This morning I called my doctor’s office in Swiss Cottage.
“Hi, can I book an appointment please?”
“Certainly. Would you like to see any particular doctor?”
“Anyone is fine.”
“Okay, let me see… yes, you can come in on the first of the fifth.”
“The… first of May?”
“Yes.”
“Of MAY?”
“Yes.”
“Three months from today? Do you… have anything sooner than that?”
“Hmm, let’s see, I’ll have a look.”
*brief pause*
“Ah, yes. How’s tomorrow at 10:20am?”
Derrrrrrrrr NHS.
Him: Did you know if you stacked up all the pages in Google they would reach beyond the moon?
Me: Really? Wow! How many pages are there?
Him: A trillion.
Me: An actual trillion?
Him: Yep.
Me: How do you know that?
Him: I counted them.
Me: Really?
Him: No.
Me: How many is a trillion? Is that like a million billion? A BILLION billion?
Him: It’s a thousand billion.
Me: Oh. That’s not very impressive.
Him: No, it doesn’t sound as good does it.
Me: What comes after a trillion? Is it a bazillion?
Him: Um, no. It’s a quadrillion.
Me: That’s crap. What about a bazillion, though? Is that real? Is a kajillion real? Is a squillion real?
Him: *thinly veiled disgust tempered by infinite patience* No, Jess. Those aren’t real.
Me: What comes after a quadrillion, then?
Him: Quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion…
Me: Right, I get it. Well that’s boring and predictable.
Him: Nonillion’s pretty good.
Me: We should replace them with bazillion, kajillion and squillion. A bazillion is a billion trillion. A kajillion is a trillion bazillion. A squillion is a bazillion kajillion. And so forth.
Him: Yeah, those are all great suggestions.
The official music video for M.I.A’s Paper Planes, the Slumdog Millionaire single. I can’t stop listening to this song.
1. Apparently if I spend too much time by myself, not talking to anyone (not including incidental dialogue with waiters, bus drivers, and other people in the service industry) I start to lose all sense of social propriety. This became evident to me in a moment on the train back to London this evening when I turned to the nondescript person sitting across the aisle from me, opened my mouth and got as far as the actual intake of breath one experiences before speaking, before I finally snapped out of it and stopped myself. I had been THAT CLOSE to saying the following words: “Excuse me, are you a boy or a girl?” This is a true story.
2. After reading my very first Neil Gaiman book this weekend I am a little bit worried and a tad displeased. The name of the book is Neverwhere, and the name of my sort-of-book (read: non-book), for the last several years, has been… Nevermoor. Neverwhere (sort of) has a character called Arch. Nevermoor has a character called Arch. Most annoyingly, Nevermoor involves a secret city (sort of) underneath an existing city. Which is basically the storyline of Neverwhere, in a nutshell. Uh-oh.
3. Oh, exciting! When I was in Oxford I bought this seriously cool pink and red bicycle bell with flowers painted on it! It’s the coolest bicycle bell I’ve ever seen! I don’t own a bicycle of course. But does this in any way diminish my excitement? No sirreee!
4. Scene: Pickwick Guest House, my temporary Oxford home. 10am. I have just gotten out of the shower.
Knock knock.
I answer the door, wearing a towel, poking my head around the corner and perfectly aware that I have crazy post-shower fringe and it’s standing up like that scene in There’s Something About Mary. The owner of the B&B is standing outside with a handful of sheets and towels.
“Er – hi.”
“Oh hello there! I’m sorry, I’ve just come to change the linen.”
“Er – okay. I’m in a towel.”
“Oh, so you are. I see you’re still here then.”
“Er – yes.”
“Right. Well, what time were you planning to check out?”
“Um… what time is check-out?”
“Ten-thirty.”
“Well… I guess… ten-thirty?”
“Quite right. Of course. No problem.”
“…’kay… thanks, bye.”
5. Key difference between London and Oxford: in Oxford, people seem to always thank the bus driver as they disembark. It’s EXACTLY like Australia, except older and Englisher and in the northern hemisphere and completely different.
Have just been reading a Valentine’s Day diatribe by the always entertaining Fweng, who has decided that if February 14 is for lovers, January 21 is for the romantically dispossessed.
Yesterday I decided that the best antidote to Unvalentine’s Day would be to leave London, so I hopped on a train and am staying in Oxford for the weekend. It’s pretty, and old, and as Shezwa’s big brother articulately noted, full of t-shirt shops and ‘keep off the lawn’ signs.
