Moot Win/Pacha London/Dom Boots

Miscellaneous disjointed updates:

After spending more time and energy thinking about eyelash-tinting than mentally healthy, I’m pleased to report that we won Wednesday’s moot and are in the next round of the competition. Notable successes of the day included restraining ourselves from referring to Jennifer Lopez’s butt insurance while trying to argue that “Demi Massinger”, the model suing our beautician client, could bloody well have gone and insured her eyelashes if they were that important to her career. Also satisfactory was our efficient downing of Screaming Orgasms and peach margaritas in the 20 minutes we had in the pub before we had to catch the train back to London. A rather fulfilling day.

Don’t bother with Pacha London on a Friday night unless you want to see the tackiest chandelier ever, and pay nearly twice the price (£15!) for half the quality of music you can get in Turnmills. The crowd was friendly and unpretentious, though, which is always good. Even Martini Breath Guy who felt it was very very important to talk to me in order to promote the interaction of Western and Eastern cultures, and who simply couldn’t understand that my name was not Mya-Chung or Mi-Choo or something else vaguely Oriental sounding, was amusing for about ten minutes.

The dominatrix boots have received their first wearing. I managed to teeter quite successfully through the Egyptian and Greek sections of the British Museum, although staircases raised minor issues. Teething problems. I’ll whip these boots into shape soon enough.

Django is showing me love for the first time in a long while. Goodbye 20th Century (Sonic Youth) and Sounds From The Gulf Stream (Marine Research) are hopefully pootling their way across the Atlantic to me. Yay.

Happy Birthday Fabric

I’ve been meaning to say: Happy 2nd birthday, Fabric. I won’t be around for your third, though.

(Which depresses me slightly, even though Friday night didn’t evoke the sheer glee previous excursions have managed. I haven’t quite decided if I’m mellowing, or Fabric’s lost something, but it was, nonetheless, nice to be there with Russ and remember us there two years ago in its opening weeks, our first weeks at university, going to Fabric at 9 pm absolutely determined to get in, talking for hours before we started dancing, me clueless and flailing in my first drum’n’bass experience, him the epitome of non-camp-male-dancing coolness that he still is, walking back to Ramsay Hall in my decidedly unsensible shoes, talking, talking, talking, and two years later here we are, and this friendship has only gotten closer and better and stronger along the way.)

Where Have All The Gorgeous Gays Gone?

Out of all the stereotypical reasons why straight girls like going to gay clubs, the only one that Taboo (at Tanjong Pagar) didn’t epitomize on Saturday night was that they’re full of gorgeous men. I have to say I didn’t find the sight of an entire club full of skin-tight singleted sweaty men with meticulously gelled and almost universally spiky hair particularly pleasant. While I admit to the occasional beefcake weakness, the rumpled intellectual look tends to keep my knees most lastingly shaky. But hey, there was good music, no sleazy gropers, good company (Ida, Yen, Fay, the guys will remain unnamed) and no cover charge, and so I had a smashingly good time.

First Belly Laugh Of The Summer

Clubbing at Eden yesterday with Ida, Rashidah, Addy, Jianyi and Billy. The club is a converted old-style Singaporean terrace house – narrow but long, you can cram lots of them on a street, but they extend back a long way, and many of them have skylights. I’ve always liked them. Anyway, lots of these houses have been converted into clubs and bars on Mohammed Sultan Road, which means that movement through these clubs tends to be extremely linear. From the front of the club to the back. From the back to the front. Not many lateral options.

So we’re all on the dancefloor, which is long and narrow like the rest of the club, and there’s an exceptionally vigorous guy dancing behind Rashid and me. Very closely. Jianyi chivalrously changes places with Rashid. Vigorous Too-Close Guy accepts this philosophically and moves on to me. Billy chivalrously changes places with me. Vigorous Too-Close Guy remains vigorous and too close behind Billy.

Billy’s eyes pop. The rest of us start to giggle.

So Billy decides he’s had enough, takes a “Still vigorous and too close? I’ll give you fucking vigorous and too close, you wanker” course of action, and starts gyrating madly in full camp mode, head thrown back in orgasmic joy, arms raised in limp-wristed exaltation, hips a sinuous maelstrom of bellydanceresque splendour, and the rest of us are cracking up, and in response to all this Vigorous Too-Close Guy is undeterred, whereupon Billy’s eyes pop again and the rest of us start to completely lose it, all sense of rhythm deserting us, all efforts at dancing replaced by spasmodic twitching as we hunched over aching stomachs, laughing, laughing, laughing, and I felt hysterical and helplessly silly and gloriously alive.

Clubbing Protect-tor

Something I didn’t say in Saturday’s Fabric report: It would all have been a lot less fun without the company of Russ, who always manages to be the best dancer in the club, yet never (well, hardly ever) hits me even while dancing right behind me (which is why, yesterday, I only described my experience in the drum’n’bass room as being battered from almost all directions), and somehow manages to keep me feeling safe and secure even as I’m stumbling completely blind through smoke.

Epiphanies

At some point last night in Fabric, blinded by smoke and battered from almost all directions by too many pilled-up people crammed into too little space with music that was probably too loud (although I’ve probably already damaged my hearing enough to have lost awareness of this), I thought about how one day, I might look back on these antics of my youth and shake my head in rueful amusement.

And it will be a sad day.

