halfway through it, I read in the newspaper that Clark had died (I think from natural causes; it hasn’t yet been made clear) and, knowing that, the book became one of the most difficult things I have ever read – I had to force myself to get to the end. When talking to A- (a lawyer) about the case, she said this kind of thing happened all the time, and for that reason it was lucky that we don’t have the death sentence here. Yet it was a death sentence for Clark, as John Batt wrote:

The shame and daily degradation of nearly three and a half years in prison does serious psychological damage to any innocent woman. It is impossible to forecast how long it will take Sally to recover fully from what she has suffered. The successive hammer blows of the death of her mother, the deaths of Christopher and then Harry, her arrest and conviction as a serial baby-murderer and the rejection of her first appeal, followed by three and a half years of a life sentence as the ‘lowest of the low’, do terrible damage to the psyche.
I fear she may still be in prison, in her head. No sum of money can compensate her for what she went through.

It was just a tragic waste of a life, for what shone through these pages was Clark’s courage, her pluck in prison, her intelligence and her overwhelming love for her husband and children. All I can think of is King Lear, ‘bound/upon a wheel of fire’ (IV, vii), and of whom the soldiers said, after he’d died:

Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer (V, iii).

As a coda, I’ll leave you with an incident that shows the character of one of the people responsible for prosecuting Clark:

Michael Green … watches as police carry in a baby’s bouncy chair; it is an exhibit.
“I didn’t realise that we were short of chairs,” he says in a loud voice, looking for a laugh.
Sally hears, as do Mackey and Kelsey Fry and Spencer. Steve also hears — and will never forget — the joke made about the bouncy chair in which his baby son Harry died (p. 113).

For more information, go to www.sallyclark.org

Between Australia and Austria

2007-03-25T22:04:00.000+01:00

…. the boiler remained broken. After three days in Austria I came back to an ice chest at 12.30am. The following afternoon a man came from British Gas to look at it and said he didn’t have a spare part so would have to come next Tuesday. He was clearly an absolute master of his trade, for he left the boiler leaking. I was worried about the water being wasted (and was haunted by the fable of the boy with his finger in the dyke – the literal variety, not the figurative, for all the filthy-minded out there, of whom of course I am not one – and of the flow of the leak becoming monstrous) so asked A- to call them again. A friendly black man wearing a hearing aid came on Friday, looked at the leak and called the previous employee ‘dogface,’ at which I was highly amused. He put in a new part, and now we are cocooned again.

… the washing machine also remained unfixed, at which I unleashed a rant against the incompetent bureaucrats who populate this country, which is also allied to my fury at the incompetent bastards who consigned Sally Clark to prison, and to an early death (more to follow on this, in a later blog). A-‘s washing now fills two Ikea bags, and H kindly did some of my undies in his wash at the laundromat, which I was too tired and lazy, and also possibly too much of a snob, to enter. The problem was the twitty ‘engineer’, who ordered a part from the south of England, only to put it in and blow the fuse again. He was going to order another part from the south of England, so as to repeat the process, at which point H and A- blew up at him instead. I kept out of it because a) I couldn’t understand his accent and b) I hate confrontation. So, next Tuesday comes the Superior Engineer (obviously of a higher grade of employment, and hopefully harbouring a higher degree of cerebral matter) to confirm that the washing machine actually is fucked, after which we will get a new one in a week. A- has been stockpiling laundry liquid in anticipation.

… I had my annual visit to the audiologist, who put me in an electric chair in a darkened room and had me stare at little red and green lights that came on. Then the chair spun around slowly, the point of which was to make me dizzy. I wasn’t dizzy, but I was petrified with claustrophobia. For someone to whom sight is everything, to be in a completely black space is terrifying. However I practiced my deep breathing and got out of there without running amok in small, hysterical circles. Afterwards the audiologist confirmed that while most people got dizzy, I didn’t, ever. I could have told her that myself. I didn’t really understand what the reason was, but it was something to do with being deaf in both ears. But by extension people who can hear in both ears shouldn’t get dizzy either.

… my collaboration project with Guildhall School of Music culminated in a performance at Wigmore Hall. My composition collaborator, S, had done a beautiful job of putting my poem to music. I hated everyone else’s songs, except for the last one – they were so academic, and dry and un-lovely. We were on first, and as a consequence T missed my performance. I was annoyed, but he countered that I’d promised I’d wear my red cashmere dress, and I hadn’t. I was, however, wearing my red stiletto boots and a short skirt, and I should have thought that would be enough to please any man. A turned up so late that he heard the last two songs, one of which made him laugh. It was probably the one of the composer breathing into his flute, yet not producing any sound. This was one of the academic songs with which I had no patience.

To give you an idea of the mentality of some of the poets, allow me to relate what happened in one of our collaborative sessions. For the first session, musicians played recordings of their music so we could get an idea of their style. Likewise, in the second session, the poets reciprocated. I felt very out of place after I’d read mine out, as I was only one of 2 female poets, and my poems were fairly erotic. Somehow, being in England makes me feel far more sexual and overbearing than I would in Australia. It’s something to do with the repressive, 19th century atmosphere of this place. But let’s not get started on that just now.

The guy who went last was clearly very into his theory, whatever it was. He stood up, opened his laptop and showed it to us, and said, ‘This is a poem.’ There were no words, only circles. Then he blindfolded two of his contemporaries and had them stand in the middle of the room. A laminated map was at their feet. The poet started reading out his ‘poem’ and played some music on his computer at the same time. Meanwhile, the blindfolded men took out coins and started throwing them onto the map. Then one of them got onto his hands and feet and began fumbling around for the coins and ended up, at one point, in a somewhat compromising position.

One of the music students was looking on with absolute horror and I started to get the giggles. Actually, it was worse than that. I was on the verge of laughing out loud, so I had to turn my hearing aid off and stare fixidly at the desk so as not to receive anymore stimuli. Later, L told me he'd passed a note to R saying, 'This is how we lost the colonies.' I burst out laughing.

Being Intimate

2007-03-25T22:02:00.000+01:00

I’ve just got back from Salzburg, where I was presenting at a conference on Persons, Intimacy and Love. It was good, and worthwhile, but utterly exhausting. Two full days of listening, with a hearing impairment, to lectures and to people talking over lunch and wine and coffee, completely did me in. I stayed at the hotel where the conference was being held. It didn’t have much to recommend it except for its pillows, which were the biggest and fluffiest I have ever seen; sleeping on them was like burying my head in a nest of clouds. The town itself didn’t have much to recommend it – it was touristy, and generally unattractive. T told me to piss on anything to do with Mozart, but had I followed his instructions they would have resulted in a bladder complaint. Instead I bought him some Mozart tat, just to be perverse.

And as I rounded the corner in one of the cobbled streets, I came across a shop which had rows and rows of painted eggs in its windows. It reminded me (again) of a fairy tale we’d read when we were kids, and even though I’ve racked my brains for a week I can’t remember which story it was. All I can remember are these beautiful painted eggs, and thinking how much I wanted one of them. You couldn’t get eggs like that in Australia.

At the back of the touristy streets was a big church, and below the church were some fruit markets, and a stall selling lavender. The smell was so rich that I was tempted to buy some, but I resisted. I don’t need lavender.

