I’m Sorry, I Was Somewhere Else

Something has been wrong. Over the past few days I’ve been grouchy, boring, incapable of holding up my end of conversations, and have generally found any sort of interaction with most of the world extremely annoying. (My smart-arse friends will probably send reassuring emails telling me nothing was different, but give me the benefit of the doubt for now.)

It started with a rut on Thursday due to sudden panic about time passing and my brain remaining empty of Masters-related knowledge, and frustration with my lack of ability to get out of bed before noon. It then passed into a weird dreamy antisocialness, going through the day with minimal mental engagement with the world around me. Like I’d switched off cognition and gone on autopilot. I think the major point I want to make is that if you’re someone who’s interacted with me in the past few days, I’m sorry, I was somewhere else.

I think I’m back now, though.

Flat Chronicles: Kind Of Settled In

The domestic pleasures I’ve been enjoying lately don’t really make for sensational blogging, but I’ll write about them anyway.

  • Central heating finally works (Yay Alec for figuring it out!). Temperature in flat thankfully no longer the same as temperature outside.
  • Basil plant well-recovered from its downward spiral into dessication. (Out of desperation we absolutely drenched the soil with water.)
  • Carpenter’s finally fixed curtain rods (no more fear of death by falling-curtain-rod-concussion) and adjusted height of shower bracket (no more fear of hypothermia while soaping). You’d think the automatic objective of anyone putting a shower bracket into a wall would be to put it at a height at which the shower head could actually be put into it, but apparently not so with whoever did it for this flat. Unimaginable joy last night with the realization that I could actually have warm water cascading down me while I soaped, instead of doing so shiveringly while I clenched the shower head between my knees.
  • Bookcase and shoe-rack finally assembled. Shoe-rack relatively simple with only one kind of nail used, but bookcase very complex with multiple screws involved. Much loud cursing when I discovered, after building the whole bloody thing, that the unvarnished side of one of the wood shelves was facing outward rather than towards the wall, but will think up inventive ways to either cover it or exploit it artistically.
  • Very importantly, we have unlimited Internet access. Downloading has begun, along with associated time-suckage, loss of ambition, eventual ruination of lives etc.

I also forgot to mention before, that not content with perpetrating navel-gazing, geekness and chronic social dysfunction only in my own person, I introduced my flatmate Tamara to the joys of Blogger. Unveiling of our new kinky FlatmateCam soon to come. Well, not really, given that we spend most of our time eating, drinking and girltalking, which I suppose isn’t particularly arousing.

Hurt Pride, Bruised Back

A lot got done today, though nothing in completion. Shoe rack bought and lugged (but they were out of desk lamps and laundry baskets, so I have to go back). Textbooks obtained (but I have to go back in search of one more tomorrow). The one thing I managed to do quite meticulously was injure the right side of my body while falling down some stairs. Right knuckles grazed, right elbow whacked, and an impressive bruise coming up on the right side of my back in pretty twilight colours.

I went to mass at my old hall for the first time since returning to England. It felt immensely comforting from the minute I walked in and sat down, but I’m still trying to figure out if that was because of the chapel’s nostalgia and familiarity for me, or because it happened to be the first time since returning that I’d gone into mass feeling unhappy enough to be in need of comfort. A poem got written about it, but as usual I have too little confidence in the quality of my poetry to make it public.

Argos Bliss

Perhaps I will know I have finally arrived in life when my yearly romp through the Argos catalogue ceases to be a source of intense pleasure. For the moment this joy no doubt belies my shocking lack of sophistication because of course only the working classes shop there, dahling. I am nonetheless incorrigible in my bliss. The path to practical necessities like laundry baskets and storage solutions is happily paved with Vidal Sassoon Maximum Funk It Up! hair dryers (a multi-function nozzle for choppy or smooth!), cordless hair straighteners and floating candle sets, and while I fall short of being girly enough to actually buy any of these, I’m most definitely girly enough to love looking at them anyway.

Live For The Weekends

It often occurs to me that if we subjected animals to the claustrophobia, cigarette/weed fumes and extreme noise that is a drum’n’bass club night, the RSPCA would be kicking our asses for cruelty quicker than a dreadhead can say booyakasha. Fabric epitomized most of this abuse, bless it. We emerged aching, exhausted, and probably with long-term hearing damage, and Gareth and me exchanged our regular (and regularly broken) “I’m never going clubbing again” vows the next day at three in the afternoon having just managed to get out of bed, and until now sitting cross-legged is an exercise in pain, but hey, that’s all part of being young and reckless innit?

The rest of the weekend was spent with Alec, newly returned (and unsurprisingly wrecked) from his week in Ireland. Crappy Tesco’s dinner. People-watching Cafe 1001 breakfast. Trawls through Rokit and The Laden Showroom. Strong temptation to buy a “Single Robot Looking For Love” T-shirt/panty set, but eventual resistance because it wasn’t worth £18. Excursion to Argos for bookcase, much love for poor Alec who had to carry it back to my flat. Mass. Pig-out at KFC. Omid Djalili: Behind Enemy Lines at the Bloomsbury Theatre. Sounds like a lot, but didn’t feel like enough, on saying good night.

Lazy LLM Life

As weeks go this one has been a bit of a badly done barbecue. On the outside there’s dessication (too much wine, tea and Coke, too little liquid with actual hydrating ability) and a host of gnawing problems (organizing my room and various personal administrative errands). On the inside there are underattended induction lectures and unmaximised time, mostly wasted in lazy mornings, shameless freshers’ fayre trawling, and reading of trash (Tony Parsons, this means you); stick a fork in it, and it’ll dribble pink.

