When your priest, while doing a stint behind the hall bar, mimes the plonking of huge pendulous breasts on the bar counter and asks wot you’ll ‘ave, luv, a la East Enders, you suddenly realize that you are no longer thirsty. In fact, you may never drink again. Ever.
Forget gourmet cuisine, decadent drug-soaked clubbing extravaganzas, and entertainment crossroads of the world for a moment. London is also about:
Kangkong belachan, beef rendang, nasi goreng, teh tarik and chin chow in Camden on a quiet Thursday night, when it no longer has the indier-student-than-thou, card-carrying nonconformist feel of the weekend. If you’re a Singaporean/Southeast Asian in London, give Singapore Sling (Inverness Road, across the road from the Camden tube exit) a try for pretty damn authentic tasting stuff, though of course at several million times more than what we’d pay at home.
Trying to blend in with what seems like the entire Irish community of London converging on the Electric Ballroom for an Aslan (described on their promotional poster as “The Best Rock Band In Ireland!”, more like Bon Jovi without sexy lead singer, cowboy fixation or, like, international fame) gig, watching fifty-year-olds sway along and belt out every line, all ultimately quite endearing and actually more entertaining than what I remember of Stephen Malkmus at ULU.
Mentioning to Sabrina that while we’re spending our Friday night in moot preparation drudgery, Alec is drinking the night away at Finsbury Park, getting her reply of “Oh, I used to live in Finsbury Park. A man got stabbed outside my front door.” and then worrying a bit.
Saving, yes, saving England from totally unforecasted gale-force winds and devastating storms by not going boating with Alec in Regent’s Park, although I do confess to unjustifiably endangering everyone all the same by daring to utter “Oh, it’s a beautiful day. Let’s go for a walk.”
Anticipatory exam dread and its accompanying crabbiness seem to have arrived exceptionally early this year. I could say this is mostly because it’s my final year but must admit that it is probably also due in no small part to the strange coincidence between me deciding to give Coke up for Lent and everyone I live with suddenly deciding that Coke is their favourite drink, drinking it everywhere and leaving half-empty cans of Coke around the house.
Still, not all is glum. The early hours of this morning were spent worshipping at the altar of hallmate Michael’s colossal CD collection (which I subsequently plundered, and intend to thoroughly rape and pillage in future), then listening to some of the spoils (Mogwai: EP + 6, then Godspeed You Black Emperor!: Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven) while snuggled in bed with Cryptonomicon and peach mousse. It may have been a waste of two hours I should have spent working, but at least it didn’t involve Vegas-style Solitaire, which Alec evilly introduced me to last week and which I have been weaning myself off ever since.
Also, the Ali G movie is coming out soon. A reason to live if ever one was needed.
The tournament was great. Will won Pop Idol. A good weekend!
Before I say I think the tournament went pretty damn brilliantly the typical Michellian disclaimer is necessary – ideally, I’d have liked more teams and judges involved, and ideally the first proposition team in the final wouldn’t have turned a motion which had great potential for something interesting (This House Would Shaft The Axis Of Evil) into an incredibly boring debate about removing Oxbridge privileges. But apart from that, everything seemed to run almost disturbingly smoothly, which actually worried me quite a lot – I kept thinking I’d somehow overlooked some huge glaring problem and waiting for the anvil to drop, but it just never did, and I’m reasonably proud that in roughly four years of tournament debating (since ’98) mine was the first tournament I’ve ever been at which ran on time.
So thank you, Mark, for putting up with all my malaise and moodiness, for being lovely in so many ways, and lastly (and very importantly) for booking rooms that actually existed this time. We were both admittedly mightily pissed while exchanging affirmations of love and friendship and each other’s general wonderfulness on Saturday night, but I stand proudly by everything I said, even now in the sobering light of day. Been great working with you, dear.
I raced home from the tournament with a beatific smile on my face, headed straight to the TV room in search of Avril, who’d taped Pop Idol for me, and did a lot of girlie screaming. Realized later that this is the only British pop cultural whirlwind I’ve actually gotten sucked into in my two and a half years here, but this one really did manage to reel me in, hook, line and sinker. I’ve explained to Alec that I came upon it at a vulnerable time; that having not seen him for two weeks due to our respective ski trips and missing him dreadfully I was just there for Will’s taking (oof, perhaps a bad turn of phrase there) that fateful Saturday evening in December when I wandered into the TV room and was transfixed. He remains unconvinced. Oh well. Good luck and best wishes, Will. Your profile is distinctly primatial but from the front you’re lovely, cheesy grin and all.
