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Entries tagged as ‘Australia’

christmas in london V. christmas in oz

November 26, 2009 · 2 Comments

London must be the greatest city in the world at Christmas time. To be fair, I’ve only ever spent Christmas in two places (Sunshine Coast and London), and it’s quite well documented that I think London is the greatest city in the world anyway, so my opinion may be slightly skewed… but I think I’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’d argue with me about it being the unofficial Home of Christmas Awesome. (Though I’ll accept alternative submissions, with proper documentation of course.)

I hate to be gushy about things (that is obviously a lie), but honestly – the whole thing is just so magical. I love it when all the street decorations and fancy lights and stuff come out. Oxford Street, Regent Street and Carnaby Street are at their sparkliest… sure, they’re also at their most manically, infuriatingly, fist-eatingly busy too, but I can totally deal with that if it means seeing the AMAZING window displays at Selfridges. I think they really outdid themselves with last year’s life-sized Santa Series (Santa on the tube, Santa in a laundromat, Santa at a sushi rail, etc). It was inspired.

Carnaby Snowmen by Abi Skipp

Unfortunately the giant, inflatable, terrifying snowmen with the white, soulless eyes looming over Carnaby Street in a crouch position, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting shoppers and suck the life out of them or possibly drag them back to some evil frosty lair, might have damaged me a little bit, emotionally.

Oh, but the chestnuts? The CHESTNUTS?Roasting? On an OPEN FIRE? I thought that was fiction! No sir. It happens right on Oxford Street and smells incredible. I’ve never actually eaten them (street food in central London? Non merci), but I thoroughly enjoy the fact that they exist.

I could go on and on, but instead I am going to give you a bullet list of things I loved about Christmas in London. We all know how much I love a bullet list.

  • Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park. Last year Sherri, Scott and I went ice-skating there on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately the hire skates were so crappy, and the ice was so mutilated and slippery from the day’s skating, that it kind of felt like somebody had attached a small, immobile child to each of my ankles and was forcing me to walk around barefoot in a circle on an olive oil-covered tarpaulin while trying to stay upright. But still… magical.
  • Drinking mulled wine at Borough Market after ordering the craziest variety of dead animals to cook on Christmas Day. Pheasant! WTF?! And GOOSE! That is mental. And awesome.
  • Going to the ballet. Last December I saw both Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum. Now I want to go every year. *Swoon*
  • Cold weather. So much more Christmassy than 40-degree heat.
  • Hosting a Chrismukah party with Ghetto at the Primrose Palace. Get us with our interfaith household! (Her faith being Judaism and mine being… non-existent.) Bridging cultural gaps and shit! Latkes and candy cane cocktails for everybodeeee!
  • Looking out the window before going to bed on Christmas Eve and crossing fingers, toes and other body parts that it would snow overnight (it didn’t, but still…)

I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t also love Christmas here in Australia, so here is a list of AWESOME things about spending this Christmas on the Sunshine Coast.

  • Seafood instead of dead birds. I mean, dead birds are great, but so are fresh prawns, crayfish, mud crabs and Moreton Bay Bugs.
  • Getting to that point in the afternoon where you think you actually might die from the humidity, and then jumping in a pool/ocean/cold shower.
  • You know how when you were a kid and you wanted to get up REALLY, REALLY early to open presents on Christmas day, but it was still 4:30am and your parents were dead asleep? Well, in Australia that’s probably just about when the sun rises in summer… and frankly, once the sun was up on Christmas Day, presents for us were fair game.
  • Carols by Candlelight! This is one Australian Christmas tradition I really missed in London. The great thing about having Christmas in the middle of summer is that nighttime gatherings of thousands of people  (each holding up a candle and singing Oh Holy Night) at your local park or beach are completely realistic and nobody is liable to get frostbitten. (Mosquito-bitten, sure, but the inventors of RID need to earn their money somehow.) My family has gone to Carols by Candlelight every single year for as long as I can remember, usually at Kings Beach in Caloundra. The coolest thing about Carols by Candlelight, especially when you’re little (aside from the requisite fairy floss machines and sausage sizzle), is running around with multiple glow sticks like a fluorescent maniac at an outdoor underage rave. And then when you get a bit older, finally being allowed to hold a proper lit candle of your own. And then setting fire to the carols guide book and burning yourself with hot wax. (No? Just me?)
  • Last minute, late-night Christmas Eve shopping at the Sunshine Plaza. Only Sunshine Coast peeps will know what I am talking about here. It’s so bad it’s good. And by bad, obviously I mean it makes you want to take your own life by hurling your body, still attached to the seventy-five shopping bags you’re carrying, over the Riverwalk bridge and into the shiny brown waters below. Fa la la la la, la la la laaa.
  • Pavlova
  • My mum’s trifle
  • My mum’s potato salad
  • Actually getting to see my family open their presents from me, and witnessing the looks of joy/dismay/confusion/surprise/disappointment that result.