Due to my general intolerance of spending too much time with people I’m not actually sleeping with, I usually don’t have a problem walking into a restaurant and dining alone (cue violins)… however, for some reason tonight I really struggled to find a place I felt I would be allowed into. Apparently the entire city of Oxford is filled with restaurants featuring nothing but tables for two, and tonight every one of them is occupied by sickeningly cute co-dependencies feeding each other forkfuls of salmon en croute. The sight of which is a more effective deterrent than if the proprietors had posted a sign in the window saying, ‘No Shoes, No Shirt, No Unhealthy Reliance on Another Human Being to Keep Your Sense of Self-Worth Alive and Burning… No Entry.’
(I’m not really this bitter. I just like to sound jaded and worldly sometimes, like I’m Nick Nolte or something.)
This is how it plays out in this city, every day. We swerve each other on sidewalks and avert our eyes. We stand at bus stops looking expectantly down the road and never, ever at each other. We swarm the underground every morning and cram onto trains at triple capacity and stand politely in each other’s pockets, face to armpit, elbow to neck, ignoring each other even as we inhale and exhale the same air and we look at our shoes and never, ever at each other. And when two teenage boys get into an argument on the Bakerloo Line and start swearing and pushing each other, we don’t react, we don’t interrupt, we silently think please don’t pull a knife please don’t pull a knife and we roll our eyes and look at the ceiling and never, ever at each other.
It struck me today how easy it would be in London to become a nonperson. Like all the nonbuildings and nonsidestreets and nonphoneboxes you walk past every day and never notice. There, but not really. Existing, but not engaging.
Over a period of time, a little well-applied avoidance is all it would really take. You just… dial yourself back.
You turn up to work every day at the same time and go home at the same time. You don’t talk, laugh, joke with your colleagues. You don’t do anything surprising or impressive. You just do your job and go home. You slowly, eventually become an unimposing, unnoticed office fixture.
You stop calling people back. You barely fill your contact quota with emails and texts, and when your friends want to make plans with you you’re always busy, even when you’re not. Eventually you don’t answer your phone at all.
You put on your coat and leave your house and go to Tesco, or Waitrose, or Sainsbury’s (not Somerfield though – you don’t have a death wish). You buy your cereal and asparagus and teabags and salmon. You line up at the checkout and the cashier asks if you have a Nectar card and you say no. That’ll be nine pounds and thirty-two pence. Would you like a bag? Thank you madam, have a nice day.
And you walk away, and you don’t remember what that person you were just talking to looked like, and they have already forgotten you existed, and you go home, and you watch the news, and you go to sleep, and you get up and play the same game tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, ad infinitum.
These were all just hypothetical thoughts on a train for me, but the sad truth is that there really are nonpeople in London, and we do walk past them every day as though they were lampposts and phoneboxes. When I moved here two years ago the only homeless person I’d ever really encountered was a young guy in Sydney when I went there on holiday. He was sitting outside a Hungry Jack’s so I went in and bought him some dinner. It broke my heart the way people with arms full of shopping bags and briefcases just rushed past him, or worse, scoffed and shook their heads when he looked up at them. I thought, never, never, never, ever will that be me. How could anyone ignore somebody so pathetic, so obviously and helplessly in need of just a bit of time, a bit of sympathy?
Two years in London and never, ever has come, and I rush past people like that boy every single day. Two years of stories about fakes and drug addicts and gypsies has made me a cynic; or maybe that’s just the excuse I’ve given myself for not caring anymore. I honestly don’t know. But every time I look away from a homeless person with their hand outstretched, there’s a grumpy pensioner inside me that tuts and says, oh, he’s only going to use it to buy alcohol, while another part of me says, Jessica, you’ve just left the off-licence with a bottle of red, you hypocritical cunt.
And there’s another, increasingly vocal part of me that thinks… if you took away my job and my family and my friends and my self-esteem, that could be me sitting on the ground next to the cash machine and holding out my hand, or walking through train carriages holding a cardboard sign that say Hungry and homeless, please help.
It breaks my heart and makes me sick to my fucking stomach.
My BFF, Shezwa, sent me this video that her office peeps made for a colleague who was leaving. I love it, it’s so super fun and completely cracks me up.
Check out the guy on the laptop screen at 00:53. He has a mouth like a Muppet. Brilliant!
(Shezwa comes in at 00:39, she’s the one in the top right corner.)
I don’t usually do memes, and I wasn’t going to do this one that it seems every single person in the world is doing right now (mostly because I have grown to despise my generation’s gross overuse and misuse of the word ‘random’), but frankly I’ve read just about all the ones I’ve come across that were written by peeps on Facebook or bloggers I admire, and have totally dug every single one, so I thought I might as well. Plus, everyone knows I love talking about myself.
