Back In London :) :) :)

Potential transit woes disintegrated when Russ, in his usual Russness, decided that he felt like picking me up from the airport at 6.30 am, driving me across London and hefting my very heavy suitcase everywhere it needed to be hefted. My best friend rocks.

After unpacking and showering off 13 hours worth of flight lint, and lunch with Mark at Newman House, I’m here in the computer room when I really should be at the bank trying to explain that I couldn’t possibly have spent £30 in Harts the Grocer in July 2000, not having been in the country at the time (long dismal customer service failure story which I’ll spare you). But what the hell, it’s a beautiful day, I’m high on lack of sleep and London love, and the best part of the day hasn’t even come yet.

City, please release my yuppie scum punctually at five. It’s been a bloody long month and a half without him.

Neverwhere

I re-read Neverwhere, after chatting to Luke, who was reading it for the first time. I love this book quite madly, probably due to the combination of loving Neil Gaiman and loving London madly as well.

I love the way the hugely different worlds of London Above and London Below overlap, yet don’t quite merge, at stations of the London Underground. The Gap is a ravenous predatorial pouncing fog if you’re from London Below, as opposed to the minor hazard we’re told to Mind by a disembodied voice that’s become background noise to most of us. If you get off at British Museum (long-closed to London Above), ads for moustache wax and two shilling seaside holidays are still plastered on the walls.

There’s something about London, and the London Neil Gaiman presents in Neverwhere, that makes it almost easy to believe that in London Below there are black friars at Blackfriars, an actual angel in Islington, shepherds in Shepherd’s Bush who you should hope you never have to meet, Coke and chocolates from platform vending machines are served if you are a guest at Earl’s Court, and you have to get to the floating market at Harrod’s (the previous one was in Big Ben – it floats from place to place) by crossing Night’s Bridge.

The Week In Words

Every now and then you need a day of doing nothing, and that day is today. It’s been a week of always feeling the need to be doing something or other, keep moving Michelle, don’t waste the time you have here before you leave, get the most out of that Travelcard, but today – today calls for nothingness. For the first time since I got back from Germany the weather is fairly blah and hasn’t lured me outdoors. I’m mildly headachey and sore-throated from dehydration and a lot of sun at Wimbledon yesterday, and want to get over all that before I go to Xen at Cargo tonight. There’s also laundry. What probably seals it is that a gunman has taken someone hostage in the Amex building and most of central London is sealed off, so there you have it.

The morning has been lazy, with tea and Xfm and Don Camillo Meets Hell’s Angels (Giovanni Guareschi), which I discovered in Spitalfields market on Sunday and bought with glee, having read and loved most of the other books in the same series, but with all that out of the way and the laundry hung up to dry, I’m finally in front of the computer. I want to write about last week, but much like my record of the last week in Singapore last summer, it’s likely to bore anyone but me.

Tuesday:
I spent half an hour in silent prayer before the Lord in St Anne’s Church (off Brick Lane). This wasn’t exactly voluntary – Alec got the mass time wrong, so we were half an hour early – but turned out to be welcome. I’ve had a lot to be thankful for lately. Dinner was in Eat And Drink, because I was craving Chinese food – they do rather good sweet and sour fish, for anyone who’s interested.

Wednesday:
There’s something really endearing about the graffiti in and around Brick Lane, but I’ll save that for another day when I can upload pictures. I had lunch in Cafe 1001, great for people-watching and toasted foccacia sandwiches, but my cherry smoothie tasted mostly and strangely of banana. The evil, evil Laden Showroom wheedled me into parting with £30 for a pink appliqued skirt after trying on and reluctantly rejecting what must have amounted to at least £150 of other clothes. As I paid I half-expected to see the cash registered displaying “Soul” along with Visa as an accepted method of payment.

We wandered into Shoreditch after dinner, mingling with the mulleted at The Bricklayers’ Arms before try-out night at the Comedy Cafe, where Ria turned up wholly unexpectedly, complete with ukelele, as part of the lineup. She was great, but I don’t know if I’d go to a lot more try-out nights. The embarrassment I felt for other people who were failing miserably was so acute it was uncomfortable. A surreal gag I rather liked came from a guy who said a woman came up to him at a bar one day and said she’d love to have his children because his head was so small.

Thursday:
I couldn’t find the new Reckless Records outlet or the Ben Christophers gig, which were the two reasons I went to Camden in the first place, but Music And Video Exchange helped to ease the frustration by providing me with Rock Action (Mogwai, £5) and Morcheeba’s contribution to the Back To Mine series of compilations (£8). Singapore Sling’s Hainanese chicken rice was passable (chilli more piquant than is authentic, but rice and chicken tasted comfortingly familiar). Also, Alec acquired new ammunition for his long-running “People who share Michelle’s music taste are losers (this obviously includes Michelle)” campaign with the cancelling of the gig, so a good day was had by all.

