Discrete little chunks of Thursday,

Discrete little chunks of Thursday, that weren’t goo-worthy in themselves, seem to have joined forces in the night and put the goo whammy on me this morning:

A beautiful day.

The frivolous yet immensely happiness-boosting pleasure of wearing a new belt with an outfit it looks really good with.

Lunch with Alec (on study leave) at Ikkyu and half-pints afterwards at the Duck And Dive. Realising how rare this otherwise mundane pleasure was – being with him in sunlight, in the middle of the week.

Good progress on immensely boring essay (the concept of technical content in determining patentability of inventions) in the afternoon despite the stealthy beginning of a goo onslaught of distraction (which finally culminated today).

A breathtakingly efficient visit to the law library, photocopying journal articles and cases like a maniac, but organized!

Gig at the Water Rats pub on Gray’s Inn Road, which I have somehow managed not to find out about during four years in this area, a feat for which I deserve much indie derision. Great venue, and damn good performances (to be described in further detail later along with how I managed to fit most of my LEG into my mouth while talking to one of the bands). Slight attack of grouchiness before the gig due to hunger and annoyance at our joint indecisiveness, but that disappeared once I was in there with loud raucous music and a Snakebite in my hand. It’s easy to make me happy provided you can stand the things that do the job. Somehow, despite hating most of these things, Alec still manages.

Late dinner in cheap cheerful Chinese on my road.

Bed.

Breakfast.

And there you have it.

Rastaporean

People who have independently, and without prompting, insisted that I am from the Caribbean, despite my strenuous arguments to the contrary:

  • The guy behind the enquiries desk at NatWest the day I walked in to sign up for a student account in 1999. He was from the West Indies, and assured me I was too.
  • A guy who came up to me after I had spoken in one of the UCL Debating Society’s weekly debates. He was cute, and I was mildly disappointed that he didn’t profess interest in more than my accent. “Hey, good speech. Where are you from, by the way? You sound like a Rasta.” Somewhere later on in the conversation, he asked if I smoked (I had a feeling he wasn’t referring to Marlboros), and left soon after I said I didn’t.
  • A guy in a hiking group in Cappadocia, Turkey. He spoke with Received Pronunciation and had coincidentally done his Masters at UCL. He narrowed it down to Trinidad.
  • My Jamaican landlady. She laughed uproariously at everything I said (this was before she recently informed me I was the most difficult tenant in the entire building. There is now little love lost between us, mostly because she is a confrontational, defensive – those two words seem like opposites, don’t they? Not with her – unreasonable cow with selective amnesia and deliberately adopted attention deficit disorder, in that she refuses to listen to you when you are trying to recount the detailed conversation you had with her in the past but which she now denies ever happened) and repeated it, highlighting my apparently unmistakable Caribbean lilt. She also went with Trinidad.
  • A guy behind the counter in Jessops, on Wednesday. No prizes for guessing where he was sure I had been born or at least lived a sizeable part of my life. He kept trying to guess where I was really from. I gave him the following clues: Not North or South America, not Europe, not Africa, not Antarctica, not Australia; the biggest continent (at which point he finally guessed Asia); not Malaysia, but a place very nearby; very small, very high-tech; starts with Ssssssssiiiiinnnnngggggg, at which point he finally managed Singapore. For some reason we briefly got into conversation about hip-hop clubs. He likes Subterania.

I am a small yellow girl. I lived in Singapore for the first 18 years of my life, and have been in London since. I have never been to the Caribbean, but apparently I’ll fit in if I do.

Meet Mr Ass

The culprit has been apprehended: none other than the boyfriend formerly known as Alec, now to be referred to here as Mr Ass for the near future.

The shameful facts emerged over dinner at Viet Hoa (the crispy pancakes fall miserably short of Song Que’s dizzy heights, but the rest of the food was fine).

Harsh retribution was swiftly dealt out by demanding that he buy me my favourite cocktail (it involves creme de menthe, Bailey’s, Kahlua and something else I can’t remember) at Bar Kick, after which I defeated him with relish at table football.

Last night I slept the sleep of the just.

Chutzpah!

On Saturday night I thought we were being courageous by braving Finsbury Park (we went bowling, trendy hipsters that we are), given its reputation for street and violent crime, and recently, fomenting terrorism. And then these Orthodox Jews strolled in and signed up for a lane. Respect.

Action!Michelle Upstaged

In conversation with John, I unveiled the new and improved Action!Michelle, proudly brandishing this week’s lindy-hopping and yesterday’s swim as evidence of her diminishing slackerdom. So what have you been up to then, I asked. Oh, was in London last weekend for the anti-war protest and am surfing in Devon this weekend, Thunder-Stealing!John said blithely. Arse. I must now go and do something like spelunking in the sewers of Hackney or rappelling off the erotic gherkin to maintain Action!Michelle’s market share.

Lindy Time Again

In halcyon days when I updated regularly, I once explained why I love lindy-hopping madly and therefore why one of my biggest regrets about how I’ve chosen to spend my time in London was that I’d let that lapse.