But other than all these, to me the best thing about Christmas wherever you are celebrating it, is the fact that nobody has to be anywhere. There’s no rushing off to go shopping or go to work or to the pub or to meet a friend for coffee or whatever… and there’s nothing that actually needs to be done, except of course all the cooking and eating and stuff. It’s pretty much the one day of the year when nobody needs to be anywhere, and all there is to do is play board games, watch movies and carb load. Sweet.

Flickr image from Abi Skipp’s photostream.

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announcement (dun dun dunnnnn)

April 1, 2009 · 6 Comments

I’m starting off Blog Every Day April with the official announcement of some rather sad news (well, it’s sad for me).

Sigh. I’m leaving London.

I mean, I don’t want to be all dramatic about it, because it’s not like it’s some crazy sudden shock. I’ve known it’s been coming for a very long time. Actually, I was only meant to be in the UK for six months… then it became nine months… then I stretched it to a year… and then I really HAD to stay until the end of the summer… and then my second London Christmas was only JUST around the  corner… and well, you see how two years happened. I just found that I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

But actually, I can’t put it off any longer, because I have commitments back in Australia – well, one commitment specifically. (Gosh, that reads like I left a downtrodden husband and three dull-eyed but obnoxious children at home. I didn’t, obviously. I’m going back to work on a TOP SECRET PROJECT… one that’s not really that top secret. I do have some pretty fun plans though, and will reveal all in the months to come, if anyone is still around to care.)

I’m not leaving immediately – it will be around the second week of June. Yes, that means I haven’t booked my flight yet. I haven’t even handed my notice in at work. Don’t be fooled by the disorganisation though – that’s just how I roll. I’ve already told my boss that I’m outta here, and he’s looking for my replacement (which I think is a bit rude, since he doesn’t even have the decency to look lost and forlorn while he’s doing it). And plus if I don’t actually come home for reals this time I will probably be kicked out of my family.

The general plan is to move back to London town in a couple of years, once I’ve done stuff and been cool and hung out with my peeps whatnot, and maybe even gotten a tan (probably not though, I don’t want skin cancer).

WARNING: I’m most likely going to be a bit of an Eeyore about this whole leaving London thing in the weeks to come (oh boohoo, this might be my last walk in Hyde Park, this might be my last visit to Borough Market, this might be the last time a North London youth spits in my general direction, this might be the last time I see a gypsy woman change carriages on a moving underground train while carrying her infant child… BOO. RADLEY. HOO) but truth be told there are things about moving home that really excite me (besides the obvious family, friends, whatever), and the main one of those things is that after a two-year hiatus I will be going back underground (literally) to make music again, and I actually CANNOT wait for that. (Oops… that’s the TOP SECRET PROJECT. Big reveal fail.)

So anyway, this post was pretty much meant to be a heads up that many of my Blog Every Day April posts are going to be (like most of my posts usually are anyway) extremely London-centric. In a me-centric sort of way, but that’s to be expected I suppose.

(OH! Side note… on my work blog I got my first nasty comment recently, although the commenter probably didn’t foresee the joy it would bring me. He called me a ‘London-centric, air-kissing fool’. ME! London-centric! Air-kissing! And he got that just from reading this post. I’ve never been so happy in my LIFE!)

