Tag Archives: I heart London

Christmas in London V. Christmas in 0z

Posted on 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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Last day in the office: Things I will miss… and not

Posted on May 22, 2009 | 2 Comments

Today’s my last day at the job I’ve been in for the past year and four months. I’m about two parts sad, one part excited and one part panic face. In honour of my imminent departure, here is a list of five things I’m going to miss about my company. And, just to keep the equilibrium, also a list of five things I will not miss at all.

things I will miss

  1. The two funniest, loveliest, meanest, cleverest, annoyingest, coolest boys in London.
  2. Walking out of Piccadilly Circus tube station every morning, looking up and blinking in awe at whatever amazing stroke of good fortune landed me a job in such a place.
  3. The best sushi in London (in my humble, probably misguided and definitely biased opinion): Kulu Kulu.
  4. The intensely hilarious and rampant (but good-natured)  cultural insensitivity in the marketing department, which is only allowed to survive because we are oh-so-multicultural and equally insensitive about ourselves as about each other.
  5. Our marketing director’s strange, mildly creepy, unnatural and hysterical relationship with the kangaroo hand puppet I brought back from Australia last year.
  6. (Okay, six things.) Adore Patisserie, the little French place around the corner that makes the most brilliant cup of coffee for £1.50, and the three super friendly and multilingual guys who run it.
  7. Did I mention the boys? Well, I’m mentioning them again.

things I will not miss

  1. The dodginess of our weird Flavia coffee machine.
  2. *Facepalming* due to unavoidable interaction with some of the cretins Daily Mail readers oxygen thieves people from ad sales.
  3. The seriously unkind lighting in the ladies’ room.
  4. The strangely frequent and often noisy roadworks that always seem to be directly outside our building. What are they building out there?!
  5. The weird alarm test thing in our office that goes off like a heart attack at random points during the day, making everyone jump and taking approximately ten years off each of our lives with every five-second ear-bleeding beep.

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Dear cyclists of London

Posted on April 17, 2009 | 8 Comments

(  )  I am a vehicle.

(  )  I am a pedestrian.

Please make a fucking decision and tick as appropriate.

Yours sincerely,
Digressica.

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Announcement (dun dun dunnnnn)

Posted on 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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5 Things to do in London this week

Posted on November 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

1. A little early morning Christmas shopping on Friday when Oxford Street gets kicking at 7am. Three cheers for a last-ditch effort to breathe life into languishing retail profits. Hurrah! Failing economy: zero, obsessive shoppers: one. I will be hitting up Liberty for fabulous Christmas tree ornaments and Mamas & Papas for baby awesomeness for up-the-duff colleague.

2. Go see Blood Brothers for £12. You WILL. NOT. REGRET IT. Somehow manages to be both deliberately and accidentally hilarious. Highlights include intense overuse of 1980s synthesised drums, oddly hysterical reaction from one character to other character placing pair of shoes on the kitchen table, Marilyn Monroe-related lyrical motif running through the entire show that becomes laughably flimsy by the end of the second act, and the intrusive and over-dramatic (thus HI-LAR-IOUS) musical interludes sung by unnecessary Evita-style narrator. Haven’t laughed as hard as hard as we did coming out of the Phoenix Theatre in a VERY long time. And yet I have this weird fondness for the show, because actually parts of it were very good, and the woman in the lead role, Niki Evans, has a gorgeous tone to her voice (and apparently was on The X-Factor last year?). Do yourself a favour.

3. Get your Christmas Tree! A real live one, that will be a pain in the arse to lug home on the tube and a pain in the arse to dispose of in the new year, and will drop pine needles all through your carpet, and will probably fall over at least 37 times between now and Christmas Day! Check out where you can buy real Christmas trees in London, then get that baby home and decorate the hell right out of it!

Last year the P-Vizzle housemates and I went to excessive amounts of trouble to decorate our first ever living Christmas tree for our first ever London Christmas. We did a roast, eggnog, copious amounts of wine (well, we did copious amounts of wine for most things), got tangled in lights, got a little tipsy, made a VERY pretty tree. Then in January when it came time to dispose of the thing, GI Jono and I left it in the hallway on the floor below ours, right outside the door of the neighbours we really hated. But… frankly, that will teach them for being utter, utter bastards.