Friday:
I spent early Friday morning watching England meandering out of the World Cup, although it was quite hard to actually make out what was happening in the game while peering at a small, distant TV in a packed pub through the space between some guy’s armpit and the game machine he’d propped his arm against.

Actual game aside, I do always feel that the cosy atmosphere of total and cheerfully irrational bias makes watching football in a pub an experience and a half. When Ronaldinho got sent off, the TV commentator observed that he’d helped make Brazil’s first goal, scored their second, and commented on the irony of him now being sent off. The pub crowd generally confined their observations to “SEND THEM ALL OFF, THE FUCKERS!” When Rivaldo was hamming it up after a tackle by writhing excessively on the ground, the commentators remarked on this as a growing trend in international football, and brought up other instances of such conduct by the Brazilians earlier in the match. A guy in the crowd was more succinct with the simplicity and forcefulness of “CUNT!”

Lunch was indulgent (Carluccio’s with Tamara). Tea equally so (Valerie’s Patisserie with Victoria and Jolene).

The calorie overload was to prove useful later while dancing in the rain to Orbital at Somerset House, which, without going into long rambles about transcendental quintessential summer experiences (because I’ve done that too many times already), was one of those transcendental quintessential summer experiences. It was pouring down while they did The Box, driving, insistent, intense rain, just like the song. Strobe lights in the downpour, flashing off the sedate stateliness of Somerset House. That familiar feeling in the back of my head: remember. Remember.

Back To The Good Life

I hate it when I want to write on this site (by this I mean a fairly specific volition in terms of particular words, phrases, descriptions of events rather than a vague write-somethingness) but don’t have the time to. By the time I manage to get down to it, the entry feels crammed and stilted rather than evocative of anything I actually did want to record and remember.

We got back from Germany on Monday night (I really do mean to put my travel journals up here. Really. Summer project). Well-meaning Alec had cooked me a dinner of stew that prominently featured sausages (which I’d managed to avoid in Germany through careful effort), accompanied by some sparkling wine he introduced with “This is horrible, you’ll love it.” And that’s when I truly knew I was home. :)

The week from then to now has been a fairly satisfying mix of mostly practical mornings and mostly frivolous days. (Which will be written about in due course. I truly am resolute. Except that right now I need to go have a haircut…) However, in the midst of obscenely indulgent lunches and teas and inordinate amounts of time looking at flouncy girlie things, I was pleasantly reminded today that I was once an intellectual being well worth my black turtleneck sweater – the law faculty wants to publish my Bentham dissertation in the UCL Jurisprudence Review, which means that most of April was actually worth the pain.

When life has been this good to me lately, am I a pessimist for wondering where and when the fall is going to come?

Very Short Update

Am going into periodic paroxysms of coughing in the computer room, and am getting tired of those furtive “Have I had that TB jab?” looks in the eyes of its other occupants.

Met Jared on Friday for rather shitty dinner at ULU (my fault, sorry Jared) but far more enjoyable drinks and conversation outside the Jeremy Bentham pub. Will be following his Eurotrash odyssey with interest.

Spent Jubilee weekend in Cornwall with Alec – great. Caught cold smack in the middle of Jubilee weekend in Cornwall – not so great. Hence coughing. Hence retreat now, back to warmth and love of duvet.

Bart Davenport/Homescience/Amazing Pilots/Ladybug Transistor (The Arts Cafe, London)

On Saturday people on the boating lake in Regent’s Park may have been pleasantly reminded of the age of imperialism by the sight of a small yellow girl rowing a tall poncily reclining white guy round the lake, although Alec had admittedly rowed me round the lake for the previous 45 minutes, and the Irish arguably have as much cause for resentment about imperialism as us yellow people do.

At night I’d decided to indulge my delusions of indieness by going to a gig at the Arts Cafe. We had a good time, but I ended up enjoying the performance of Bart Davenport (who wasn’t even advertised) most, and Ladybug Transistor (the only band I’d actually heard of) least. In between those two were Homescience (not the most cohesive or animated performers around, but their songs were mildly Pavementy so I liked them well enough) and The Amazing Pilots (who were, in contrast, incredibly cohesive, really got into their performance, and had much better rapport with the crowd, but whose songs were for the most part less interesting except for one called I Thought About It And I’ve Still Not Changed My Mind, which lived up to its rather great title).

Alec bought Bart Davenport’s CD on the strength of what he managed with just the quality of his voice, his songs, his guitar and the occasional kazoo, but it turned out to be disappointingly glossier – a bit too sunkissed and xylophoney – than what we’d been expecting from the performance. Still pleasant enough though, and well worth looking up if you like Summer Hymns or Yuji Oniki, who produced some of the CD.