However, on the 2nd and 3rd days it SNOWED. Not grotty London snow, but big fat snowflakes that settled on the ground; it was just like being in a snowdome. After that the town was much prettier, and as the taxi driver took me to the airport, the mountains appeared in the distance, covered in snow and sunlight; it was gorgeous. On some other hills that rose above the town was a forest without any leaves, very grim and forboding like something out of the Grimms Fairy Tales, and I realised how only those kinds of stories could have been written in Europe. Near the hotel were the Mirabell Gardens, in which the song ‘Do Re Me’ from the Sound of Music was sung.

At this point I must make a most dreadful confession: in 1999 I went on the Sound of Music tour. It was kind of under duress, but mostly due to my own timidity, because I didn’t want to be left behind while my travelling companions went off, so I went and saw a lake with a lot of rubbish in it, a gazebo, the inside of a bus, the tour guide cracking jokes (which E told me were awful) and the selfsame gardens, which were lovelier then as it was summer while we were travelling.

I was glad when it was all over though (both the Sound of Music tour and the conference), and came back to (slightly) warmer climes. People said they enjoyed my paper on Molloy, but I didn’t get much feedback. There weren’t that many literature people there and I think they didn’t feel qualified to comment on it. Well, I didn’t feel I could comment on theirs; half of the papers went over my head. I was grumbling to someone about how academics rarely wrote in an accessible way and she replied that often it was because they couldn’t write in any other way; she certainly couldn’t, and I thought, Oops, I’ve put my foot in that one.

'Must be a chick thing.'

2007-03-12T20:42:00.000Z

Thus spake the numbskull in ‘Alien Resurrection’ after Ripley had blown to bits the tanks full of attempts at recreating her self from a bit of DNA left on a piece of ice in the last film (I know that was a bad sentence, but I can’t be bothered to fix it). Or rather, the idiot who wrote that stupid line and ruined the whole scene.

I love Aliens. Once I was so infatuated with Ripley (during my anorexic adolescence when I found her leanness so very appealing) that I thought that, if I had a daughter, I would call her Sigourney. Then a friend asked, ‘So what would you do for her nickname? Call her Siggy?’ and I admitted that perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. But on that note, I like the themes of motherhood, pregnancy and hosts that ripple through the stories, especially in the last film, where the boundaries between alien and human began to break down, and you can't tell what a mother isanymore, because the doctoring of DNA has become motherhood. Which is why that line shat me, because it pointed so obviously to what was there, that it assumed the viewers were dumb.

But what I like most of all about the movies is that Ripley is such a ball-breaker. She’s as tough as nails, smart and has satisfyingly sarcastic one-liners. I said to A- that, sadly, I didn’t think they made movies with strong female characters like that anymore and A- replied, ‘I don’t think they have ever!’ (She also said, in a discussion we had with H about whether it was the blood or the Alien’s saliva that was acidic, and H said it was the blood, and A- said, ‘I hope she doesn’t menstruate,’ and I said, ‘I bet they didn’t even think of that.’)

Yet I found it unnerving that it was still a resurrection, because although I was glad Ripley had come back to life, it was still upsetting that she wasn’t completely the same. It was like in the Dune novels, by Brian Herbert, when Duncan Idaho was replicated each time, but always changed some way. I loved that character, and I was disappointed that he never lived as he originally had.

Anyway I like these ideas about perpetuating love and life, and I dimly recall Sue Woolfe saying, in an interview, that someone like Ada Lovelace had invented the computer so she could find some way of extending the life of a person she loved, who was dying. It’s for the same reason that I’m interested in memory, and in the question of how you can bring back someone who you’ve irrevocably lost through the process of remembering them. And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be good enough to write something science fictiony, and have it work as well as well as Aliens.

But maybe it was a chick thing, on Friday, to burst into tears after spending an hour and a half getting to the British Library (there was an incident of some sort, so the police had cordoned off half the street so I had to walk to St Pancras from halfway down City Road, in very high red heels), only to discover that I’d left my card behind and couldn’t get into the reading room. I was already overwrought because it had taken so long to leave that house that I felt like I was living out my recurring nightmare of never getting anywhere because of having so much stuff to pack. So I went to the membership desk and asked if there was anyway of getting a temporary membership card and the man said yes, there was, if I paid £5 and provided proof of address and identity. Since I can’t even afford to pick up my dry cleaning, let alone pay £5, and since I’m not in the habit of carrying around my latest gas bill, there was no way out of it, and in despair I rushed into the ladies’ and started howling. Naturally it would have been more efficacious to cry in front of the man at the reception desk but unfortunately I hate crying in front of other people. There was nothing for it but to get on the bus and go back home. I did, however, see a man in a suit playing a guitar in a parking lot and, tossed onto the top of a bus shelter, a potato that had been spraypainted blue and jabbed full of red toothpicks.

Meanwhile, I am going mental (just in case it wasn't obvious from the abovementioned incident) because I haven’t been writing. I think the instability also has something with the fact that my baby (so to speak) of seven years has left me and now I need something else to fill the space. Stories keep welling up in me, bursting to be written down, and I just can’t seem to find the time.

At least now I’m writing in notebooks again, which I haven’t done for years, and I’m using the chocolate brown one that C sent me after we’d had a fight. I’m writing down my dreams, because A- said she’d had a dream that she, H and I had moved to a house by the beach, and I said I never had happy dreams, so I’m logging my dreams for a month to see what they’re like. So far I’ve had my only other recurring nightmare – about marrying a man I don’t love, and having a less-than-perfect wedding – and a dream about being frustrated with H because he was having a dinner party and it wasn’t organised, as usual.

And I have, at last, found an author who inspires me – Marguerite Duras. I’ve just finished ‘The War’ and for a day I was slightly stunned by the potency of her words. I read ‘The Lover’ last year, but I found the film far better than the book. Naturally, this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Tony Leung was stark naked in it, but all the same I think I’ll go back to that book and try it again. And I might watch the film again too.

Shades of Grey

2007-03-03T21:22:00.000Z

Coming back to London has been a shambles. After a 25 hour flight (delayed because we had to let a sick woman get off the plane at Bangkok so she could go to hospital, half an hour after we’d boarded), and waiting another 40 minutes for my luggage (delayed because of the rain – surely if they worried about the rain in this country, no one’s luggage would ever arrive), I stumbled onto the Tube. It was grey outside. The buildings were grey. The trees were grey. I was reminded of a fragment from Praed’s transcripts, during a conversation she’d had with a spirit named K, who’d said to her: ‘For pleasure I can’t imagine anybody wanting to live in England. The grey sky – the grey mud – the prevailing colour is grey.’ It seems that dead people don’t like London either, even when they’re dead. And yet again I asked myself, ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ Aside from the dosh that Melbourne Uni has given me, it’s because I’d be bored if I stayed at home.

I woke up at 3.30am the next morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I attempted to deal with the luggage strewn across my floor, gave up, got dressed and trudged to the bus stop. The bus took forever to get me to work. The C charge has been extended and everything is slower than before, because of all the people turning away on the rims of the zone. I contemplated buying a bike but it’s hazardous because I can’t hear the traffic around me, and my mother would probably crucify me first by screaming at me down the phone, ‘You can’t do that!’ Although whenever someone tells me I can’t do something, I go and do it.

