Apologies for the extended radio silence. I haven’t completely disappeared from the airwaves; I just went home to the southern hemisphere for a couple of weeks and was obviously far too busy and important to post, opting instead to carelessly shunt aside my lovingly created blog and indulge in a two-week maelstrom of unseasonal winter sunshine (interspersed with thunderstorms), blurry nights out at beachside clubs (featuring sticky floors and unfriendly bouncers) and vegemite on toast without a trace of irony or patriotism.
If I had actually planned this trip to Oz in advance, I might have been organised enough to drop a post before I left. But alas it was all very last-minute, which to the untrained eye might look like a mildly exotic streak of spontaneity, but actually was more due to a minor nuclear meltdown in some part of my brain that I guess came temporarily unhinged. Danger, Will Robinson!
So my thought process, apparently, was that when life gets you down, when you have a complete mental spazfest and you don’t know how to fix everything up all neat like, the OBVIOUS solution is to flyyyy! Fly, my pretty! Fly away!
Because – derrr – when you come back from your little sojourn, everything will have miraculously fixed itself in your absence. Suffering writer’s block every time you sit down to work on the novel you keep telling yourself you’re writing? Feeling too completely inept to achieve anything at work? Worried that all the social retards at your magical life-changing seminar series are somehow “getting it” while your under-developed brain is just too simple and childlike? Suddenly horribly aware that in the face of overwhelming evidence, you might now consider the existence of God (or Whatever) to be equally as probable as leprechauns, garden fairies and anybody ever solving the world food crisis? Shocked and appalled that for once you’re just not getting every single bratty little thing you want? And any number of other fairly insignificant problems that your inner drama queen has blown up to ten times their original size, like horrible paralysing sea monkeys?
Well, have I got a solution for YOU!
Yes, the logic astounds. So needless to say I came back to London (quite happily) to find that not only was my life and everything in it exactly the same as when I left two weeks earlier, but there was actually nothing particularly wrong with it in the first place.
Huh. How ‘bout that.
I have no theories behind this minor life event. It remains a mystery, like the Bermuda Triangle or Pete Doherty’s enduring fame.
So because I have been away from this thing for so long, I am burning up – BURNING UP! – with things to talk about, and I shall begin with
The Paralympics
Does this festival of differently-abled athletics seem a little… patronising? I’m genuinely asking, because I can’t decide how I feel about it all. What is the point of the Paralympics? And because the Paralympics exist, does that mean disabled people aren’t allowed to compete in what I probably shouldn’t call the “fo’ real Olympics”?
A friend of mine was telling me about a girl with only half an arm (well, she had one full arm, and one that was kind of a stump or something. I’m sorry, I have no idea what the PC term for this is, so if anyone can enlighten me, please do) who won gold in some bike riding marathon thing (probably not the official name). Apparently people were saying that if she’d been in the Fo’ Rizzles, she’d have won bronze.
If she’d known this, would she have wanted to bypass the Paralympics and go straight for third place in the Olympics? Would the fact that she was competing against… oh gosh, whatever you call non-disabled people… make it somehow a more significant win?
And knowing that this girl could have kicked most of their arses, how does that make the Fo’ Riz Olympians feel? Perhaps this is why they have to separate the Olympics from the Paralympics. Just in case some stud in a wheelchair decides to get his awesome on and sail into a victory, making all the rest of them feel like utter knobjockeys. Imagine if that girl really had competed in the Olympics and come in third. What a kick in the guts for the winner… she gets the gold medal and STILL has her thunder stolen by Stumpy and her bronze. Tough gig.
Agyness Deyn
In my favourite part of the London Lite – the text column – someone raised a most excellent point this evening. Why is everybody obsessed with Agyness Deyn? It’s not that I don’t think she’s pretty. She’s pretty stunning. I like her eyebrows especially. (I’m not being sarcastic; I really think they are cool.)
But… there just seems to be something of an imbalance between the level of interest in her and the number of interesting things about her. I can only count one – her eyebrows. Well, I guess that’s two.
I’m so confused.
You know who actually IS interesting? Maureen Johnson is interesting. That’s who.
Maureen Johnson
Oh I love her! Love to the power of love. I don’t remember how I came to find her blog one day a few weeks ago, but I am now obsessed with it.
Maureen is a young adult fiction author from New York, and I have not read a single one of her books. I hadn’t even heard of her before accidentally stumbling upon her blog, but I guess now I will have to read some of her work, because she is like awesome made solid. Funny, insightful, genuine and fabulous.
She is so seriously cool, that I’m left pondering why people like Pete Doherty and Agyness Deyn and Amy Winehouse and whoever else is the Train Wreck Du Jour keep getting our attention and print space, when clever and cool people with lots of interesting things to say like Maureen are left to languish in comparative obscurity.
I would like to make it my mission to let people know the radness they are missing out on if they do not read Maureen’s blog and buy her books. I am going to have Maureen Johnson t-shirts made.
Large Hadron Collider
I am super excited about this. I know it’s old news by now, but aren’t you excited still? The day they kicked this baby off, I was refreshing Radio4’s dedicated Big Bang Day website every five minutes. The updates were mostly just things like, “Oh lovely, now we’re all bathing in champagne and our own cleverness, which we’ve managed to turn into liquid because we’re clever scientists, what a marvellous day this has been”, but it was all just so exciting!
In case you have been living under a rock, the Large Hadron Collider is a big ol’ sciencey kinda machine built at CERN, the world’s biggest particle physics lab in Geneva. Its Big Sciencey Destiny is to fire protons around a huge tunnel the length of the Circle Line (a line on the London Underground, for those of you reading this from outside the centre of the universe) at the speed of light, and smash them together to see what sciencey things happen!
And oh, the things that will happen! Not only could they recreate the conditions surrounding the Big Bang, but apparently this machine could do lots of other fun stuff as well. The people in charge have said it could lead to a cure for cancer or bird flu, and maybe even solve the problem of radioactive waste.
I am sure it is far more complicated than the image in my head, but what I imagine (and please don’t ruin this for me with the real sciencey truth, if you happen to know it) is that the protons speeding around the Circle Line, when they smash into each other, will spontaneously burst into things the likes of which we’ve only dreamed of.
Boom! Look, a little tiny universe, with little tiny humans! There’s me! Look how tiny I am!
Boom! Look, a cure for cancer! It says it right there on the label!
Boom! Look, a unicorn! A garden fairy! GOD! There you are! You’re shorter than we expected, but welcome!
It’s a whole new world of possibilities, people, and I for one am going to start planning a new wardrobe.
