Don’t Think Of A Blue Elephant (Tangents Inspired By Love Actually)

A conversation yesterday:
Ken: So, Michelle, how’ve you been doing?
Me: Well, I’ve been having problems resettling into Singapore, and I’ve been missing London a lot.
Ken: Then whatever you do, don’t watch Love Actually.
Me: I’m watching it tomorrow.
Ken: Then watch it with someone you fancy. It’s a great date movie.
Me: I’m watching it with my mum.

Not the most promising prelude to Love Actually then.

Every time I go to the movies with my mum, I always manage to forget that apart from being witty and quirky, British romantic comedies are also fairly crude, or at least more so than their sanitized American counterparts. So there I am in the first two minutes of Love Actually, sitting in a cinema next to my mum as aging rock star Billy Mack gets the words to a song wrong for the umpteenth time and bursts out in a stream of “Oh fuck wank shit arse…” And while she isn’t quite so Puritan as to stand up and walk out or anything like that, she’d probably find it rather strange if I gave into my sudden impulse to sigh in happiness at the sound of those English terms I miss so much. “Wank”. “Arse”. And later in the film, “bollocks”.

Ken was right. The sight of London on the big screen almost physically knocked me back into my seat. The ice skating rink at Somerset House. Panoramas of the Thames. The Millennium Bridge. The Erotic Gherkin. Charing Cross Road. I could smell the winter air, feel the tug of my coat on my shoulders as I stuffed my gloved hands into its pockets, and hear the silence of London on Christmas Day.

The opening and closing scenes of the film make a big deal about how the arrival halls of Heathrow abound with love as people reunite. My first thought: my moments of highest emotion in Heathrow were always spent alone. Forget the arrival halls, every time my plane touched down on the Heathrow runway, I was already bursting with love. In the arrival halls, Russ would usually be there with a big hug and a strong arm for my bags, but the few times he wasn’t, I still walked through the airport, totally alone, giddy with happiness, straight onto the first bus for central London. When I left, forget what I went through in the departure hall saying goodbye to Russ and Alec – at least then I could cry freely. Sitting at the window of the plane as it accelerated and slanted skyward, surrounded by strangers, my face pressed against that tiny oval, and my body turned wholly away from everyone else so they didn’t see it shuddering as I tried to hold back sobs…well, let’s say that’s part of the London experience that wasn’t documented in this film. Unfortunately, it, too, came back to me vividly.

So I sat through this film, filled with scenes of the place I love, sounds of the accents I love, jokes in the humour I love. I didn’t even feel the slightest desire to rearrange Andrew Lincoln’s annoying fishlipped face the way I normally do. Conversely, my usual lust for Colin Firth was wholly overwhelmed by longing just to be walking the same London streets. (Don’t think I don’t realize how crazy this sounds, how mawkishly sentimental, how downright “unpatriotic”. I know.)

And all the time I sensed a creeping dread that at some point, this film had to end. When it did, with those scenes of the Heathrow arrival hall again, and the opening notes of God Only Knows, something triggered a perspective switch, and then only the most rigid control was keeping me from bursting into tears. Because in one week’s time, in the Changi Airport arrival hall, that will be me. That will be Alec. God only knows what I’d do without you. God only knows what I did to deserve you. I have lost London, but I still have so much.

Thanks For The Memories

I guess there’s just no pleasing some people.

For weeks I griped and complained about the fact that my boxes hadn’t arrived from England yet. And now they’re here, I wish they weren’t.

I never thought I would be quoting lyrics from The Tennessee Waltz in this blog, but while I was unpacking, one particular line kept playing in my head, louder and more insistently than the Fugazi on the speakers. Going flagrantly against the optimistic conclusion I forced myself to draw here in a previous entry, that line was: “Now I know just how much I have lost.”

I always intended, apart from living a proper goodbye to London (which I think I did), to sit down and write something about it, but in the pressures surrounding my departure I never got time to. Call it solipsism or exhibitionism if you will, but somehow it feels inadequate just sitting here alone with my memories, I want to tell everybody about what this city, these people, this time, meant to me.