Ciao, mwah-mwah xx

P.S. I’m aware, by the way, that it’s 01 April today, and just to be clear – I really wish this was some kind of lame, nobody-cares-you-idiot April Fool’s Day joke, but it’s not.

P.P.S. Just because you haven’t heard me bang on about how awesome Australia is (yet), doesn’t mean I’m ONLY about the London love. I am still patriotic to a fairly absurd degree. For the record.

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dear baz, i’m feeling slightly violated

January 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Dear Baz Luhrmann,

Really loved your latest film, Australia. I know a lot of people didn’t get it, but frankly Baz, I think those people just don’t get you. Anybody who’s seen and loved the Red Curtain Trilogy is no doubt familiar with and loves your style, and can appreciate the slightly camp vein that runs through all of your work, as well as the bold, original choices you make. I think you are ace, and I love the way that in this film you both captured the spirit of our country and maximised the time Hugh Jackman spent shirtless.

Baz, you made me laugh (especially in the scene where Nicole’s character sees kangaroos for the first time – classic) and you made me cry (“I sing you to me Mrs Boss”… holy crap, I bawled my eyes out)… but then, alas, you had to ruin it by having ELTON FUCKING JOHN record the theme song played over the credits.

FOR FUCK’S SAKE, BAZ.

Now, look, before I get lynched by an Elton John-loving mob – I am no stranger to the musical delights of Sir Elton. B-B-B-Benny and the Jets is, as far as I’m concerned, no less than a work of boogie genius.

But I can’t help but wonder, as wonderful as our fine British friend’s menthol-cool musical stylings consistently are… was there no Australian artist you could think of who could possibly use a break on the international stage off the back of a major vehicle such as this film? A Pete Murray or a Bernard Fanning perhaps? A David Campbell? Or even a more established and respected stalwart of the Aussie music industry? The supreme king of eighties Australian soft pub rock, John Farnham, comes to mind. Middle-aged women don’t throw their panties at him for nought, Baz.

Of course there’s not much you can do about this now, but… well, it’s just something for you to mull over in retrospect I suppose.

Thanks again for all your top work, Baz. And thanks for including some premium Rolf Harris wobble boarding in the score. You’re a legend.

Sincerely,
Digressica.

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north-west is best

October 12, 2008 · 5 Comments

Today has been one of those days that make me pity the fools who don’t live in London, AKA The Centre of the Universe (TCotU). Sunny, warm, relaxed and lovely, and yet still busy like a hive of busy little Londoner bees.

A friend of mine (who lives in Australia and hates TCotU) once said that the place at the heart of your first Big City Experiene (BCE) must always be the one you love the most. For him it’s New York. For me it will always be London.

Since moving to the UK about a year and a half ago, I’ve had two very different living experiences.

The first was in Fulham. Fulham High Street, to be precise.

In May 2007 I was fresh off the boat from Australia… you remember Australia of course, it’s that place at the bottom of the world where you used to dump all your criminals. My dear friend LC Hammer was living near Fulham Broadway in a semi-detached Victorian conversion (now that I write about property for a living, I bother to use phrases like these. When I first got here, it was just a pretty house on a pretty street). Like most young Aussie professionals, she was living in a sharehouse with two fellow Aussie professionals (let’s call them AusProfs, because it’s quicker and it allows me to embrace my inner wanker), and was part of a thriving community of south-west London AusProf friends.

Like many of those who came before me, I had the good fortune of a connection like LC that meant I could slot straight into a ready-made community. Before I knew it – and before I’d even shaken off my travel-induced daze – I had moved into a flat, P-Vizzle Court, with a couple of her friends, Carrie Powerhouse and GI Jono, and a friend of theirs, Kibble Mahoney.

Ah, the times that were had at P-Vizzle. The ‘family’ dinners almost every weeknight. The movie nights. The Get Pissed Wednesdays. The glasses we broke in the bathtub (that was just me really). The Sunday night scampi. The trips to the circus. The many, many stray Australian visitors that Kibble would bring home to sleep on our living room floor.

