Amsterdam And Bruges, 2001

Any discussion of Amsterdam really must start with my priest, whose responses to my telling him where I was going ran the gamut from “You dirty slut!” to “Pull yourself together, girrl, and doan’t be goin’ to that city of sin!” (spelling irregularities my attempt to convey his channelling of our Irish housekeeper nun) to “Would you like to borrow a guidebook?”

In hindsight my mid-trip “Hi Mum, I’m in Amsterdam!” phonecall to my mother, who I’d forgotten to tell about my plans, was rather cruel, given that the answers I then gave to her anxious queries could hardly have brought maternal peace of mind eg. “Where are you staying?” “Hostel Kabul”; “Hostel Kabul? Is it safe? Is it full of drug addicts/sex tourists/generally unsavoury characters? Where is it?” “Oh, it’s in the heart of the red light district. It’s quite nice, really, don’t worry…” Sorry, Mum. I probably do this to you too often.

I wasn’t really lying about the hostel. Despite its roach problem (such as me opening my toiletries bag and finding a large roach perched on my toothpaste tube; said roach was given a 5 minute grace period to get the fuck out of there, after which it was unceremoniously hauled out with bare hands and savagely killed) and the fact that from the second night onwards I was the only girl in a 24 person dorm, and the fact that all the men in there with me seemed to be of the resonant snoring variety, despite all this, Hostel Kabul was actually quite all right compared to others I’ve been in. For example, water came out of the shower when you turned it on. This was a plus.

Apart from this, the rest of our (me, Russ) little jaunt involved lots of walking (good) in cold and rain and wind (not so good) with little more than my regularly inverting umbrella (bloody annoying) as protection against this. There were of course the requisite visits to the Anne Frank house, Van Gogh museum, friendly neighbourhood brothels etc., also a day-trip to Bruges, also rambling along the canals, stumbling down narrow wind tunnel streets brandishing umbrellas like shields, Russ chasing his umbrella down one such street, me laughing like crazy until my umbrella promptly did another topsy-turvy, long-drawn-out dinners that left us the last people in the restaurant, celebrating the phenomenon that is the Michelle-Russ dynamic, me making a silent promise to myself and him that things will not change (at least not much) in the light of recent developments in my life, that we will not lose this.

Stereotypical souvenir shopping: Belgian chocolates for hall priests, nun and Mark (Mark got “Woodies”, I obviously chose something different for the clergy), Royal Delft blue and white pattern teacup for mum, advocaat for me and Avril. Considered an inflatable doll for Alec, decided this was possibly not the best gift to give a significant other/boyfriend/whatever, even if he did once send me a tape of a song called Pussy-Pussy-Cat.

All in all, an exceptionally good Reading Week, but I really am determined now to slog for a bit and put in some hours in the library until Christmas. I needed to do this, but now I need to do that.

Happy Snippets

Snippets from the weekend (no more than snippets, though. Tufts in the fur of the woolly mammoth of my current happiness. Some of the reasons I’m happy make me go a bit shy and fluttery, and I don’t feel like writing about them here):

After an extraordinarily taxing day, Thai food, Mercury Rev and charming company made for an extraordinarily pleasant Friday night. Even though I somehow managed to buy a Rev T-shirt that was shocking in its random ugliness (I blame the wine, and Alec for not stopping me), and even though I was the lucky one who got to sit next to Stupor Guy, whose travails on the astral plane manifested themselves in the inexorable downward drift of his upper body towards an increasingly cringing me, the gig still had its moments – nice renditions of The Dark Is Rising, Spiders and Flies, Hercules, Tonight It Shows and Goddess On A Hiway’s always fun. I do wish they’d played Endlessly and A Drop In Time though, and I don’t think they played anything from Boces or Yerself Is Steam, which was a little disappointing.

Their live sound is rougher round the edges than the pristine sound on the last two albums. Their album sound feels as if each component of a song (think Endlessly, for example) occupies a distinct musical space with clearly delineated boundaries, and exists quite happily there without really interacting with other elements of the song, even though they all complement each other very prettily when taken as a whole. Like a consomme. Live, it’s more of a stew, or perhaps a chunky soup, and I’m not sure how much I actually liked hearing the songs that way. For me, Deserter’s Songs and All Is Dream are the sound of late nights studying or reading in bed, just right for the spaces between the sounds of night drizzle and Gower Street white noise. Having said that, I do think gigs are meant to sound different from albums, so all this is more commentary than complaint.