At work they’d written on the whiteboard, ‘Welcome back to work, Jess,’ which was sweet. I distributed Warheads, Freddo Frogs and Caramello Koalas. By the end of the day I was so tired I couldn’t speak.

Wednesday was payday. I discovered that I’ve used up all of my savings and my wage only just covers my living expenses. I can barely afford to walk out of the house now. I was plunged into gloom. I tried to sleep before going to M’s talk but I was too overwrought and had to cancel.

I kept waking at 5am. Thursday I went to the physiotherapist about my knee. It was a bloke feeling me up this time, so one couldn’t complain. He gave me different exercises to do so maybe these ones will work and I can start running again. Friday, the tuner came to look at H’s piano. The poor man, red-faced and friendly, plucked and banged and struck for four hours and then gave up on it. Then the washing machine man came. It transpired the washing machine has a broken fuse and we can’t get it fixed for another week. I think I have enough undies left to last me that long. Meanwhile A-‘s clothes are piling up in the bathroom.

While checking my emails that morning, I came across a ‘gentle reminder’ from the Intimacy conference organisers that papers were due in that day. I haemorrhaged for 15 minutes - I thought I'd had weeks to do it - then pulled myself together and started writing the paper. It was just a cut and paste job, and I was too dispirited to care about it much, so it didn’t take long to do. When the pinao man left I tried some scales and realised I had forgotten pretty much everything my music teacher had taught me. So much for the thousands my parents ploughed into my piano lessons, and I hope they don’t read this bit. By the time H came home I was too depressed to move. I cancelled on T and we watched Crash, which kept me awake. It was a good movie though, and I liked that it was so nuanced about racism. H complained that it won an Oscar above Brokeback Mountain, and I said that maybe in a few more decades there would be movies made that were more sophisticated about gay relationships and homophobia.

Saturday I shopped and baked Russian Tea Cakes, then Wtk came over in the afternoon. I realised it had been three months since I’d seen him, which is appalling.

That was the end of my first week back in London. I think ‘grey’ sums it up pretty well.

Last Days in Paradise

2007-02-18T00:10:00.000Z

Or not quite Paradise, as it’s been raining every afternoon, but that isn’t a bad thing as Oz is going through the worst drought in history. However it is lovely to be home again, and mum and dad haven’t even started driving me crazy yet.

After 2 weeks in Brisbane, doing my research at the State Library (which was a very impressive building), and hanging out with my sister and her two kids, I boarded the night bus to Armidale, which contained all of 7 occupants. Before we set off the bus driver cautioned us, ‘Now, the toilet on this bus is DOWNSTAIRS, so be VERY CAREFUL. The bus is moving, so you be careful going down them stairs.’ Meanwhile, sitting to his left was an Aboriginal woman with only one leg (the other was a metal rod ending in a shoe), and he kind of glanced to her for confirmation and said, ‘You right?’ and she nodded, and got off at Toowoomba anyway, so she didn’t have to worry about navigating the stairs.

At home I have been reading (finished Robert Drewe’s ‘Grace’ which was a good read but disappointingly superficial), eating, watching TV and writing. Life here is not so slow so as to have almost stopped, but it’s getting there. I’m not raring to go back to England, but I’m resigned to it, and so I’ve been attempting to make myself feel better by thinking of some of the good things about England. Here is my concise essay on cultural
comparisons between England and Australia:

Things I Like About Australia

My family
My friends
Space
Sunshine/weather in general
Friendly, laidback people
Good coffee
Fresh, cheap Asian food
Fresh fruit and veg
Outdoor eating/drinking
Plenitude of healthy eye candy (esp Asian)
Landscape
Aussie chocolate, esp Freddo Frogs and Caramello Koalas
Egalitarian society
Good shopping boutiques

Things I like about England

PG Tips pyramid teabags
My brother
My friends
My job
My flat
Columbia Road flower markets
Support for the arts
Excellent universities and academic resources
Boots
The British Library

Things I don’t like about Australia

John Howard
Other fuckwit politicians who don’t look after our water and natural resources and who don’t give a rat’s arse about helping the Aborigines.
Obsession with sport, to the detriment of culture

Things I don’t like about England

Weather
Nonexistent customer service
Unfriendly people
English chocolate
Class divisions/social problems
Crowded
Homogenous shops
Backwards about environmental awareness
Dirty streets – no pride in their country
Overpriced place to live
Bad, bad, bad coffee
Obsession with pubs and drinking
No outdoor cafes
No fresh fruit and veg

I think it's obvious who wins, and who will always win.

The Launch

2007-02-17T23:59:00.000Z

Monday was my last chance at finding jewellery to go with my outfit, so H and I paid a trip to The Family Jewels and luckily found a necklace that ended most conveniently just above my cleavage, and a pair of (more subdued) matching earrings. Tuesday I had an interview at the ABC studios in Ultimo about Georgiana Molloy, which went very well despite feeling groggy because I’d eaten a plate of couscous the night before and my body didn’t like the wheat. The interviewer was a very intelligent woman and it was refreshing to be able to talk about my book on a more intellectual level.

On Wednesday arvo, I assembled my outfit and it looked splendid. H and I caught a cab (more lovely cabcharges!) to Redfern where mum and dad were staying. En route I madly rehearsed my speech, scrawled on a tiny bit of paper. We found mum and dad in an airless hotel room with our sister, who was capering about making lots of noise as usual. She told us not to tell any stories while she was in the bathroom because she didn’t want to miss them.

I was nauseous with anxiety, so I made everyone get a move on, and we ended up in Glebe early. Mum flaffed around trying to find money for the parking meter while we had a coffee in the back garden of a café down the road. Some men were sitting a little further down, smelling odiferous. There was a swing, of the nasty plastic variety, at the back of the yard so we sat in that and dad took a family photo – the first one in a year.

Then we headed down to Gleebooks and I introduced myself to M, the lady running the show, who turned out to be a good friend of A+’s. Then the people started flocking in – most who I hadn’t seen for years – and it was hectic, and hard work too, trying to hear them all. I knew pretty much everyone there but the strangers spun me out, because it was hard enough trying to communicate, let alone with people I didn’t know. By the time I got onto the stage (after waiting for L, who was stuck in traffic) I was hyperventilating.

A+ gave an excellent speech and said lots of good things, and described an argument we’d had about my use of the word ‘gleam’ in a poem, which he was against and which I had adamantly refused to change, so he was forced to concede the point. I couldn’t remember this transaction at all but was in no doubt of it having occurred, as it sounded like one of many conversations that we’d had. I was glad that my talk was quite perfunctory in comparison because M had told me not to go on for long, as people were standing and wanting to get back to the wine. I made them laugh though, and that was the important thing. Afterwards I was hurried to the writing table and began signing books. It was only when R* handed me her nice black pen to sign her own book with that I realised I should have been using something fancier than the blue Artline pen A* had given me in Melbourne, because I’d been penless then too. Anyway I will get it right next time.