The thing about the Aussie sharehouse, though, is that the experience is transient by nature. One by one, Aussies left and were replaced. Eventually Powerhouse went home to Brisbane, and was replaced by Kibble’s friend Jellabean, who proved to be another excellent addition to the P-Vizzle set. Then Kibble himself moved home, and was replaced by ScottyDon’t, who proved to be a wanker.

Eventually P-Viz disbanded, and my next London living experience – my current London living experience – began. In Primrose Hill. Primrose Hill Road, to be precise.

Here life is different. Instead of living in a two-bedroom flat with three other Aussies (this was the reality of life at P-Viz – extremely fun, but not very practical), I live in a two-bedroom flat with one English girl, Vicky Ghetto, who owns the place.

Vicky Ghetto is unlike the P-Viz inmates, but equally awesome. She is very funny, in an English way, and has an equally funny but even Englisher boyfriend. Vicky was the first Jewish person I’d ever met in real life, which I’m sure she finds amusing in a quaint, oh-you-silly-Australian way, but which for me was super exciting. I know this makes it sound like my parents were Grand Dragons in the KKK or something, but actually my hometown is just embarrassingly monocultural. Being a pasty brunette throughout my school years qualified me for the status of Strange and Exotic. The reproductive norm on the Sunshine Coast is for each family to create a small army of tanned blondes, who marry other tanned blondes and make lots of little tanned blondes of their own. If you want diversity, you go to Melbourne.

As I was saying – living with Ghetto is completely different to living at P-Vizzle – but I’ve totally lucked out, because both experiences have been perfect in their timing. A year ago, I didn’t know anyone in London, didn’t know anything about London or about living in London, and having a bunch of Aussies around me who were experiencing the exact same cultural shift was absolutely crucial to my survival in those first six to eight months. If I were in that same sort of situation now with different people, though, it would kill me.

Gosh, I can’t remember what my original point was. Oh right… it was actually going to be a comparison of south-west to north-west London. Hmm, I’m way off.

I guess when I was living in Fulham I just couldn’t have imagined living anywhere else. We had everything right outside our building – good transport links, good shopping, a cinema five minutes away, fabulous restaurants, our own gorgeous local pub – The Temperance (which is on Fulham High Street, on the right side just before Putney Bridge, and is awesome and I highly recommend it), the best fish and chip place in the city right across from us (Fishers – holy cow, try the scampi), the Thames about a two-minute walk away, a beautiful park, a beautiful church, hilarious Pakistani guys in the convenience store downstairs who knew our names, and of course all our Aussie friends living nearby.

But then I moved to NW3. Ahh, the north-west. The best view and nicest picnic spot in London, Primrose Hill, is a five-minute walk from my flat. England’s Lane at the end of my road is the perfect London street – it has a Starbucks, a little Tesco, a florist, a butcher, a drycleaner, a brilliant pub called The Washington, a newsagent, a cute gift shop, an Indian restaurant, a couple of cafes. Supposedly the place is crawling with celebrities, although I’m not very good at noticing them, and frankly I’m still waiting on that welcome-to-the-neighbourhood casserole from Gwyneth and Chris. It’s leafy and peaceful here, but not too quiet. I feel closer to central London, especially since I don’t have to get on the dodgy District Line to get there. The frights and delights of Camden are ten minutes away. Oh, and my friend LC Hammer also remains my neighbour LC Hammer, holing up in NW1.

All in all, north-west is definitely best.

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the mental, the differently-abled and the fabulous

September 19, 2008 · 1 Comment

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.

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puck you, miss

August 1, 2008 · 4 Comments

I feel bad about that marathon previous post, so here’s something bite-sized.

In a strange turn of events, the piece of really, really good news I got turned into really, really sad news. And the really, really bad piece of news turned on its head and is dandy once again. I think.

Has anyone been watching Summer Heights High? Chris Lilley is a genius.

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