Alone With Bankside

My last Saturday of 2001 should be written about, even if I don’t manage to write about anything else.

Lost myself happily in Surrealism: Desire Unbound at the Tate Modern for nearly four hours. Hans Bellmer’s doll concoctions made me think of Sandman covers. Un Chien Andalou wasn’t nearly as shocking as I’d expected it to be. Loved Man Ray’s photos of Lee Miller. Wished they had more Magritte. Finally found out name and artist of the painting I’ve long privately described as “Alice in Wonderland meets The Shining” – it’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, artist Dorothea Tanning.

When I left it was already dark, but walking along Bankside and across the bridge to Blackfriars, St Paul’s and all the other riverside buildings were lit, and the water was incredibly still, reflecting them perfectly. For a moment on the bridge it felt like I was the only thing moving through the world. I realized I hadn’t uttered a word to another human being in the last five hours despite being surrounded by crowds, and that I was freezing cold and completely alone – but completely content. And I walked along brimming with that strange solitary joy, loving London, loving the fact that I still love being alone.

The Night Before Jurisprudence Essay Deadline

Last night while trying to finish my incredibly late jurisprudence essay, I:

Listened to albums by Unwound, The Cure, Bob Dylan, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miles Davis, My Bloody Valentine, Olivia Tremor Control, and Coldcut’s Solid Steel radio show on London Live.

Read two chapters of The Cider House Rules, poems by Adrienne Rich and Andrew Motion, and The Economist.

Snacked on bacon wheat crunchies, mint chocolates, Jaffa Cakes and herbal tea.

Filed the past term’s worth of bank statements and phone bills.

Organized my unrefrigerated food storage.

But did not finish my incredibly late jurisprudence essay, alas.

Hall Chronicles: ABBA Priest /Jurisprudence Choices

Tiny glittery stars are strewn along the floors of my hall, incredibly well dispersed from their original places on the tables at our Christmas dinner party by getting caught and carried in clothes and under shoes, or unstuck from noses and cheeks and foreheads. It’s rather nice.

The Christmas party had highs and lows, lows being the mediocre cuisine and people who couldn’t sing particularly well deciding they’d sing for what felt like particularly long, but of course we all clapped and squealed and hollered “Encore!” because that’s what this hall is like, highs being Mark’s unfailing ability to choose the exact moment a priest is walking by to be saying PUBES!!!, giggling with Tay about him getting his guitar out and leading everyone in a rousing chorus of “FEEEEEEEED THE WOOOOOORLD”, and a brief period in the bar where a small number of people were going absolutely apeshit dancing until everyone promptly decided they were far too drunk to continue and went off to vomit/attempt to pull/sleep.

Neither high nor low but just in a whole other dimension was Father J dressing up as the Queen (complete with handbag) and giving his version of the Queen’s speech (tailored for the hall), which included statements like a new pricing system for showers which would involve “50p for a 30 second spurt”, and then dancing to, unsurprisingly but terrifyingly, Dancing Queen.

Life was somewhat back to normal yesterday, or at least it seemed normal by the time I’d woken up at 2 pm. Have been grappling with a morass of practical really-must-do’s since then – Conflict of Laws reading, choosing my Big Jurisprudence Book option for next term (see below if interested), badgering NatWest about the Switch card they’re supposed to send me but haven’t.

[I’m going for Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates as first choice and Machiavelli’s The Prince as second. Discarded Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship and Montesquieu’s The Spirit Of The Laws early on because they take a more sociological approach to the law than I’m interested in, decided against Finnis’s Natural Law and Natural Rights, Dworkin’s Life’s Dominion and Mill’s On Liberty despite their legendary status because they felt like ground a little too well trodden, and finally eliminated Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic rather reluctantly later on because they sounded a little less fun than my final two choices, and also because, as Alec pointed out, it might ultimately feel unfulfilling and difficult to take them on without a wider grounding in philosophy.]

Pleasant distractions abound, though. Amazing dinner at Alec’s, cooked by Larry (home-made bread, tortellini, duck, The Mother Of All Chocolate Cakes, wine, some other alcoholic beverage that tasted of lemons). Excitement about Friday’s Tori Amos gig, and Saturday’s outing to Rent. Slight consternation as to how to avoid nudity and freezing in Andorra in a few weeks, note to self: find out about renting skiing clothes.

Today

Today I have walked along a still-sleeping Brick Lane on a bagel mission, and had a leisurely breakfast in a room with a skylight, and jazz, and lovely company. I have ridden on the tube half-blind because I didn’t have my spectacles (this time with a cast-iron excuse for not making eye contact with the guy asking for change: it’s not that I was deliberately avoiding his gaze, I just couldn’t see his eyes to begin with), although once the train is moving the world outside isn’t any more of a blurred rush without specs than it is with them. I have walked home down Gower Street in a quiet riot of sun and blue and leaves, and scrunched through fallen yellow in the UCL compound. I have been rather happy.