Typical Michellian Disclaimer: What follows may not mean a great deal to people who either don’t know me or don’t know London, but if you’ve ever been madly in love with any other city, that’s all you’ll need to understand. And of course I don’t think London or England are perfect, and of course there are serious problems with them which I was just lucky enough to never really encounter personally, and of course there are things I like and respect about Singapore. It’s just that on balance I swing West rather than East. My attempts at translating jumbled ecstatic memories into dry electronic scribblings may therefore give but a rippled reflection of reality, either through my inadequacies with prose or my tendency towards sentimentality, but here is my goodbye. I pray it wasn’t a farewell.
Read More “Thanks For The Memories”

Last of the summer wine

The entry begins as a flippant comment on how it probably doesn’t do much for my indie cred to be giving props to the new Fountains Of Wayne album, but fuck me, Mexican Wine is catchy, and then I think about a line in the song (“but the sun still shines in the summertime”) which is undeniably vapid when considered in a vacuum, but less so when I realize I no longer live in a place where “summertime” has any real meaning; when I realize the last time I had wine, Mexican or not, was the Saturday of the weekend I left England, when we finally went to Incognico and things were said that keep me going on lonely nights here, when we went to the South Bank and the Royal Festival Hall had been transformed from cheerless 60s edifice into a phantasmagoric Bollywood playground (we missed the stunt skateboarders in saris, dammit) and the night was a riot of colour and exuberance next to which my past two months here can only be described as monochrome.

[I realize this represents a bit of a regression from my recent efforts at perspective. It can probably be chalked up to the fact that I’ve had a shitty week, and the weeks to come offer no respite. But fear not. I continue to see the glass as half full, it’s just that right now I happen to be drowning in it.]

Last night a DJ saved my life

It’s a rare DJ that can transform an exhausted, ridiculously sleep-deprived Michelle in an overcrowded club full of Singaporeans into, well, a happy Michelle, so I guess DJ Jazzy Jeff (yes, Will’s friend in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air who kept going over to the house, annoying Mr Banks and getting physically thrown out) must be one of those DJs.

Before he came on, I was ready to kill. I was annoyed at overdressed people, yet annoyed at myself at the same time for giving in and dressing fractionally better than I would have for a London club (where you could walk in wearing a clown suit and the most anyone would say is “Love the baggy trousers, mate”). I was annoyed at the stupid level of crowding in Phuture, and at incredibly rude people who pushed past others way too violently, or literally just leaned on the people behind them to force them to give way. (Big Bald White Guy, this means you. You’re an asshole, and I just wish I’d elbowed you in your spine a lot harder than I did.)

In the crush of the crowds, I remembered how Russ always managed to protect me, dance behind me without ever hitting me, and look good dancing, all at the same time, and I remembered how far away Russ is now. I remembered Nick and Vish gangsta’ing it up on the empty dancefloor of a Glasgow student union bar, not caring how ridiculous they looked. I remembered trudging painfully up the Ramsay Hall stairs with Gareth in daylight, vowing futilely never to club again and knowing this scenario would repeat itself in the near and irresponsible future.

I felt constrained by the atmosphere of the club, very much a place where people go with people, and don’t tend to strike up random conversations with strangers, and again felt annoyed with myself at the same time for letting them affect me. Coincidentally, the only stranger who struck up a conversation with me the whole night was from England. Go figure. To be fair to the club, and my fellow Singaporeans, I was probably mostly just pissed off because it wasn’t London.

Then Jazzy Jeff came on, and all my acrimony melted away into happy flailing and perspiration. Great selection of material ranging from the obligatory to the obscure, pretty damn inspired treatment of well-known samples and recent hip-pop either through mixing or scratching, some moments of total weirdness like when he played Smells Like Teen Spirit, and always on the right side of the fine line between turntable mastery and turntable wankery. I must admit that his decision to tempt us with the intro of Sound Of Da Police but never actually give us the track frustrated me dreadfully, but maybe everyone else except me is tired of it.