Much like the Sunday after the last debating tournament I organized, yesterday was a whole lotta wonderful nothing. Woke up at noon. Lunched and coffee’d with Russ, whom I dearly wish hadn’t brought me that belated Christmas present of American Gods, because he inconsiderately went and bought himself the tripod I was going to give him, and now I’m stuck for ideas. Treated the congregation at mass to an unusually muted and reflective version of Shine Jesus Shine (the hymn Fr J disdainfully refers to as likening Jesus to Brasso). Lingered downstairs with soup, John, Tay and bizarre conversation that involved coffee sugar Nazism (Me: “Does it make me some sort of lesser person because I like two sugars in my coffee, goddamit?”) and awful puns about a strange guy called Terry who comes to our hall and makes trouble every now and then. (Tay: “Man, this is scary. I’m terrified, man. I’m developing terranoia…I really don’t like it when he comes over here. I get all territorial.” And so on.)
Yesterday had the potential for hellishness, but somehow managed to turn out almost as perfect as it could have been instead. Keep in mind that by perfect in this context I don’t mean winning lotteries or sprawling with paper-umbrella’d drinks on sunkissed beaches or even a Pavement reunion concert.
This is what I mean: I woke up in time for morning prayer, had breakfast, arrived early for my 9 am lecture and stayed fully awake throughout it. Answered loads of tournament-related emails and wrote a blog entry. Went grocery shopping and cooked a divine spinach and bacon omelette for lunch. Put final organizational touches on tournament for today with Mark, including coming up with 7 debating motions we liked and were happy with in a reasonably efficient period of time. Romped through the Bentham reading I had to do for today. Got my company law essay back – a high 2-1! Attended special lecture by Sir Peter North (Conflict of Laws guru) and actually understood most of it. Went home and realized there was nothing, nothing, nothing more I had to do for the day. Went happily off to see Alec and listen to patchy but generally enjoyable hip-hop at 93 Feet East.
Sounds completely mundane when I write it, but there’s a real satisfaction in the fact that I had so many things I needed to do on the day before a tournament I’ve spent the last month organizing, and was very worried about the amount of time I’d been sacrificing for something irrelevant to my degree – and I managed to do everything and more (the omelette was a plus).
Funny how things swing. Maybe I should attend morning prayer more often.
You know you’ve reached a low point in stress management when you wish it was time to start studying for the exams just so you could start eking out that simple existence of 2 am nights and 8 am mornings, and deeply boring but satisfyingly routine and sedentary days.
I refer to “low point” because I hate that existence, but it’s a hell of a lot better than this week’s frenetic staggering between exponentially increasing numbers of To Do List items – write research project (yo, if anyone’s an expert on the public international law aspects of Internet regulation, please talk to me), decipher Jeremy Bentham for jurisprudence dissertation, magically produce completely organized intervarsity debating tournament (this Friday and Saturday) out of arse…
But enough whinging. After writing a similar diatribe last Thursday I then allowed Russ to persuade me that I really needed to be at Cargo that night for our monthlyish Xen worship session, and although I then managed to miss 3 hours of lectures the next day and generally descend into self-hatred, it was well worth it just for the half hour of mind-boggling virtuosity that was Killa Kela’s mouth. There was also the unique cultural experience of being in a room full of white Brits who seemed to know every word of Roots Manuva’s Witness and joined in especially enthusiastically for the “cheese on toast” line, the sweat-soaked live exuberance of New Flesh (new album Understanding, currently stickered all over London), and DJ Vadim, endearingly Russian and generally loved by all.
Other causes for joy: long overdue ejection of dishwater-dull Darius from Pop Idol, which I, er, accidentally stumbled upon on a lazy Saturday evening in late December and have been, er, accidentally watching ever since. Grin. Go on then, pour forth your ridicule. I’M NOT ASHAMED! VOTE FOR WILL!