1. I wish it was socially acceptable (and possible) to eat all food with chopsticks.
2. Every day on my way home I change from the northbound Bakerloo Line to the northbound Jubilee line. When you cross the platform through the little walkway just by the back end of the train, there’s this strange, unidentifiable but not unpleasant smell that comes through the vents from the platform below. The only other place I’ve ever smelled it is at Clapham Junction station. It makes me weirdly happy every day, because it reminds me of the first six months I lived in London, when I was working as a copywriter for a travel company in Crawley, and commuted via Clapham Junction. It always makes me think of how everything was new and sort of alien back then, but by the end of that contract I was a total Londoner, and had become friends with some of the most fabulous, funny people I’ve known here. It makes me smile every single day without fail, and I’m quietly confident the people walking past me at the time think I’m a bit differently-abled. Gosh, that was a long story and probably quite boring for anyone who’s not me.
3. I had a crush on the same boy consistently from age 11, when I started at a new primary school, to age 17 when I graduated from high school. Like all the boys I have ever had a crush on, he was the only one I thought was as clever and funny as me. (Why yes, I do have quite a high opinion of myself, thanks for noticing.) We finally got together about a year after we graduated, and then nine months later broke up due to random fact #4. He is still a seriously awesome, clever, funny, talented dude.
4. I have a crippling aversion to commitment. It infects every corner of my life, from relationships to the tasks on my daily to-do list.
5. When I was seven years old, whenever anyone asked me what I was going to be when I grew up I would say, “A singer, a violinist, an author, a dancer, an actor and a polo player.” I didn’t really know what polo was, just that it involved horses.
6. I worked at Australia Zoo (‘Home of The Crocodile Hunter, on Glasshouse Mountains Road, Beerwah… where Crocs Rule!’ <— imagine that in an American accent) for almost five years. I started straight out of high school folding t-shirts in a souvenir store and ended up editing their stable of websites and a magazine. Left in May 2007 to move to London. Probably the world’s funnest and most bizarre workplace.
7. I don’t believe in anything even resembling the supernatural or spiritual anymore. Sometimes that makes me sad, but mostly it’s just a big steaming bowl of sweet relief soup. Ahhhhhh… oh yeah that’s the stuff.
8. Return to Oz is still the scariest movie in the world to me, and the irrational thought of the Wheelers being real and coming to get me sometimes strikes me when I’m walking down a quiet residential London street at night.
9. I’m the youngest of five. I have two brothers and two sisters. The eldest is 15 years older than me.
10. My newest obsession is this whackjob.
11. I’ve read Little Women approximately once a year since I was nine. I cry every single time Beth dies.
12. I have a cat at home in Australia called Hunter. He’s nine years old. He was a Christmas gift when I was 14.
13. I’m mildly fixated on Rwanda and the genocide and how they’ve rebuilt the country since 1994. I’m desperate to go there.
14. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that I made myself learn how to drink black, sugarless coffee because I thought it made me seem cool and sophisticated… two things that, if you spend approximately five minutes with me, you will realise I am most certainly not.
15. London frequently takes my breath away. I think this city is the most exciting, beautiful, quirky and surprising place in the world.
16. I still haven’t used the video camera that I bought two years ago.
17. Sometimes I worry that when I move back to Australia, it’ll be like that final scene in The Wizard of Oz, when everything’s gone back to sepia and nobody believes that Dorothy has seen all the amazing things she describes, until finally she begins to wonder if any of it actually happened or if she really did just dream it all.
18. I am secretly, politically-incorrectly concerned that because the United States now has an awesome president, we will all soon have no reason to bitch about America and its inhabitants. I know I’m awful, you don’t have to say it.
19. When I was about six I apparently ran home crying from the neighbour’s house, where my sister and I had been playing with a bunch of kids. We had been having a singing competition and all the other kids were singing things like Mary Had a Little Lamb, Three Blind Mice, etc, and I got disqualified for singing (and headbanging to) Under The Bridge by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Fucking fascists.
20. One of the things I miss most about home is proper thunderstorms, with actual thunder and lightning. I used to love the rain in Australia, because it was proper, hardcore rain that drenched you in five seconds but made everything seem clean and fresh half an hour later. Here it’s just this endless, miserable drizzle that eats away at you for three days and then slips politely out the back door, trying to pretend it was never really there to begin with. However…
21. …summer in London is my absolute favourite time/place combination.
22. I desperately want a pet rabbit.
23. My favourite song to sing when drunk in a pub is Holy Grail by Hunters and Collectors. This is a phenomenon that only ever occurs in Australia.
24. My top three all-time favourite bands are as follows: 1) Crowded House, 2) Indigo Girls and 3) Ben Folds Five.
25. I get really angry when people eat wildlife (e.g. shark fin soup, crocodile kebabs, kangaroo meat etc). If you have an opinion on this, by all means let me know. I will fight you. I will meet you in the carpark after school and Kick. Your. Ass.