I snapped back into perspective. I was with great company, friends no less dear to me than the ones I’ve left behind. I was witnessing one of the best live mix sets I’ve ever seen. I had a wonderful boyfriend to talk to on the phone when I got back later that night. In England I gained everything and lost nothing. I mustn’t forget to keep focusing on what I gained. I mustn’t forget that I have lost none of that just by having to be somewhere else for a few years.

Two Memories

Yesterday, trying to wake myself up, I put on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back. In the first few seconds London is asked to make some noise for Public Enemy, and I remembered making lots of noise for Public Enemy, a few months ago, in London.

Last night, trying to get myself off to sleep. I put on Sigur Ros’s (), and lay there in the dark listening, remembering sitting entranced as that same opening track started their gig in London, that sparse beauty in the bass clef, that earnest weary voice singing words that mean nothing and everything at the same time.

Last Legs

I just realized the last few times I meant to type “stipulated” in my international trade notes, I typed “stupilated”. Time for bed. I feel stupil.

Some Vice With Your Chicken Rice?

We cooked dinner on Wednesday night for various old friends at the hall. Alec made chicken rice, and I made Thai beef salad. A simple, fairly healthy, fairly nutritious meal combining the smooth mild flavour of chicken rice with the piquancy of the Thai beef salad.

If only such meal-planning and flavour-mixing decisions could be equally applied to after-dinner drinking with similarly enjoyable, innocuous consequences.

The available tipples, mostly what Alec and I had managed to accumulate and needed help in consuming, included wine, vodka, mead, Sheridan’s, whiskey, schnapps and absinthe. After consuming almost everything there the hall bar’s stocks of Bacardi Breezers, Smirnoff Ices and a bottle of Jack Daniels were also raided. In the course of the evening I consumed almost all of the above, as did most others present.

Suzy provided an extremely appropriate cocktail for this evening involving former residents of a Catholic hall. The Weeping Jesus involves absinthe, schnapps and grenadine. The green of the absinthe is the Garden of Gethsemane, and the red grenadine gets dribbled down the sides to represent Jesus’s tears of blood. The instructions on the absinthe bottle say you must always dilute it before drinking, given that it’s 68% alcohol by volume. I don’t think they really meant diluting it with schnapps though.

As I write this (it was written on Thursday) it’s 2.32 pm. As of an hour ago, Chris was still in bed. Alec has taken some Resolve, and is now just about capable of vacantly watching old episodes of Jeeves and Wooster. And I am listlessly trying to tear myself away from this random typing and back to civil liberties and the responses to terrorism.

Moving Out

I’m hard-pressed to think of anything remotely entertaining about the final day of the move out of the flat, except that I went into Waterstone’s in search of a travel guide and instructed Russ, standing outside on a busy street carrying a hoover and its assorted tubes, to “try to blend in.” I could also mention his regular exclamations of “You know what I really like about cleaning? I really like _____” as he hoovered the entire flat with unbelievable meticulousness, scrubbed footprints off the walls, and picked up really gross stuff from behind Tamara’s couch, but that’s not entertaining, it’s just freaky. There’s also the way I packed the 3 little sheep in the box for the ghetto blaster that came at Christmas disguised as a big sheep, but on closer inspection the little sheep looked rather lost and sad.

In general, the day was one of those times where I realized how sheer personal will and capacity for exhaustion is sometimes just simply not enough for the task at hand, no matter how much you mutter “I think I can I think I can I think I can” and wear your superwoman underpants. Sometimes even independent Michelle needs other people. Russ to help me heft stuff to the charity shop, my shit to my new lodgings, a borrowed hoover back to the flat, hours of aforementioned cleaning. Alec to use up an entire bottle of carpet cleaner on our disgusting floors, return the hoover (carrying my laptop and a bag of random kitchen supplies at the same time), give me alcohol and sunflowers before I collapsed into bed.