But moving on swiftly… :)
More glimmerings in the gloom include recent arrivals from Django (Sparklehorse: It’s A Wonderful Life, Marine Research: Sounds From The Gulf Stream, Sonic Youth: Goodbye 20th Century, stuff by Pavement, 20 Minute Loop and Silver Jews also on the way), a rather lovely boyfriend carrying pancake batter in a plastic jug on the tube in order to come over and cook me dinner, and actually understanding the maths in Cryptonomicon, which reassures me that two and a half years of law hasn’t cottonwooled my brain yet. Yet.
What I actually do with my life, which this blog used to feature reasonably regularly, in reasonably faithful detail, has been markedly absent lately. There are good reasons for this.
A lot of it has been boring – one, I’ve been trying to remind myself that I do rather want a First in this law degree, and have reluctantly embarked on tentative incursions into textbooks and other unfamiliar entities. I must admit this hasn’t been completely painful. Highlights include The Last Days of Socrates, complete with hunky Greek tutor who kept unintentionally sending the 14 or so girls in the seminar group (I assume not the lone guy) wild with seemingly innocuous remarks like “This will be our last session together”.
Two, the monster that is the UCL intervarsity debating tournament I have to organise gets bigger, scarier and hairier as the days go by – it’s a week from tomorrow. My various panic attacks about this remain largely concealed from the world at large, apart from co-organizer Mark, who tends to meet them with gales of laughter and “God, we’re so crap!”
Three, music and reading lately has involved much flitting between various books and albums with little real long-term commitments to any, and therefore no commentary of substance to give. The Borders Student Discount Day (bless ’em) yielded Watchmen (finally), Fleur Adcock: Poems 1960-2000, Our Aim Is To Satisfy Red Snapper (Red Snapper), The Broken Down Comforter Collection (Grandaddy), Keep It Unreal (Mr Scruff), Headhunters (Herbie Hancock) and I can’t remember which orchestra playing a lot of Vaughan-Williams. Have also been very pleasantly diverted by Cryptonomicon since finding it in Waterstones for the very agreeable price of £2.99 (all 918 pages, too) a few weeks ago. But as I said, much flitting, little absorbing.
Having said all this, there are actually things I wish I’d written about in here, and may still do if I find the time. Walking (squelching) in the driving rain to Borough Market. Peppered Bambi dinners. Trying to figure out what it is I like so much about skylights. Other random snippets which I used to find the time to write about.
This sounds pensive, but it isn’t meant to. Life’s been a bit more stressful lately than I’d like, and it’ll continue that way until after the tournament at the very least, but happiness is still easy enough. Kettle Chips. Blind Date. Alec.
At least nobody threw haggis, even at this joke (slightly modified from how it was delivered):
The other day, my friend told me she’d just received a delivery of a dozen red roses from her boyfriend. “I suppose this means I’ll have to be spending the weekend with my legs in the air,” she said. “Surely you have a vase?” I said, bemused.
As I said, at least nobody threw haggis. Small mercies.
The next time I consider agreeing to do a stand-up comedy routine on gender relations, in the crypt of a church, in front of a Christian ecumenical group mostly composed of puritanical American Protestants, who will most likely have large portions of uneaten sheep entrails at their disposal, will somebody please stop me?
Of all the ways there are to die, death by haggis is probably one of the least dignified.
(For anyone who’s mystified as to the occasion I describe above, a little clarity is available here. Just a little, though. My apparent longing for public humiliation remains inexplicable.)
Strangely fun weekend. Dreadfully disappointed on Saturday night when plans of going to a strip club with the boyfriend fell through; we had to settle for a quiet romantic night in instead, bah.
Downstairs in the hall on Sunday night, Natalie decides to discard clothes she can’t fit into any more, and offers me a bra. “It’s a lovely bra, Nat, but somehow I think my mother might not be pleased if I told her I spent my time in England wearing other girls’ bras.” Zad cheerfully offers to take it, but then decides his mother would probably be even more worried than mine. He does, however, accept a “Let’s Party!” baby-tee and strips off (in the dining room) to try it on. Given that it’s way beyond skin-tight on him and ends somewhere at his ribs, his nipple ring is obvious to all. Natalie’s just twiddling it when Father Jeremy walks in.