Saturday was the President’s Cup, the only intervarsity tournament for novice debaters in the UK, and something Mark and I had been slaving over (well, kind of) for the past couple of weeks. Relentless perfectionist that I am, I’m still half convinced that every person who kept coming up to me and raving about how fantastic the tournament was, was either piss drunk or just being polite, but there does seem to be considerable consensus that it was a resounding success. Which makes me happy, although it could all have been so much better if not for a plethora of organizational failures that I know I made, and which I feel lucky for getting away with.

Special mention must be made of:

  • Mark, tournament convenor AKA My Bitch, who ran himself ragged during the day, supplied alcohol at night, and has generally been absolutely lovely to work with because of his ability to find hilarity in drudgery and give wonderful hugs when I’m not in the mood for hilarity.
  • Russ, who sacrified his Saturday to perform the extremely boring functions of a tournament drudge, because I really needed the help, and because he’s sweet like that. (Oops, he hates being called sweet. Oh well.)

After Saturday, Sunday was a day for nothingness. Woke up at noon. Practised the organ for evening mass. Spent the rest of the afternoon in bed with Seamus Heaney and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, falling in love all over again with the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk At Cubist Castle, munching Kettle Chips, breathing in chrysanthemum tea. Had fun at evening mass playing my calypso version of How Great Thou Art. Chocolate pancakes a la Mark for dinner. Subjected Alec to The Lost Children (stomach-turning song on the new Michael Jackson album, to be excoriated here in the very near future). Camp dancing extravaganza with Mark to New York City Boy (Pet Shop Boys), which might possibly have been quite inconsiderate to Stefan downstairs due to my very creaky floorboards. In retrospect, I suppose you could say it wasn’t actually a day of nothingness, except in the sense that it involved nothing that detracted from happy, happy, happy me.

(Are you tired of this yet?)

Sholipshishism With Seamus

As is often the case when work and various other things start encroaching on my usually satisfactory sense of mental stability and general well-being, I’ve been feeling an ever-increasing compulsion to do anything but everything I should be doing.

Hence: tendencies towards extreme offensiveness at debating committee meetings (this would involve interrupting the President’s incessant whinging and acute martyrdom complex by shouting “Well, BOO HOO!”, and then collapsing in helpless cackles), rather too much time and money spent at the hall bar drinking dodgy £1 vodka alcopops, and a general longing to just get out of the hall, the law library, the debating chamber, the entire UCL locale altogether.

Except that most of the time my inertia and disorganization means I end up retreating to my room and music and books, which are all far cheaper forms of escapism than the alternatives that come to mind, but this tends to steep me in solipsism after a while, which I don’t like.

[Speaking of solipsism (or perhaps not, because I don’t think the poem is entirely solipsistic, but it did somehow get associatively recalled by my use of that word) please read Personal Helicon (Seamus Heaney) because I just love it.]

[You could also do with reading Anahorish and Death Of A Naturalist, and pretty much everything else he’s ever written, while you’re about it.]

[You could also buy me Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, if you’re feeling generous.]

[Or you could buy it for yourself, which would admittedly make me less happy than the above option, but would nevertheless make me quite happy, all the same.]

Where was I? Oh yes – solipsism. :)

For A Five-Year-Old (Fleur Adcock)

New poet discovery: Fleur Adcock, discovered on Sunday in a book of poetry I borrowed from Mark.

For a Five-Year-Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.

Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960-2000

I want.

Was Down. Am Back Up.

I was sitting in my hall’s reception area yesterday feeling unusually low (tough day in school, hacking cough, debating/organ-playing stress) and slightly resentful at the person who hadn’t turned up for reception duty, even A.H.W.O.S.G (which I’m loving, and will probably rave about in the near future) failing to rouse me out of listlessness, when Virgin Radio (not my channel, but the office radio can’t seem to receive Xfm) started Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of.