Music buying opportunities, though, have as usual been fully exploited, perhaps overly so. It Was Hot We Stayed In The Water (Microphones) and Compassion (Broadway Project) are on the way from Django. Sea Change (Beck) is coming from CD Wow. Benny tells me he’s sorted out DJ Shadow tickets, and I’m on the case for the Sigur Ros ones.

I could write more but I must leave to get ready for yet another jaunt to Fabric, which will do little for my dehydration, debilitating music addiction, or weak prioritizing ability, but will hopefully help with my aerobic fitness if nothing else.

Flat Chronicles: Shit Moving Day

Today has been designated official Shit Moving Day.

The enema will begin from Russ’s attic, potentially include Alec’s bedroom floor, and ultimately end in my new flat.

There are far too many dumb cracks (oops, there goes the first one) I could be making here about loads, piles, boxes, messes, etc. but I’ll hold back. Recently I inadvertently disgusted Alec when, while talking about the latest cast lineup for the Vagina Monologues, I described it as “really scraping the bottom of the barrel.” Perhaps I should try to move myself on to higher forms of wit.

Talking Of Many Things

Graduated on Tuesday. Left for Ireland with parents on Wednesday. Fairly insane by today.

They’ve been here since Friday, which is my excuse for this silence. I wish I had time enough to talk of many things: graduation, house-hunting, stupid Americans and gorgeous Ireland to name but a few, but I don’t have time to even begin on any of them, let alone get to questions of cabbages and kings. I’ll try and get something in here when I get back to London on Thursday, but given that I have to sort out extending my student visa and moving my shit into the new flat before I leave for Spain two days later, entries may be fairly sparse here for a bit. I hate priorities.

No Title Possible For Weeks Like This

The week was nondescript except for Neil; frustrating attempts at house-hunting in the absence of my flatmate, sudden awareness of an acute lack of reading material in my temporary lodgings (went through Time Out, Glamour, and two old Vogues in quick succession, finally bought A Confederacy Of Dunces and am chortling my way through it), dinner with Edith where I probably came on far too strong about how much I love love love London and how she should be exploring it day at night despite the fact that she really doesn’t have the time to. Oops.

Saturday open-air theatre in Regent’s Park (As You Like It), then a scoot to Harrow for Tony and Susie’s barbecue where the meat tasted like everything you long for from barbecued meat and hardly ever get. Back to central London by midnight to meet Russ and Gareth and various others for the optimistically-titled Hoxton Festival, which was basically large-scale noise pollution in a firetrap – an experience well worth £2, but perhaps not much more than that.

More Brick Lane bagel indulgence on Sunday – that damn salt beef one is possibly more addictive than crack. Lounging in the sun on a bench in the bombed-out church off Great Tower Street, reading Confederacy. Rushing for mass and microwave dinners before heading out to a pub in Waterloo for what was an enjoyable but rather couply evening. There were 4 couples in a group of 9. I couldn’t decide whether to feel old and boring or as if I was 14 and on an octuple date.

Lots of walking on Monday. From Brick Lane to London Bridge. Along the Thames on the riverside paths. An excellent violinist busking in the tunnel near the Tate Modern – his Bach Partitas were crisp and effortless, although perhaps the needs of busking made their delivery more flamboyant than they should be. Scouring the book market outside the NFT turned up a Gerald Durrell book I don’t remember having read before (The Whispering Land, £1.80). Across the bridge to Embankment, then in towards the West End, stopping in the National Portrait Gallery just because.

But then I ended up spending much more time reading old favourite children’s books on the floor of their current exhibition of portraits of children’s writers than looking at the rest of the gallery’s collection. Everything came back to me with such startling clarity – the illustration in The Borrowers of the door with the safety-pin catch which her father had to use his weight to spring open, the old irritation Mary Poppins books used to spark in me because I felt the way they capitalized words everywhere was Unnecessary and Patronizing, the desolation and bleakness I used to feel every time I read the first half of Joan Aiken’s Midnight Is A Place (they didn’t have it, so I leafed through The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase instead, disappointed. I always thought that one mediocre compared to her other stuff). I searched hopefully for Harry’s Mad (a highly underrated Dick King-Smith book which I think deserved to be as famous as The Sheep Pig) and Grimble (Clement Freud), but no luck. There were a number of other adults cross-legged on the floor with books, but I was the only one unaccompanied by a child.

First Weekend Back

I’ve left it so long, too long. And my cunning trick of splitting my very long catch-up entries into several posts has been spotted by Alec, who has of late been finally driven by sheer desperate boredom to my site since the Irish Times site now charges for access, and his work firewall blocks out everything that’s actually interesting.

But here I go again anyway.

The first weekend back:
Friday splurging at Great Eastern Diner, Saturday Brick Lane bagel breakfast on the way to Hampstead, where we got crepes from the supposedly famous stand and ate outside a nearby pub, and I commented in wonder on the fabulous, fabulous glass of Coke I was having only to be crushingly informed that it was a Pepsi. Highly distressing for me, highly amusing for Alec who retained it as comic ammunition for most of the day. Reading/chatting/ non-verbally communicating on Hampstead Heath, evening at the excellently and hilariously gross The Lieutenant Of Inishmore (when they pick the dead cat up at the beginning and you can see stuff dripping off it, that’s just the beginning). Sunday mass, brief Brick Lane junk surveying and mullet-watching over breakfast at Cafe 1001, lazy afternoon browsing in Waterstone’s and reading all the Sunday papers, this time with real Coke.