We did get a cranky letter from our landlord about it. Think it may have been the trail of pine needles from their front door to ours that tipped them off.

4. Go see No Man’s Land at the Duke of York’s Theatre. No, wait. That’s what I’ll be doing. Because I am crushing on David Walliams.

5. Try out the new Bob Bob Ricard all-day bar/brasserie in Soho. Opens at 7am, closes at 3am. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, drinks etc. I haven’t quite got there yet, but the promise of toasters on tables and an interior inspired by ‘first class rail travel in Edwardian times’ has me raising one eyebrow. Not like a sinister fictitious villain, but like someone who is intrigued by old trains and the thought of kitchen appliances being an active and aesthetic part of restaurant dining experiences.

Their website is a total non-event actually, so don’t bother with it, but the place itself is getting some decent reviews on Time Out. Thanks to LC for the red hot tip.

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North-West is best

Posted on October 12, 2008 | 8 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

Posted on September 19, 2008 | 2 Comments

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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Attack of the hemp-clad percussionists

Posted on August 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

On a sidenote, I came to a cafe in Camden tonight called InSpiral Lounge. I came here for a couple of reasons: a) they have wifi, which I needed since my housemate kicked me out of the apartment for the night and I had an essay to write that needed some research (I know you’re reading this V! I’m only kidding!) and b) they have a nice little quiet downstairs area, perfect for geeking out on your laptop without looking like too much of a tool.

InSpiral is this little place on Camden Lock, opposite the stables. The place is great for internet, guarana truffles, hippies and rockin’ the ganj. (Sorry, I tried to sound cool just then when I’m quite obviously not. It won’t happen again.)

It’s 10:34 pm, and while two hours ago I was peacefully tapping away and devouring my favourite blog of the week, I have suddenly looked up and found myself surrounded by a large, impromptu group of percussionists.

I guess they must assemble here regularly and it is in fact I who have disrupted their chi and not the other way around. This merry band of minstrels consists of one very bad female guitarist-slash-singer, three guys with very loud bongo drums, someone with something that sounds like a kazoo and a surplus of people who seem to be competing as to who can bring the most haphazardly assembled instrument that makes the least musical sound. Plus one guy who can’t seem to decide what he wants to play, and starts singing loudly at random intervals, apparently when he recognises a song he’s heard before or thinks he may know the lyrics to (he doesn’t).

The prerequisite for membership of this band seems to be having dredlocks and either an item of clothing made from hemp or a funny hat. I wonder if they held auditions.

Oh good lord. I just looked around, and I’m actually surrounded. They’ve blocked my exit. What’s a coffee-chugging, capitalism-loving super-consumer to do?

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Dear sleazebag, thanks for the sexual harassment

Posted on July 22, 2008 | 4 Comments

An odd thing happened as I left Swiss Cottage tube station this evening. I was walking very slowly up the stairs of the Eton Avenue exit while reading the London Lite (on a side note – gosh I love that text message column. I always want to send one in but usually by the time I’m out of the tube and have reception on my mobile, I’ve forgotten all about it. If anybody reading this wants to make me deliriously, girl-squealingly happy, please say hello to me via the London Lite text column. I. Would. Die.), and a man was walking down on the other side.

“Hello baby, you look very beautiful.”

Pffft, I thought, and kept walking.

“I love that sexy dress you are wearing.”

Since the only other person around was the homeless man sitting at the top of the stairs, I figured I could safely assume the guy was talking to me. However, as said dress features a very unsexy print of white baby deer, comes almost up to my neck and goes down to below my knees, and was paired with a buttoned-up black cardigan and opaque black tights, I felt his comment was at best misplaced, and at worst a damn dirty lie.

“Oh yes, very nice darling. And now you say thank you.”

Please allow me to repeat that last bit, just in case you didn’t receive the full impact.

“And now you say thank you.”

I’m sorry… what?

