Disorientated

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.

Repressed Librarians

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

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

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

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

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.

Bank Holiday Meanderings

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

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

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.

Between Australia and Austria

…. 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.