After a few hours, people began to leave, and I shepherded out the last of them because M was wanting to pack up. We repaired to the Mexican restaurant down the road, and to H’s and my astonishment, my parents, and most of their friends, hadn’t ever had Mexican before and didn’t know what to order. H ordered for them, while L and a friend of R’s from uni got trolleyed on the sangria. I was utterly drained by this point and just wanted to go home, but when I finished dinner I joined E and S-j down the road for a chat, then H and R swung by and said they were going to a Spanish bar up the road.

E and S-j walked me up there, saying, ‘You’re not going on your own dressed like that!’ and my shoes were pretty hard to walk in so I wouldn’t have been able to effect any fatal self-defence moves (apart from a stiletto heel in the groin, but even then my shoe might have gone flying before making the necessary contact), and agreed it would be good to have their company. E knew the bar, so I waited with her out the front until her man picked her up. H generously bought me a Toblerone cocktail and I joined L and R, and L’s toyboy who’d also come to the launch. Then J, who H was hoping was single and available, turned up. He was a lovely man, but unfortunately I was too tired and drunk to chat to him much. There was some kind of metal peacock attached to the wall, its tail fanning out across the wall while the bird itself stuck out of it in a sculptural way. J used its beak as a back scratcher and then, when I got up to go to the loo, my dress got stuck on the wire and I panicked, and J gave an excellent rendition of a peacock squawking violently. It was all very confusing, amusing and worrying as I sought to detach myself without damaging the dress.

After my second cocktail I was pretty much losing the plot and, to the discomfort of H, R and I (J was probably just amused) L was making out with the toyboy with increasing intensity. I absolutely detest it when people have sex in front of me, and I was so exhausted, and J had to work the next day, so we called it quits without H being able to make much of a move. We used my final cabcharge to get home, and H got sick with a cold that night because he didn’t turn the air conditioning off.

So it was a wonderful launch, the only sad thing being that I didn’t have a chance to talk to people properly, when they’d made an effort to come and see me.

The next morning we had to get up at 9am, having had a protracted argument with our mother about the absurdity of the hour, but she’d refused to get there any later, saying that she and dad would have nothing to do in the hotel and had to be on their way. When they arrived we had a coffee at the café down the road (which has Rick Hatch pottery) and I painfully mustered some conversation, then they took H home and I went down the road to buy some wine for L and P for having us to stay, then went back to bed. That evening I flew out to Brisbane and my sister met me off the plane, in even worse shape than I was, because she’d had to fly back that morning and go to work, so I decided to stop feeling so sorry for myself.

Literary Traversings

2007-02-06T07:13:00.000Z

After meeting H and having lunch with C on Chapel Street, I walked back to the hotel to meet my publicist. I was still grumpy, but feeling less violent than in the morning, and as I walked I rehearsed my speech and decided that the sun was uncomfortably warm on my shoulders. A* turned out to be wonderful – young, vibrant and friendly – and she carried my backpack around for me, which made me a little uncomfortable. H had been the designated packhorse but due to a change in plans he couldn’t go back to the hotel to collect the bag for me.

A* and I went first to a gay and lesbian bookshop down the road and signed their two copies, then went on to a beautiful bookshop in Albert Park. ‘The book’s been selling quite well,’ said the manager, rather solemnly and quietly, and I wondered if this reserved estimation was characteristic of all bookshop managers. A* then got us a cab to Dymocks and the manager there was lovely, and gave us cups of tea and hot chocolate from the cafe. She told us about her camping trip for the upcoming weekend, on a plot of land which several families had grouped together to buy, and now she and their descendents kept up with the tradition and still went there to stay. It sounded a bit like life on the farm so I told her about that. Then A* and I went across the road to an independent bookstore and signed some more copies, and then we caught a cab to Brunswick Road for dinner – Malaysian this time, at Blue Chillies. H texted me in alarm to say that there were people queuing on the footpath outside and he wasn’t sure if he could get a ticket. Then he wrote again to say they were the overflow from the previous event, which had a comedian in it, and my heartbeat subsided fractionally.

It surged again as we entered the bookstore, where there were quite a few people. I flapped around trying to get the FM set up so I could hear, and introduced myself to the two women writers beside me, Jesse Blackadder and Susan Hawthorne. There were three blokes, Dallas Angguish, Todd Alexander (Sydney) and Henry von Doussa, sitting in front of us but I couldn’t hear them and was too stressed trying to remember my spiel to try to hear them. Four writers spoke and then there was an interval, in which I caught up with my publisher, who’d come back from maternity leave, and met the head of marketing at Penguin who’d also come along. H chatted to them too then excused himself to attend to his blind date outside – a meeting engineered by L. After the interval a woman got up and sang a song, murmuring into my FM microphone, ‘This song is for you, Jessica,’ then she sang into the microphone for the audience. I giggled, embarrassed by the attention; it was the first time I’d been serenaded by a lesbian, and she was a good singer. Finally I got up and said my bit and gave two readings from my novel and, despite feeling very nervous and ill-prepared, it was fine.

I was utterly relieved when I got back to my seat and forgot that we had to do Q&A. So we all went up and sat on the plush red velvet couch, and everything was fine and dandy until I got asked the question by the MC, ‘Now Jessica, you’re a heterosexual, so how did you go about writing about lesbians?’ Fortunately I’d rehearsed an answer to this question with H, though he assured me that I wouldn’t get asked it because a thing like because it was passé. I explained that the relationship between Ingrid and Ellyn was based on a relationship with a man that hadn’t been working and wasn’t ever going to work, but that the reason why I’d written about two women instead of a man and a woman was because I was a very strong feminist and my ideas about female autonomy and independence were better expressed through a relationship between two women. They seemed happy with that, though I was affronted and, later, quite angry, for the same reason that I was irritated by the review written by Peter Pierce.

Pierce had maintained that I’d chosen quite a conventional structure and genre (ie a romance) to write about an unconventional topic – namely, lesbians. The must frustrating thing about reviews is that you can’t defend yourself or give the reviewer one of your famous expressions of withering scorn. The whole point I’d been making had been that lesbian love is no different to heterosexual love – therefore as a heterosexual writer I’m entirely qualified to write about love. As for the sex scenes, as I pointed out to the MC, I used my imagination – which is what writers tend to do.

After thinking about it some more, I understood that the MC might feel defensive if a heterosexual writer was writing about gays, namely because I was infringing on the very thing that defined them – their sexuality. But to use that line of reasoning would be to say that deaf people can only write about deaf people and black people can only write about black people, which is patently ridiculous. Then I thought about it some more and figured that it might have been a generational thing – maybe that’s how people like the MC thought (and he was at least in his late 50s), and how people like Pierce think - ie that lesbianism is something radical, when in fact it’s not that different – sure, you’re still marginalised, but marginalised in the way that deaf people might be. I can recall one of my writing lecturers (also around the same age as the MC and Pierce) saying in a faintly disparaging tone to a lesbian in my class that the lesbian novel she was writing was the sort of thing that might get picked up by a left wing women’s press but it would never make it to the mainstream. Well, look at where we are now, folks.

Anyway that’s enough of my ranting. Someone then asked a very sensible question about the role that landscape of Australia, both in the city and country, played in our work. I'd already spoken about this before I gave my reading, so I talked about how homesick I was, and that the only good thing about being out of Australia was that I didn't have to listen to John Howard, and I got a round of applause for that one.