Until NOW! In a recent surge of dynamism I marched down to the London Swing Dance Society’s Tuesday night class, and have since rediscovered the meaning of addiction. Everything is coming back, the sudden sinking feeling in the chest when I realize the hour is over, the little private skip of joy when I realize there’s still the next class to go (I attend both Beginner and Intermediate), the dopey grin I try to suppress in front of the stranger that is my partner as we both move to the music and wait to start the dance in earnest, the somewhat challenging exercise of trying to mentally rehearse my newly-learnt steps on the way home while trying not to give any outward signs of the “triple step, step step, ba di ba da” inner monologue that accompanies my walking.

I’m going to see Amon Tobin DJ at Electrowerkz tomorrow, and am confronted with the strange reality that despite my long-standing admiration, nay, adulation of his work, the night may still pale in comparison to my future Tuesdays in a musky studio dancing to the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

Galloping Update

Have done lots. Fell asleep in Metropolis. Blissed out at Sigur Ros. Romped wild-eyed through Atonement. Improvised a tutorial. And am off to the Cotswolds tomorrow for cheesy romantic weekend.

Some worries: possible possibility of random suicide bomber at train station tomorrow, for example. Russ’s safety in New York. Family in Singapore, way too near Bali.

Might say a prayer tonight. In thanks. In worry. Ultimately, I suppose though, in His hands.

Going To The Dogs

You may or may not have heard the one about the dyslexic atheist who lay awake at night wondering if there was a dog, but whatever the case, they always say start with a joke. I actually prefer the one about the dyslexic devil worshipper who sold his soul to Santa, and should probably say I think both jokes rather misrepresent the problems of dyslexia sufferers, but my point, and I do have one, is that we went to the dogs on Friday night.

We went to the Wimbledon track, because Walthamstow (which is, incidentally, the first place in London I knew a postcode for – fans of early 90s boy bands should be able to figure out why) doesn’t do Friday nights. It was quite a walk from Tooting Broadway tube station, firstly because it was quite a walk, and secondly because it involved walking in Tooting. As we wandered tentatively past a breast scanning clinic on a deserted road, we remembered a very early date when Alec managed to mistake a VD clinic in Peckham for the Old Vic (a rather long and surreal story, but hey, he got the girl) and were starting to wonder if it was all going a bit pear-shaped.

But we finally got there, and got down to brass tacks. We didn’t win the first few races we bet on, but about four races in, we were starting to get the feel of things. After some discussion, we decided to bet on the trio of Beat Them Melv, Mustang Messiah and Call A Copper. I walked confidently to the counter, asked for a trio on tracks 2, 4 and 5, and was somewhat perturbed when the betting coupon named Ravilello Girl, Quick To Move and Baran Magic. It soon became clear that, tit-like, the pair of us had been scrutinizing the form for completely the wrong race. And of course, it turned out to be the closest we came to winning anything the whole evening.

I think I’m hooked.

Attempting Pollyanna

Well, Italy didn’t happen, due to snow. Bugger.

This was rather disappointing, given that we’d actually managed to do a fair bit of planning for this one, as opposed to our little jaunt to Spain, and actually most other holidays I’ve ever gone on. Add the fact that I’d been using the thought of the holiday to keep myself going over the past couple of weeks of essay hell, and am now hard pressed to find something similar to tide me over the next few months. Add the sharpening feeling that my time here is inexorably winding down and I haven’t done enough. Add the general malaise I’ve been feeling over the past month or two that I’m going through a “minging period” (my most recent haircut, which featured extreme fringe action, is now growing out, which means I no longer look like a quirky interesting person with a unique sense of style who cut my fringe that ridiculously short on purpose, I just look like someone who made a horrible mistake while running with scissors).

Add all this up and you have a rather depressed Michelle.

There are, however, Pollyanna moments in the gloom. Alec as SuperBoyfriend in aforementioned depression crisis. Loads of CDs arriving in the post, in bubble-wrapped packages. Schindler’s Ark (Thomas Keneally), which apart from being a great book in the pure literary sense, also unsurprisingly helps to put things in Michelle World back into perspective.

And, and, and, Justin Ruffles, as in way-funnier-than-me Justin Ruffles, thinks I rule! Or at least, he wrote it on his site, which I acknowledge can be a rather different thing. Apparently I have a “groovy urban boho life spent cruising bagel shops, watching films in Swahili and listening to music sung in ancient tribal click languages”.

This is, unfortunately, mostly wrong (well, maybe the bit about the cruising…) and should not be allowed to mislead people as to my coolness, or, as it were, ruleness. My closest contacts with Swahili have been watching The Gods Are Crazy about a million times when I was ten, and having an Irish boyfriend who mumbles. My most boho moments go no further than a preference for cider (oops, that’s “hobo”) and an occasional predilection for subtly incorporated tie-dye. While I’ll ‘fess up to a music collection I do think is fairly cool for the most part, I have just spent the last two hours watching the Michael Jackson interview on ITV, and writing an email about it to other members of the Michael Jackson mailing list I have been a member of since 1995.

Note To Self

Note to self: when one has managed to bruise one’s tailbone through falling on one’s arse while ice-skating on Friday, it is not particularly smart to commemorate this injury by going to a drum’n’bass club that very night, and it is even more stupid to throw caution to the wind and indulge in more booty-shaking at The Roots gig on Monday.

Notes to self, eh? Why don’t I ever listen to them?

Owwwww.