Now I say thank you? Okay, good. I’m glad you told me, actually. Because this isn’t the first time a complete stranger with an unidentifiable European accent has called me baby and made an unsolicited comment about my appearance, and I’ve never known quite how to respond before. To be honest, I would normally go for a stock standard “Fuck off”, but really that’s just out of convenience. I use the phrase so often that it’s never very far out of reach and I don’t have to scramble for it.

Now that I know what the proper response is in situations such as this, I look forward to a much smoother relationship with many of my fellow Londoners.

You know, I guess there have been other times when I’ve leapt recklessly to reactions such as irritation, indignation or disgust, when I could just as easily – and perhaps more suitably – have felt gratitude instead.

So, in the spirit of setting things right…

To the rather large black man who, as I walked past the doorway of a sex shop in Soho one evening a couple of weeks ago, invited me to come in with him “for some fun” – thanks. I know I told you to go fuck yourself, but what I actually meant was that while I already had plans for that particular night, your invitation was certainly appreciated.

To the young men who wake me up every second night yelling at each other across Primrose Hill Road, apparently trying to organise the best time and place for a gentlemanly bout of fisticuffs, or possibly a knife fight (it’s hard to tell through the thick haze surrounding my brain at 2:30am) – merci beaucoup monsieurs. If you ever do manage to coordinate your busy social calendars, give me a shout and I’ll be ringside in a jiffy.

To the anonymous man who called my landline a few weeks ago at 3am to call me darling and enquire about a particularly intimate part of my anatomy when I was home alone, insomnia-stricken and watching Silence of the Lambs on television – muchos gracias, amigo. The ensuing ten minutes of irrational fear that because the phone had rung as I was walking right past it meant you were actually looking inside my apartment made me feel so alive.

To the local fast food joints who incessantly stuff delivery menus into our mail slot… I’m going to ignore for a moment the disturbing question of how you got into our building in the first place, and focus instead on some well-deserved gratitude for your perseverance. It’s true… one can never have too many Sizzling China pamphlets. Thank you for your contribution – not just to the rape and devastation of old growth forests the world over, but also to my own personal Heathrow injection.

Wow. Oprah was right. Gratitude feels good.

Got someone you need to thank? Go ahead, share.

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Begging for it at Hyde Park

Posted on July 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

Saw Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, G. Love and Mason Jennings at Hyde Park with V on Wednesday. It ruled – FACT. Jack is so especially swoon-worthy.

Highlights included a conversation between two girls overheard while standing in the three hundred metre-long queue for the portaloo:

“Are you drunk?”

“No, I’m not like gahhhhhlalala, I’m just a bit like yeah Jack Johnson alright woo.”

“Oh. I’m like yeah woo alright woo.”

One thing that always makes me smile at live gigs is the encore fake-out. You know what I’m talking about. The process goes thusly:

1. Lead singer finishes song and makes announcement something like this: “Right, thanks for coming, we’re outta here, goodnight!”

2. Entire band makes an obviously over-hasty exit

3. The audience clap and cheer a lot, while some people (amateurs) standing around you make nervous comments such as, “Is that it? They’re coming back out aren’t they? I don’t know, maybe they’re not…”

4. A few audience members exit; these are the people who are more excited about an unobstructed departure from the car park or an empty tube carriage than about seeing the act’s best and most built-up-to performance of the night

5. But wait – what’s this? The band! They’re coming back on! Oh, miracle of miracles, it’s as though we’re the best audience they’ve ever had and they simply can’t bear to be parted from us! What ho!

Historically, surely this must be the most enduring public mutual deception in the world. We know it’s a charade. The band knows it’s a charade. But it’s a reciprocal lie that we all actively participate in and enjoy. The band feels like we’ve really, really proved our love for them by screaming ourselves hoarse and clapping our hands raw, and we feel like the band really love us and are giving us our money’s worth by coming back out even after what’s supposed to be their last song.

Just once I would like an act to perform the encore fake-out, but on their return to the stage admit they weren’t really finished anyway, and they’d actually saved their very best material to play only once they felt we, the audience, had properly earned it. Because paying the exorbitant ticket price to see us perform just isn’t enough, damn it. We need you to beg for it.

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