There’s one last thing I need to mention: the red velvet flock wallpaper of the bookstore. I spoke to the owner of the store afterwards as he got me to sign a stack of books and told him how much I admired it. He said that it had been a toss up between the wallpaper and the airconditioning and he wasn’t sure if he’d made the right decision. ‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ I replied. ‘It’s like when I buy shoes – I always favour beauty over pain.’ He looked at me dubiously and said, ‘I don’t think you’d have been saying that if you were here last week when it was 40 degrees in the store.’ I had to concede he had a point, but now I am determined to have the same wallpaper in my house when I get back to Oz.

We went out for dinner afterwards, and as we stood at an intersection figuring out where to go, a girl, who was reasonably well-dressed, came up asking for money. H forked some out and handed it over, then the girl turned to me. I didn't really have any idea of what was going on as I hadn't heard her, so J+ patted her on the shoulder and said patronisingly, 'I think you've done well for tonight, you should go now.' I didn't hear this until afterwards when H repeated it to me, but when he told me I started laughing, and matched up J+'s phrase with the girl's expression of resigned agreement.

The next day we had a picnic with our cousins in the Botanical Gardens, which were beautiful, and the day after that indulged in the panacea of shopping. I found some lovely sparkly shoes to go with my Collette Dinnigan dress - $215 down to $75 – wohoo! And made the mistake of walking into Alannah Hill and walking out again with a red handbag. Ok it was kind of essential and I will use it everyday but I still felt guilty as it was a tad on the expensive side.

That night we went out with G and her boyfriend to the pub. H was supposed to meet up with his blind date again but after the previous night he was a bit reluctant to go. I drank twice my limit (which is a glass and a half – yes, am sad – but cheap) and eventually I got sick of his flaffing around and said, ‘For God’s sake, what do you WANT to do?’ and he said, ‘I want to stay here,’ and I replied, ‘Well, tell him that then!’ Many creative suggestions for texts were proffered and eventually, guilt-ridden, H managed to stay put. After freezing once again (honestly, I didn’t travel 2000 miles to end up shivering in a Melbourne beer garden in the middle of summer) we got up and I tottered after the others, flashing a brilliant smile at the bouncer for the heck of it. There was some kind of scuffle going on across the road. ‘What is it?’ I asked H. ‘A bitch fight,’ he replied gleefully. We walked on some more. ‘What are they saying?’ I asked again, but he replied, ‘Shhhh, just get a move on.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Shut up and keep walking, I’ll tell you in the car.’ When we got to the car he said, ‘Lock your doors, Jess!’ and I asked again, ‘What’s happening?’ and he said that he’d started giggling as we walked down the street and the man fighting with his girlfriend had shouted, ‘What are youse fuckin’ laughing at, you fuckers?’ Hence the reason for not talking and hurrying on. Next time, H said, he would laugh throatily like a man instead of giggling like a girl, and no one would dare to swear at him. At this I, too, burst out laughing.

I caught the plane back the following afternoon after having coffee with C and J* at a hole-in-the-wall cafe. I'd had a bad hangover and so settled on Vietnamese coffee, which was thick black coffee with condensed milk. It was a bit nasty and my tummy was upset so I opted for a freshly baked chocolate cupcake as well. When I got back to Sydney I texted L to tell me where to go but she didn’t answer her phone until 2 hours later (despite me having told her I would arrive at 5) by which time I was sitting at Eddy Avenue at Central in the sun waiting for a bus, angry as all fuck. Later I complained to Mum on the phone, ‘My life is organised, why can’t other people organise theirs?’ and she remonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that everyone was different therefore it wasn’t fair to apply my standards to them. I knew she was going to say this – she’s been saying it since I was small – despite the fact that both of us know it won’t make any difference because I will always be frustrated by disorganisation.

Home again, jiggity jig

2007-02-06T07:07:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I flew out from a day that was pissing with rain into a balmy Sydney evening. The weather in England was on the news the following night; Mum said that the people in Oxford Street looked like they were swimming against the wind and I burst out laughing. None of it was smug laughter, of course. L greeted me at the airport and I scolded her for being too thin. She was annoyed but I pretended I didn’t see it.

The next day I was so jetlagged my eyeballs felt like they were drying up in my head. My lovely ex-Randwick flatmate had booked me into Blondes Brunettes and Redheads to have my hair done at 11am. ‘We’ll be through by 2, right?’ I asked the hairdresser. ‘Because I need to have lunch with my agent.’ ‘Um,’ he replied, ‘you’re due to have the haircut at 2.’ I then realised that the hair was going to be epic. We decided I could have a break in the middle then come back for the cut. However the foils weren’t red enough so after lunch with my agent - at Benzin, the Thai restaurant snuggled between Puegots (ah, the perks of being a writer!) – I bought another fashion mag and sat for another 2 hours to have the colour and the cut done. The hairdresser was Irish with ginger hair and a lovely accent, but he was a bit hard to hear and put off having conversation with me, I think, by my announcing that I was deaf, but I was too tired to rectify the situation. Suffice to say, 5 hours in a hairdressers is a first, and I wasn’t even getting married.

H turned up on Sunday. L had to work so I public transported it to Coogee Bay, finding (with much satisfaction) that I could get from the Northern Suburbs to the Eastern Suburbs in an hour; in London it would have taken me two hours. D had picked H up and they were sitting outside Barzura, the former wearing a pair of ‘ironic’ (his words) white-framed 80s sunglasses, and his facial hair was something to be reckoned with. Only D could have pulled off awful fashion and uncontrolled hair with irony. However I soon lost my thoughts in the bliss of Barzura’s blueberry pancakes with coconut icecream and maple syrup.

D drove us to Nielsen’s Bay after that, and it was rammed with people because it was 35 degrees out, probably more on the sand. The bay was netted in from the sharks and there were no waves so I borrowed H’s goggles and stolidly swam a few laps, vowing again to start swimming properly when I got back to London. Which I have to do anyway because my knee is buggered. Back on the beach I got hot and bored and started whingeing to H, and D kindly took us back to L’s place.

Monday and Tuesday were shopping days but I couldn’t find the jewellery, shoes or handbag that I needed. Things in Sydney seemed dull and overpriced so H and I decided to leave it until Melbourne. I flew there on Wednesday arvo and discovered the joy of cabcharges courtesy of Penguin. The Midsumma people put me up in the Marque Hotel which was a little dull (though still tasteful) on the inside, and the receptionist was very helpful and there were bottles of Bvlgari shampoo and conditioner in the shower. I was knackered so I slept for a bit, then found an internet café and did a Q&A for my publicist. It had questions like ‘Which book has changed your life?’ which is a wank but after searching on the internet for half an hour I managed to find the title of the book I had in mind – Rumer Godden’s ‘The Peacock Spring’ which, to me, always lay on the cusp between childhood and adulthood and therefore represented some kind of turning point in my life. And there were other questions like ‘Who is your favourite author’ which drives me insane because I don’t HAVE a favourite author. I read omnivorously, if you take popular fiction like Jodi Picoult to be your veges and literary fiction like Kazuo Ishiguro to be your meat. Or Jodi could be dessert if you want to follow the fairly useless assumption that popular fiction is sweet and fluffy. In my mind all good literature should constitute a meal in itself – tasty and good to read, but also satisfying in that it fills you up and gives you things to think about.