Early New Year’s Resolutions

Based on the events of the past few days:

  • I will stop going for tutorials a week late.
  • I will stop going for aforesaid tutorials unprepared, although I realize this is ultimately of no consequence given that I am a week late.
  • I will bother to set my alarm clock(s) for Wednesday mornings, when I have to meet the priests to choose hymns for Sunday. I feel exceptionally rude keeping the clergy waiting and then turning up in pyjamas.
  • I will buy gloves I like instead of going gloveless and freezing due to reluctance to wear my murderer ones.
  • I will never buy Tesco’s vile soya milk again in attempts at health. Self-induced nausea cannot be healthy.
  • I will find music to listen to while studying that is neither so catchy that I end up singing along and bouncing off the walls (Dismemberment Plan) nor so soothing that it lulls me to sleep (Galaxie 500). Unfortunately I think this then means Matchbox 20 but they do say suffering is good for the soul.
  • I will teach myself to like healthy snacks like wheatgerm instead of guzzling Kettle Chips (salsa and mesquite flavour).
  • I will uninstall Dope Wars from my computer. I will also stop publicly discussing cocaine prices and the strategic necessity of procuring assault weapons for use against the police.
  • I will stop getting wound up about things that are ridiculously unimportant in the larger scheme of world hunger etc. as well as pretty damn trivial compared to the problems of some of the people around me.
  • I will spend less time writing lists of resolutions and more time actually carrying them out.

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?)

Real Life Syndrome Strikes Again

I never really mentioned the debating tournament I have to organize for Saturday, my skyrocketing workload or the fact that I have to spend about six or seven hours a week organizing the liturgical music for my hall before, mostly because I don’t like whinging and do my damndest to refrain from it, but this week I think the proverbial shit just hit the proverbial fan.

But! I am far less stressed than I should be, mostly due to frivolous shopping, decadent meals (Busaba Eathai lunch with Ken, dinner at Mash for Gareth’s 21st birthday), and a Mercury Rev gig tonight – these diversions (oh, mustn’t forget Bailey’s doubles) have done a remarkably good job of persuading me that I still have a life, and therefore I remain reasonably smiley, albeit occasionally wild-eyed and muttery.

And! Once tomorrow is over Reading Week starts, and I will magically combine some solid academic catching-up with more frivolous shopping, hopefully The Homecoming, hopefully The Man Who Wasn’t There, hopefully Amsterdam, and it will be one of the first times in my life I’ve actually deserved a bloody good break.

Operation Get-Michelle-Out-Of-The-House: Initial Success

But then I got lazy.

Thursday’s usual crapness was substantially mitigated by a night pilgrimage to Cargo with Esther for Xen bliss. Lots of fun discovering the joys of frozen melon schnapps shots (topped with Bailey’s), two successive gorgings on fries gloriously slopped with ketchup and mayo, and the sonic smorgasboard that is the Ninja Tune sound unfolding around us all the time. Satisfyingly vigorous stints of probably the most uninhibited dancing I’ve done for a while. An atmosphere I hadn’t felt for ages – that the people on the dancefloor were there simply because they loved the music and wanted to dance to it. Not to look beautiful, not to pull, not to be able to say they’d been to the latest trendy Shoreditch bar. I liked that.

Thursday’s exertions necessitated a restful Friday night, so the highlight of an extremely quiet night in an eerily deserted hall was laughing maniacally to the South Park Thanksgiving pageant episode with Zad and Tay, although watching Zad and Tay chortle and fall off chairs was almost funnier than what was on the screen.

The most fun I had on Saturday was doing the Big Issue crossword (party on, Michelle), which really does sound rather pathetic, especially since we somehow just couldn’t manage to figure out “Producer of natural foods” (available letters *A*R*M**) and eventually scrawled FAARRMER.

I think I still need to get out more.

Lots of things appeal. Surrealism at the Tate Modern, The Homecoming, The Man Who Wasn’t There, long sprawling walks around London (which I haven’t done for a while, and rather miss), and of course there’s always frivolous shopping. Also, I suddenly feel like Barcelona or Berlin. Possibilities, possibilities…

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. :)

Working Lunch

Epic fusion lunch with Mark on Monday involved leftover claypot rice with lap cheong (Chinese sausage; Mark popped some in his mouth and asked what was in it, I said probably dog, Mark spluttered a bit), fusilli with pesto, chicken kievs, cherry tomatoes, and mouldy bread.

Other features of lunch included surprisingly efficient planning of Tuesday’s debate workshop, managed far more successfully than all our previous attempts at planning sessions because at those we always end up wallowing in mad gossip and agonizing over respective affairs of the heart – today we were in the dining room and didn’t have the requisite privacy.

We also tried formulating a cunning plan to discourage a girl who’s after him and needs to know she’s barking up the wrong tree (so to speak). One possibility was that I call him a “fucking faggot” in front of her. The problem with this, of course, is that it calls for careful planning and judicious implementation, because otherwise I might end up just looking really, really mean. His solution to this: “Oh, just say you’re post-menopausal…pre-menstrual…oh, whatever, female bits, you know…”

Oh, Mark. I may have spent most of two hours last night shouting “All men are bastards/fuckwits/arseholes!” (with a long-suffering but highly entertained Avril), but not you, never you.