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.

Various Selections From Poetry Daily

There is a bumper crop of beautiful words at Poetry Daily, which I disobediently visit only weekly, but which is almost always a veritable wellspring of names I’ve never heard of, writing words I wish I could write.

Some recent enjoyments:
Love (Aaron Fagan)
Bermuda (Billy Collins)
Gate C 22 (Ellen Bass)
Star (Danielle Dutton)

The Rain In Spain Falls Mainly On The Irish Plain

The holidaying this year was rather different from last year. Ireland with my parents was pleasantly luxurious even if immensely trying at times. I’d forgotten how nice it is not having to share a room with 25 other backpackers and their assorted smells and nocturnal burblings, and the parental food budget was certainly far more nourishing than mine usually is. The tradeoff for this luxury was having to toe the tourist trail line – service staff treating us with an air of contemptuous sufferance, gimmicky stops like Blarney Castle, and way too much colcannon.

But the tour had its moments. At the Bunratty Castle medieaval banquet thingy (also gimmicky but fairly fun), my mother, in mead-filled merriment, started telling the guy in tights how gorgeous he was; later, when he announced to the “guests” that bands of roving brigands were apparently heading for the castle to rape and pillage, she exclaimed “Oh, goody!” I buried my face in my hands and surreptitiously finished off the rest of the mead.

On a guided tour it is easy to begin to take for granted the fact that there will be a roof over your head at night. In light of this, Spain with Alec was indeed a change, given that the only things we booked in advance were air tickets. In trying to find accomodation we therefore soon became very familiar with certain Spanish phrases, most of them ranging from completo to completo, fuck off. But all hiccups were ultimately muddled through without having to resort to “romantic” nights on the beach or me pretending to be pregnant with the next Christ, so all turned out well in the end, yay us.

Quiet Blog Month

It appears that September is the quietest month, at least where this blog is concerned. Last year I spent most of September in Greece and Turkey, this year I’ve been in Ireland and Spain, and in general both Septembers have been exceptionally weak in terms of entry quality and quantity here. It’s not a situation I pride myself on, but what’s done is done, and from now on I should be well able to resume the regular programme of solipsist musings and unnecessarily detailed breakdowns of my time and money management, or lack thereof, that readers of this blog have no doubt become used to.

Phew. I was fairly worried I’d lost whatever legal mind I’d ever had over the summer, but by God this is proof I can still write the long convoluted sentences.

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.