I told H I’d meet him and G for dinner and trammed it into the city, remembering where to go from the last time I’d been in the city, when I came down for my scholarship interview and J took me around. I texted H and ended up freezing my tits off on a bench opposite the train station while I waited for him and G to arrive. I decided then and there that I could never live in a city where the weather was even remotely like London’s. H + G finally turned up and then it transpired that we were to go to a barbeque at A’s and it was to be a family reunion, with C + J* coming too. That was wonderful but my hopes of a good night’s sleep slowly and sadly dissipated.

After much hilarity – with G and A screeching at the top of their voices like their mother – but how they made us laugh – G took me back to the hotel. I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep because I was stressed about the talk. By the time I got up I was furious that I was so tired. I packed and put on my red and cream Monsoon skirt, then checked out and ordered a bad coffee from the café that was part of the hotel while I waited for H to arrive.

Marrakech

2007-01-02T19:15:00.001Z

Let’s begin with the packing, because that’s how one starts a holiday. With visions of brilliant warmth and sunshine, I realised that I could only take my plain red and plain black t-shirts, because all the others were emblazoned with phrases such as ‘You call me a bitch like it’s a bad thing’ and ‘Good girls go to Heaven, bad girls go to London’: somewhat inappropriate for wearing in a Muslim country. However, in a fit of optimism, I packed my bikini.

We stepped off the plane into glorious warmth and sunlight. I had slept through the entire flight because I had to get up at 5.20am (‘Come on Jess! We’re on holiday!’ H* had beamed, and unfortunately she hadn’t been prepped on my propensity for surliness in the mornings, especially mornings when I’ve had inadequate sleep, for I told her to fuck off), but woke in time to see the desert, the snow on the mountains, patchworks of irrigated crops and the honeycomb of houses. H barely glanced out of the window because he was engrossed in my novel.

J met us as the airport and negotiated in French with the taxi drivers to take us to the hotel in their dilapidated Mercedes Benzs’, and they refused to give H his change when he paid, but fortunately J stepped in and rescued us. The hotel was lovely: an atrium with tables and chairs and palms surrounded by the rooms. In the afternoon we wandered through the souk, the market, and ignored the vendors stepping out to invite us into their shop. This is easy to do if you’re deaf. H and I then lost the others and drifted into a spice shop, attracted by the jars of coloured liquid lit up by neon lights, and rows and rows of spices. H chatted innocently with the vendor and I fretted, knowing that he would take H’s interest for a desire to buy. We extricated ourselves then went next door to a place selling lots of wooden boxes, which were charming. It transpired that the same man owned that shop and this time I was interested in buying something, but the man was too pushy and H started feeling faint so we made a rapid exit and sat down on a ledge. We got lost on the way back and approached a white couple with a map, asking ‘Do you know where the big square is?’ and they said ‘Slow down, we’re French, our English isn’t very good’ and I felt ridiculous for being such an Anglo.

Dinner that night, for J’s birthday, was in a gorgeous restaurant, with huge curves of fabric pinned to the ceiling by an enormous lamp that was enclosed in tin perforated with designs. The glass windows looked out onto the square, the walls were patterned with intricate mosaics and rose petals were scattered in the bathroom. The food was excellent, and we were introduced to pastilles, which were pastries dusted with cinnamon and sugar enclosing pieces of chicken. There was also a display of ‘local colour’, being some bellydancing by nubile young things (and a more ancient woman), but it made me distinctly uncomfortable. However it was probably the only overt reminder during the whole trip that I was existing in a man’s world. Oh, and the fact that men always looked past you when you asked for the bill. Apparently only men are allowed to finger coins and bills.

The next day we had a look at the government stores which set a standard price on goods so that you could get an idea if you were paying too much at the souk. The places were evacuated of character however, for they were catering solely to tourists. It felt like this in the main square too, and J said that there had been a government crackdown on hawkers and people who pestered the tourists. At times people were almost ridiculously respectful to us and I didn’t like it, though I have to admit it was better than being harassed all the time.

H and I left the others and walked further on to find another store that was listed in the Lonely Planet as being like an Aladdin’s cave. We passed a school where the kids had just been let out, and it was a bit hairy trying to cross a road crammed with children, mothers, motorcycles and cars. Down the road a bunch of kids were clustered, like bees to spilled honey, around a street vendor selling sweets from his cart. When we stopped at a corner to consult the map, a young boy with cracked glasses asked if we needed help and led us to the store. He expected money but H had no coins, and on the way back we encountered him again and he castigated us for not paying him. ‘Did he look upset?’ I asked H, not having heard or been aware of the exchange, and he replied, ‘Not particularly, he’s probably just waiting for the next hapless tourist to come by.’ At the store we stepped through a door in a wall, into an enormous room lined with carpets. It felt hushed and strangely lovely, until we laughed as we saw a cat sharpening his claws on the carpets and clambering up them to search for creatures in the rolls. The carpets weren’t what H wanted though, and we contemplated buying lamps as a present while a nice lady brought us heavily sugared mint tea, but the price was too high and I started feeling a bit nauseous, so we left.

In the afternoon we set off through the streets to investigate a tannery, despite having read ominous reports of the stench in the guidebook. Somehow a tracksuited man with a growth over his eye found us and led us into a tannery. He gave us bunches of mint to thrust under out noses, then led us to a landscape of vats, scattered with rubbish, hides and sacks of chemicals. The guide began a rendition of the tanning process, most of which I didn’t hear, though D later explained to me that it involved lime and guano to strip off the hair and soften it. The smell was truly appalling and I breathed vigorously through my mint. Then the tour was cut short, because the workers wanted to pray and didn’t like to do it when Westerners were around, so we were led by the guide to a shop selling rugs, jewellery, satchels etc – obviously a flytrap for tourists. The man had his sales pitch down pat, and began with an ‘explication’ of the tanning and carpet weaving processes. His assistant, already castigated for being slow with making the mint tea, threw down one carpet after another for our perusal. ‘At the end of weaving this one,’ said the salesman, ‘the woman went blind.’ We looked at each other dubiously. Continuing his sales pitch, he pulled down a yellow silk rug and announced that it wouldn’t burn, flicking a cigarette lighter flame against it. H* later bought that rug and there were jokes that she’d taken his display model, and that all his other silk rugs were flammable. Then H somehow found himself buying a rug after the man finally came down to his price, and we went on our way.

Sunday was designated ‘culture day’ and we headed off to look at some museums. The descriptions were all in French so I didn’t learn much, but the buildings were absolutely beautiful – incredible mosaics, intricate carvings in marble and plaster and, in the first museum, an absolutely enormous lamp (for want of a better word) suspended over the ceiling. But it was cold and raining, and the appeal rapidly wore off and H and I went back to the hotel to wrap ourselves in blankets and read.