We all had an 8.40 plane to Italy the next morning. Russ only got home after 1. He had to leave for the airport at 5. He got almost no sleep. He said it had been his pleasure to help me. The other night I was crying my eyes out at the thought of August 3, departure doomsday. Among other things, I was remembering this.

Packing Up

Whew. Handed in the dissertation on Tuesday. Am moving out of flat today. Going to Italy tomorrow to watch Radiohead. Hence recent silence.

The move so far has involved Alec in latex, James hanging out of windows, and later today, quite possibly Russ walking down the street cradling a very happy vacuum cleaner.

There’s something uniquely depressing about packing away the vestiges of a life you love in an empty flat. But at least with all the dust you have an excuse for the sniffles.

On a cheerier, more frivolous note, I cannot believe I am going to Milan (well, Bergamo to be exact, but Ryanair equates the two) at the precise point of time in my life when I have a total mullet head and seem to be going through a glut of Bad Face Days. It’s going to be pretty hard to avoid looking like a tourist.

Mainly For Accounting Purposes

I want to make quick notes about these few days, if only for the fact that if I don’t, I’ll forget how I managed to spend so much money and pass out when I get my bank statement.

Friday was relatively restrained. Dinner at good ol’ Sweet And Spicy never costs much more than £10 for both of us to stuff our faces. We decided to have a walk down to Columbia Road rather than go to the Califone gig I’d been pondering originally. We were looking for a drink, and wavered outside a particular pub. Peering in revealed an almost totally male clientele, and the fat slob staking out the pool table didn’t look as if he’d relinquish it willingly. Alec thought the place looked a bit loutish. Having had an awful day, I was, however, in dire need of alcohol, so we went in. The first thing I noticed was that it was playing George Michael. The second was that the bartender was a little camp and looked at us funny when we ordered drinks. The third was that the one woman I’d seen when I peered in appeared on closer inspection to have rather rugged features and didn’t seem to be wearing her own hair. When we left, everyone was singing “Anything you can do I can do better” and the slob was dancing.

Saturday being the day hippies were staking out Stonehenge, we decided to go to Greenwich for the summer solstice. Or at least, we walked through Greenwich Park to Blackheath, and toasted the summer solstice from the artificially-lighted insides of a rather nice microbrewery.

On Sunday I managed to visit Spitalfields market and only spend £10 (a T-shirt). All was going well, but then that night’s attempts to see electronica maestros Four Tet and Prefuse 73 at Plastic People fell through when the gig got totally sold out in advance, so we went to The Elbow Room instead for two hours of pool and several rounds of drinks. Team composition shifted constantly, and despite playing 5 or 6 games, some partnering Nick, and others partnering Alec, I can’t remember if my team ever won.

Monday was the first Tony Hawks day, which wasn’t the best intellectual preparation for Brand that night. But I must confess my motivations for seeing the play weren’t entirely intellectual to begin with. The Independent review begins thus: “Casting an actor of such extreme gorgeousness as Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Brand somewhat undermines the plausibility and point of Ibsen’s tormented hero,” to which I say undermine away, Ralph baby, you were scorching, which is impressive for any performance in a Norwegian play. (I am actually capable of deep commentary on the play, but I’m saving my deep commentary skills today for deconstructing the respective Canadian, US and German approaches to content neutrality in free speech adjudication.)

Tuesday wasn’t meant to be stupidly indulgent at all, but then I went and read the second Tony Hawks book, and a dinner trek with Alec to the seedier bits of King’s Cross ended up decidedly non-seedily in The Perseverance with blackened cajun salmon on a bed of rocket and cherry tomatoes, eton mess with assorted berries for dessert, and a lovely Rioja.

Yesterday I met Jiawen and Gwen for dinner at Little Bay (lovely, I’ll definitely be back). Today I’m watching Henry V. On Friday Benny’s doing a birthday thing. On Saturday I’m going to the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Tate Britain with Russ. I am fervently hoping nothing comes up on Sunday or Monday. And on Tuesday the damn dissertation is due, whether or not I have finished writing it.