(I think I’ve written about it before. The pop song you sneer at when you are at your most cynical becomes your Dawson’s Creek pensive moment soundtrack when you’re at your most vulnerable, and suddenly the lyrics seem to speak to you when before they were nothing more than pleasant but gooey sounds to move your mouth to and hopelessly garble from time to time, and before you know it you’re writing blog posts quoting song lyrics that aren’t hiply oblique (e.g. Can’t catch me, I’m syntax free – “The Ineffable Me”, Sonic Youth) like they’re supposed to be in order to meet the indie coolness criteria, but they really are speaking to you, they really are…)

And you are such a fool
To worry like you do
I know it’s tough
And you can never get enough
Of what you don’t really need now

During Benediction I was more distracted than I should have been, mulling over various mull-issues, thinking maybe what I needed was to get out of the house, maybe go to a movie by myself, maybe Amelie for feelgoodness. Found out after Benediction (the organ playing was relatively hitch-free, hooray) that Alec was thinking of seeing it too, tagged along with him. Liked it a lot but didn’t absolutely love it – a little too many shots of Audrey Tautou being gamine, which got mildly tiresome after the initial charm wore off, but I did enjoy many of its other little touches: the jet-setting garden gnome, the bullied artichoke-caressing veggie stall helper, the girl at the centre of Renoir’s painting but not really there at all, the jealous ex-boyfriend cataloguing perceived flirtations (time-stamped) into his tape recorder.

Talking outside the pub after the movie, I realized with relief that I hadn’t actually become recently socially dysfunctional (which I’d been wondering about), I’d just gotten rather tired of group conversations with people I’d just met and needed one-on-one conversations that went beyond the polite, chirpy “How are YOU” barrier to recharge.

There was also the matter of the pig keychain which ballooned shit out of its arse, but you really just had to be there.

It’s just a moment
This time will pass

It did. I’m glad.

If Headmusic Was A Sweet Mine Would Be An Everlasting Gobstopper

A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.

The last line of the article finally got a non-torturous song in my head again. Last week Mark got Tom’s Diner on repetitive loop. Then Mark’s friend replaced that with the intro to Bootylicious. Then Enter Sandman somehow found its way in, and stayed there all of last night despite efforts to get rid of it with Boards Of Canada (Music Has The Right To Children, gleefully scrounged from my neighbour’s CD collection and very much enjoyed). But I can live with Simon & Garfunkel in my head quite happily, for at least the next few days.

Last Hours In Athens

Killing time in the cybercafe before dinner and the airport in a few hours – it’s been a slow, leisurely day. Acropolis in the morning, my last souvlaki lunch in Monastiraki, shopping in Ermou, stocking up on reading material for my long night at the airport (Heart of Darkness, and I’m still looking for the latest Economist), lazing in a cafe, and now here, feeling the last dregs of this holiday ebb away, faintly worried about the jurisprudence essay I was supposed to have written this summer, and still feeling excruciatingly out of touch with recent world events. But Ken does do an amazing job of reading my mind with regard to moral high grounds being pretty bloody empty, “bloody” used deliberately.

Greece: Athens, A Blip

Back in Athens, my base till I leave early on Sunday morning. Yan Yan leaves tonight for California. I’ll probably go to Delphi tomorrow, and finally get myself to the Acropolis on Saturday. It should all go well.

Hey, maybe I’ll ask the Oracle who sent me that Crushlink email…

Greece: Santorini, A Blip

I’m in Santorini, Greece, now. I feel guilty in this hedonism, given the anguish that others are suffering elsewhere. When you’re on holiday and cut off from world news, accepting the reality of tragedies like this recent one is even harder.

I still don’t even know if Billy, Yish, Michelle and all my friends in uni at Columbia are all right.

Secrets From Turkey

Phew. It’s been an amazing nine days in Turkey, which I’ve been documenting faithfully in my beat-up travel notebook and will type up and put up here some time after I get back, but for now I’ve popped in to say that significant changes to our travel plans have taken place – Yanbin’s grandmother has passed away in Singapore, and he’s had to fly home for the funeral. Yan Yan and I are continuing to Greece. Yan Yan flies back to the States two days before Yanbin and I were originally due to fly back to the UK, so now I’m going to spend the last two days in Greece on my own.

Note: NO ONE READING THIS WHO KNOWS ME TELLS MY MOTHER (or anyone else in my family, obviously), please. (Ken, I especially mean you, if you’re still in Singapore and happen to run into my family in the lifts or whatever) She can’t worry about it if she doesn’t know.

I’m excited. The Athens Symphony Orchestra is playing The Planets and Adagio For Strings in the theatre of Epidavrus on the 21st. Originally I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to go because I wasn’t sure how interested everyone else would be but now it looks like I might manage it.

That’s it for now – typing on Turkish keyboards is a bit of a pain. I’ll try again in Greece, which will have to make a hell of an effort to match up to fantastic Turkey.