After I’d finished my rather interesting, but not-very-well-structured book, Ruth Ozeki’s ‘My Year of Meat’, we roused ourselves and went out to the souk to buy some wooden boxes. We found a store that we’d seen on the first day, and the man, who of course was friendly and engaging, quoted a price that was, as usual, 4 times H’s asking price. So they haggled and H got tense and so I got stressed, and H said the man’s price wasn’t worth it and reluctantly, I agreed, so we walked out, then got called back again and the man threw in a free wooden turtle – as if that would have made us any more susceptible – and we eventually walked away with three boxes at what I thought was a decent price. However H was fuming because of the emotional manipulation, and I said I would rather have parted with the money, because it meant so little to us, than have got stressed out, and this is the reason why I cannot haggle at all; it’s just too emotionally destabilising. And H said the money probably went to men like the portly rug man and his explications while his woman went blind, and I had to concede this was true.

On the way back we bought a kilo of dried apricots and began to eat them at the hotel. I started ‘The House of Sleep’ by Jonathon Coe which was rubbish - a very obvious and clichéd book - and H finished my novel which, to my immense relief, he enjoyed. However the apricots resulted disastrously in the emanation of noxious fumes - though I am sure H’s were far worse than mine - and, in the morning, an outbreak of hives across my neck, chest and ankles. Why do hives always appear at one’s extremities? The last outbreak, caused by a Holiday Insect in Perth which bit my toe, and which was far worse than this one, produced red welts that bloomed across my feet, the insides of my arms, my neck, my calves and my cheeks. I had to go to the chemist looking like a domestic violence victim, though the prepubescent Asian boy behind the counter very wisely offered a packet of Telfast for hives.

On the last day it was no longer raining, but it was cold, and my bikini remained in my suitcase. P bounded into our room at 9.30am, when we were struggling awake, asking if we wanted to go into the mountains. We ended up in the offices of Sahara Tours, and I stared idly at the map on the wall while conversations circled about me. ‘What are they saying?’ I asked H and he replied, ‘They say that if we go to the snow we’ll slip off the road and fall into a ravine.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘We had better not go to the snow then.’ However we did end up going to the snow. ‘What about the ravines?’ I asked H. ‘I was making that up,’ he admitted, ‘they were talking in French.’

We rattled off to the mountains in an ancient minibus (H and I wearing our entire wardrobe to keep warm), and there was snow, and it was beautiful. The locals said it hadn’t snowed like that for 10 years. We drove slowly up windy roads and H* sat grim-faced on the back seat. There were ravines, but I didn’t look into them. We stopped off in a village for a snowfight, then drove on to another village and had another tajine for lunch. The Morrocon Atkins diet was becoming very trying by this stage, especially as I hadn’t even lost weight. We braved the local loos, and the man outside responsible for cleaning them asked for 1DH but we had no coins. When he spoke to H* she came away with the most incredible and fascinating look of disdain. Someone else repaid the man with 5DH, so all was good. A tour guide met us in this village and we drove up more snowy hairpins to reach another village. We piled out and began walking up a slippery hillside. The snow reached our knees and my feet froze in my inadequate, unwaterproofed sneakers. H joined in with some local kids sliding down the side of a hill on their backs. I unwisely shoved P and ended up being ground into the snow. And we made snow angels.

At the top we were led to a café and rewarded with cups of tea. We found an old, incomplete pack of cards and played Shithead. K discovered a copy of Heat and declared ‘I’m staying.’ Then we put our sodden shoes back on (having exchanged them at the door for draughty slippers) and slid back down the mountain. Part way down there was a half-grown dog outside a house, wriggling with delight at seeing all these people. Its shiny black coat was startling against the snow. In the van on the way home we also had some men with us from the village who needed a lift. We passed the local taxi, crammed with about ten men, one of whom was sitting on the driver as he drove.

In the evening we wandered into the market and had a glass of ‘fire water’ which had something that tasted like chilli in it, though gathering by the conversation that we’d had with one of the sellers the night before, it was probably more like ginseng. ‘Hey,’ said the seller, ‘you drink this and it will make you more manly.’ ‘Really?’ H replied. ‘I had a glass and a half last night and mine was like this,’ and he crooked his little finger and I burst out laughing. ‘You need to drink more, to make the woman happy,’ the man continued and slipped his arm around my waist, and as I gently extricated myself I knew that H was thinking, as I was, that this wasn’t the time to explain to the man that we were brother and sister. So we tried the fire water, which was scooped out of a big tub of what looked like chocolate fudge (of which H had had a tablespoon a few evenings before, thinking it was the real thing, but instead got a mouthful of flour and spices) and sat on a little bench. A small boy of about 4 with snot running out of his nose came up to us with a pack of dirty cards which I think he was trying to sell to us. D spoke to him in French and the kid was as sharp as a tack, because he was able to convey to us that Dad, who was manning the stall from which we’d bought our drinks, had had too much Jack Daniels to drink, a fact that was in evidence when Dad shouted belligerently at the bloke at the adjacent stall.

We flew out the next morning and, though I’d found the people lovely and unthreatening, the architecture beautiful, the shopping good (though stressful) and the absence of a Starbucks most refreshing, I was very pleased to get home to a cup of PG Tips.

What to Wear?

2006-11-18T22:37:00.000Z

I’m slowly beginning to realise that there is such a thing as having too many clothes. Last Friday was V’s party and after wrestling with my velvet Fanchulla dress for ages (moving buttons, sewing and unpicking illegal seams, swearing a great deal) I finally had to concede that it was obviously made for someone with a much longer torso than mine and would never do grace to my curves in the way that I wanted. And so, feeling bereft (for it would have gone splendidly with my red boots), I pulled everything else out of my cupboard and tried to find something else. Several hours later I decided on my bottle green top, asymmetrical black skirt and the boots, and then I reflected how appalling it was that, even though I my mind was slow with exhaustion and I’d been cooking hors d’ouevres in between, one could waste so much time trying to work out what to wear.

I know that I have too much stuff because the only recurring dream I have is of being late for something because it takes me hours and hours to pack everything, or hours and hours to find something before I can go somewhere. I think I have only ever once successfully got to where I wanted to be before I woke up. But this won’t stop me from buying more clothes; there are just too many pretty things in this world that must be possessed.

And speaking of not reaching one’s destination, it seems that every time I try to get to the Orangery in Hyde Park, I am late. Last time it was daylight saving: as was my wont, I wound my watch back instead of forward and left H to read the paper for two hours until my arrival; however that was the last time I ever get it wrong, because a friend has since taught me the very useful maxim ‘Spring forward, fall back’. This time I left my bus pass at home, and being an impoverished student (in theory, at least) I can’t afford to travel without my Oyster card. I was already cutting it fine, having taken too long to get out of bed, which then left less time for the crucial activities of applying one’s makeup and doing one’s hair to one’s satisfaction. Then of course, the Tube was fucked, and it stopped, as it often does, in the middle of a dark tunnel. This is why I tend not to take the Tube. When it stops in dark tunnels, my heartbeat vaults and I start hyperventilating with claustrophobia. I marvelled, this time, that the woman next to me could read so calmly, and take out a packet of rice cakes and munch on them.