There was nothing I specifically disliked about Ladybug Transistor, but there seemed to be a sameness to all aspects of their performance and their songs that didn’t capture me at all. In response to the last sentence of this review at Pitchfork, I guess I do just prefer the less sophisticated and trippier ways of channelling 60s sound that the Elephant 6 bands come up with (which reminds me, must go listen to my Olivia Tremor Control CDs for maximum summerness).

Spread Eagle Surprise

Friday was meant to be practical day. It was meant to involve writing heartfelt treatises about why a Masters in Law, and particularly subjects like International And Comparative Commercial Arbitration, would give me mojo. Instead I found myself staring up at the Cutty Sark and chasing an elusive meridian line across Greenwich Park with Luke. As you do.

Later, with a dead phone battery, I was in Shoreditch trying to find a public phone to call Russ about meeting up in Herbal. Walking down the street, a pub door opened and a man came out. Right, I thought, pubs are good for public phones, and so I strode in. In hindsight the fact that all the windows were frosted should perhaps have warned me that The Spread Eagle was a pub where the line between public and private was somewhat blurred. Specifically, the line between women’s privates and the male public. Hindsight is always 20/20, so they say, and here I did indeed sight several ‘hinds’ with disturbing and unlooked-for clarity before beating a hasty retreat to a pub where everyone was fully clothed.

Herbal was enjoyable enough, except that the diversity of the music in the Ninja Tune room meant that we didn’t always feel like dancing to what was being played. Also, getting a split lip from an accidental hit on the dancefloor (miscellaneous wanker dancing way too vigorously for reggae) wasn’t too much fun. While spitting a lot of blood into the sink, I remembered primary school health education tests where you had to memorize the functions of the different teeth. Mrs Ang was right about incisors, although at the time I think the point she was trying to make was that it was naughty to bite people.

Goddess Of Small Things

The details of my life seem that much more shallow sometimes when I try to write them down here, but for me buying a lot of CDs, endorphin-level-wise, is right up there with beautiful sunsets, belly laughs, MSG, and a warm man. Well, maybe not quite as good as a warm man, but anyway, it feels damn good.

So on Thursday I bought:

  • Since I Left You (Avalanches, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Spoonface (Ben Christophers, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Good Morning Spider (Sparklehorse, £8.99, Reckless)
  • Fog (Fog, £6.99, Reckless)
  • Black Whole Styles (Big Dada compilation, £7.99, Reckless)
  • cLOUDDEAD (cLOUDDEAD, £5.99, Selectadisc)

Yeah.

Dinner with Alec and his dad was inevitably stressful and toothachesome from holding back my usual stream of inappropriate comments and smiling a lot, but it was well worth it for the valuable ammunition of embarrassing Alec stories gained.

Back in my room, I snuggled up in bed with cherry juice and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal), which I found very much more tragic than ‘omedy, as opposed to the You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! type review excerpts it had on the back cover and elsewhere on the Web. When I closed the book the light outside was long beyond Prussian blue and well on its way to eggshell.

Happy Ending

I’ve only just come to the stage of post-examness where writing for the blog begins to feel like a growing necessity rather than the enforced sidetrack from Getting A Life that it would have been in the past few days.

There is nothing wild or bacchanalian to report. Company Law went much better than I’d expected, and I left quickly after exchanging a few perfunctory words with the few people I actually talk to in the course, nothing of substance; there was no feeling of Here Ends Undergraduateness (assuming I pass), no lump in the throat.

It’s an illustration of my general lack of connection with the social aspects of the law faculty, I guess, even if I will miss the lady in the cafe who worried aloud that the owner of the purply coat left behind (mine) would be cold and since then always reminds me to take it with me when I leave, the lovely Irish security guard who always tried to calm me down every time I was desperately apologizing that my debating tournaments were keeping him there overtime (we always got him some whisky to make up for it), and strangely, the roadworker on a long-term job on the road to the faculty, who chats me up every time I walk past and tells me I’m pretty even when I look bloody awful.

I grabbed a Time Out, a Marks & Spencers lunch, and made a long list of things to do, both practical and frivolous. I went shopping – the makeshift stall on Goodge Street again proved itself an unlikely treasure trove when I found Adventures In Foam (Cujo, 2 CDs, £10), reeled back in disbelief, and snapped it up hungrily. Oxford Street yielded two skirts and a garish top.

Last year the night the exams ended was celebrated in typical style – dinner, pub, club till dawn. This year I had dinner with just Russ (in Carluccio’s, which I loved. Can’t wait to try the one in St Christopher’s Place). It felt right, celebrating the end of my undergraduate life at UCL with a friendship which I count among my most important achievements at university. I didn’t feel the need for anything more glamorous.

Insensitive

The exam venue was a large room which is usually a stomping ground for rampaging medical students (in their UCL Union building on Huntley Street. Thursday nights here are epitomized by mass karaoke and wild table dancing.) I think it was a bit insensitive to leave the Time Crisis machine in there when converting the room to an exam hall.