On recounting this to H and R over coffee and cake (‘This one is low-calorie,’ said the waiter as he placed a berry tart in front of us.’ After he’d gone, I took a bite and said, ‘Low calorie my arse.’ But I appreciated his efforts to make me eat it, which I did, as calories tend not to bother me), H said that if I ever do have a panic attack, I should go all-out, and scream, ‘I’m going to DIE!’ and that would set off everyone else in the Tube who was on tenterhooks. A bit like the kid who vomits on a bus, and sets all the other kids off barfing.

And just like the last time I was late to the Orangery, there were gale-force winds to contend with and the ground was soft with rain so my stilettos insisted on aerating the soil and the wind blew my hair into my face so that it got stuck to my lip gloss, and I was in a right strop by the time I got there, esp as H and R had not arrived after I walked so fast to make up (however slightly) for my lateness. But in the five minutes it took them to arrive, I calmed down, found a bench, combed my hair and tried not to squint against the light, as one needs to get as much light in winter as possible, to regulate one’s circadian rhythms.

The next day as we walked along the canal, we told B about the swans clustered around the man feeding the birds by the pond, and how they came up to his waist, and B in turn told us of some trashy newspaper like the Sun that had the headline ‘Asylum Seekers Eat Swans’ and I thought how interesting that was (regardless of whether it was true, which I doubt it was) – it would be like someone coming to Australia and eating all the koalas. The asylum seekers were eating the swans that were protected by the queen – they were eating the heart of the empire, so to speak. Though I doubt the Sun shone that particular light on it, except subliminally.

At work, a wall overlooking over the quadrangle is covered with leaves that are slowly turning red. But they’ve started turning on the outer edges of the wall, for what reason I can’t understand. So the centre is greenish, but the rest of it is red. In summer, when all the leaves are fresh, the breeze makes them ripple like a green ocean.

Mum said that yesterday it snowed at home – in mid-November! And also in Ballarat and other parts of Victoria. The weather is seriously fucked. I’m not complaining that it’s warm here – I loathe the British winters – but it’s disturbing when you see blossoms coming out on the trees at the Barbican in Autumn. What will they do now when Spring comes, and they’ve already flowered?

At last ....

2006-11-05T12:11:00.000Z

…. the novel is done. Seven years of thinking, writing, rewriting, drafting and editing, the blasted thing is finished. 'A Curious Intimacy' will hit the bookshops in Oz on 8th January. I’ll also be talking at the Midsumma festival in Melbourne on the 25th Jan, and then the launch will be on the 31st January at which, of course, I’ll be wearing my Collette Dinnigan dress. I was looking at the scar on my knee this morning (acquired whilst trying to escape from stingrays when snorkling in January), wondering if it would disappear in the next two months, but given that it has only slightly faded in 11 months, I don’t think that’s a goer. I half-heartedly apply Palmer’s cocoa butter scar serum to it every now and then, but the stuff has shark liver oil in it and reeks to high heaven, so I’m not fond of using it.

Scars aside, I keep expecting Penguin to send me more proofs to tweak, but at the moment they only want more info for publicity. It won’t feel really finished until all the publicity is done and I’m back in the UK, staring glumly at my thesis again. Why did it take so long? I had various degrees to finish and start in between, and money to be made to get to London, and I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing and had to rewrite it twice before I found the right voice. Then there were agents and publisher to be found, and so many drafts to complete before it could become a reality. A few months ago I was so fed up I wished I could burn everything, but now all the work is out of the way I’m getting excited about it again.

So I have two months to get back to my previous Sydney skinniness, so as to look brilliant for the publicity. But given the shitty weather in this country, it’s hard to get motivated. In Oz the light would wake me up, I’d bounce out of bed and run around Centennial Park, then sit down and write for the rest of the day. Here it takes forever to get out of bed then it’s so fucking cold outside. However, complaints aside, I still love running. This morning along the canal there was a woman sitting on a bench reading, all the hairs on her legs standing up because it was so cold. A little further along in the alcove that stinks of urine was another woman reading music and playing on a guitar. And in the park were the usual dogs bounding around and chasing the squirrels, and a pack of men fishing, all kitted out in their green camouflage/army gear. I always laugh at them to myself as I go by, and wonder why they don’t go out into the country instead of staying by some pissy little pond in the middle of the city, trying to feel like a hunter.

I’m so homesick. I miss the sound of the palm trees clacking their leaves in my mother’s garden on windy days.

The Red Room

2006-10-15T21:29:00.000+01:00

It’s apt to start with yesterday, for yesterday I was in the Starr Auditorium of Tate Modern, wearing red boots and a red skivvy, almost camouflaged among the red chairs and the red walls. My hair was a different shade to the chairs though. I was listening to a conference on ‘Ways of Dying’ and it was excellent.

Marina Warner, lucid and elegant and wearing the same dull pink shawl with a brooch that she had the night before (at a talk with Steve Connor on spookiness in cities; it was so hot in the room I almost fainted), spoke eloquently of zombies. Rosa Braidotti was in conversation with Donna Harraway, although it wasn’t a conversation as such, just one saying their piece after another. Donna H was dressed like a man; she had a good sense of humour and was lively and expressive, and her piece, a kind of eulogy for her father, was moving. Rosa Braidotti was also cheerful, but I didn’t like the way she spoke; it was hard to get a grip on what she was saying. But then, that’s what I hate most about academics – their inaccessibility. Before this conversation spoke Iona Heath, a GP who was factual, precise and refreshingly down-to-earth amidst all the talk of bio-engineering and mythical creatures. She talked about the need for people to construct a narrative of their lives before they die, for to live is to tell a story, and that while a sudden death might be good for the bereaved, it isn’t necessarily so for the person who has died for they had no time to reflect. She also railed against the medical profession for their practice of keeping people alive at whatever cost, for the body, when in pain, is adjusting the mind to the idea that death is coming, just as a woman suffering the discomfort and heftiness of the late stages of pregnancy is becoming used to the discomfort and sleeplessness that comes in the first few years of a child’s life. And then in the question time a woman put up her hand and said, ‘I’m dying,’ and I didn’t hear the rest.

What is it with kids and pigeons? As I was early for the conference (having been almost-late for every other function this week, I decided to make an effort), I bought a latte from Starbucks (it was unhappily very weak, and this morning while running I wondered if it were a conspiracy by Starbucks to dilute their coffees so you say ‘Yes’ whenever they ask ‘Would you like another shot of espresso?’ I wouldn’t put it past them) and I sat beneath the spindly trees on the black rubbery seats covered with spilled somethings and bird shit, while a little Asian kid ran around in circles yelling ‘Waaahh!’ over and over at the pigeons. And some blonde tots followed suit, after one of them had picked up my empty Starbucks cup and thrown it on the ground (good work, lad: his anti-capitalist streak was already present, something I cannot admit to possessing). His father had hurried over because I had caught his eye, but that was because I had no idea what to say to his son (I never know what to say to kids, and it worries me), not because he was trashing my coffee cup. The kid’s sister picked it up and gave it back to me and I thanked her clearly. Then around and around they ran, until the girl fell down the steps and landed on her cheek on the concrete. I didn’t like to look; it already felt painful. Instead I read my book, Chloe Hooper’s ‘A Child’s Book of True Crime’ which was very good, but the ending was totally obscure.

After the conference I tottered home over Millenium Bridge, which always makes me think that I might quite like London, and tripped on the uneven cement.