Because last night, when the bass was so powerful I felt my bones shudder in submission, and the beats so compelling it seemed as if they’d assumed control of my pulse, it was visceral and euphoric and exhausting and uplifting and (shall I use it? shall I use it? It’s way too overused but what the hell…) transcendental, all of those at once, and even though I know there are moments far worthier of immortalization and with far greater depth than a night in a drum ‘n’ bass room, I arrived at one of the many little epiphanies that brighten up my life in the UK, that this was one of the things I came here for.

They come to me at wildly different times and places, these epiphanies. The last one was when I was sitting in my debating society’s annual Foundation Debate, watching MPs engage with each other and the students in the audience in a way that was stunningly different from the sterility that permeates Singaporean political awareness.

They’re not an indication that I will go home to Singapore and look at it as a poor substitute for life in London – over the summer at home, I had similar little moments of clarity when I suddenly realized I was in the middle of something wonderfully unique which I would have to go without during my next nine months in London.

I guess you could say they’re moments when, wherever I am, I am suddenly aware that the fabric (no pun intended) that is my life will be variegated and Technicolored, and I hope I’ll be able to look back on both the glamorous and the mundane and wear it all with pride. At the same time, there’s the awareness of the inexorable passage of time, and how “looking back” will still only be looking back, which is only ever bittersweet at best.

And I am here in London for these three years, and I feel that old, cliched fear, redolent of high-school prom night sobbings and adolescent angst, but still resonant to me nonetheless, that things will never be the same again.

UCL President’s Cup 2001

it’s over! It’s Over! IT’S OVER! IT’S OVER!!!!!

The UCL inter-varsity debating tournament 2001 was on Friday and Saturday, convened and organized by Nick and me. And I’m relieved and overjoyed to report that it seems to have been a success. This time, we were working under far more difficult circumstances than we had been when organizing our first debating tournament in October last year. Dire financial crisis in our debating society meant we had the grand total of 95 pounds to run the tournament on, plus whatever we got from entry fees. We told the debating community about this, said we wouldn’t be able to offer the lavish prize money and free drinks that other tournaments offer, and asked if they’d still be willing to come. Support was significant enough for us to decide to go ahead with it anyway, and now I’m so glad we did.

After running The President’s Cup exactly to schedule last year (quite an achievement in the British university debating circuit), we were determined that this one would be no less well organized. We did, however, end up running late in this one, much to our general dissatisfaction, but many delays were due to forces beyond our control like teams turning up late, and college staff booked and instructed well in advance failing to do what had been arranged. All the same, so many people made a point of telling us they had really enjoyed the tournament, and these are debaters who’d definitely have bitched loud and long if they weren’t satisfied with it.

Another thing I’m proud of was the quality of debating. We had a well contested and interesting final. I’d come up with the motion This House Would Make Amends For Africa. The first proposition team made a courageous and well-argued case in support of reversing the current situation of withholding aid from African countries which allow the practice of female genital mutilation, and eventually won the tournament. We’d tried to achieve a wide variety of motions in the earlier rounds of the tournament, so we had motions ranging from This House Would Tackle The Mad Cow to This House Would Give Saddam A Stroke, as well as the UCL innovation of generally themed debates where anything goes as long as it sticks to the topic given (the environment, this time), and another innovation of our own, where we told the debaters we knew how much everyone liked bitching about motions, and so we’d give them the opportunity to submit their own motions for the third round, one of which would be chosen.

We wanted our tournament to be well-run, well-debated and well-enjoyed. It looks like we succeeded on all three counts. :)

I should, however, add one of my characteristic disclaimers here: despite all this, I still think it was far from perfect, and that there were areas where my organization could have been better. The fact that we had to work with a number of well-intentioned but generally useless morons who are unfortunately members of our committee made things difficult as well, and sometimes I probably let my frustration show a little. So, there’s still lots of room for improvement.

Following in our President’s Cup tradition, we went clubbing after the tournament, and revelled in being completely different people from how we’d had to be during the tournament. JP, Nick’s flatmate, had free passes to the Glasshouse, so that’s where we went. The stresses of the past few days had taken their toll on Nick and me, such that we didn’t really feel up to dancing much, but we were, nevertheless, amused at watching JP’s effervescent antics as we chilled on a couch. After a shivering post-club excursion to Farringdon for coffee at 6 am, we went back to their flat. It’s a pretty surreal experience when you’re lounging in a road-scrounged easy chair, with a huge Bruce Lee poster staring you in the face, Gomez on the speakers, Wall Street on the television, and the all-permeating smell of weed. I next woke up around 8 am in JP’s bed, with Nick scrunched up next to me, JP fast asleep in the easy chair, grey snow on the TV and silence on the speakers.

I notice the littlest, and strangest things when the radical break from routine means I’m not functioning on autopilot. The mingled odours of tobacco and weed on my clothes and hair, defiantly residual even as I walked through icily fresh morning air on my way home. Soggy fur on a dog after it had romped its way through dewy grass. The clack of my boots, too loud among the shuttered shops and empty cafe furniture of Woburn Walk in the morning. The incongruity of sitting in my hall having breakfast in a gold halter-necked top among pajamaed hallmates who would later change for mass, while I’d be changing for bed.

And now it’s 3 in the morning, and as I write this, a blank sheet of paper on the table masquerades as tutorial work for tomorrow.

The tournament’s over. The weekend’s over. Back to normal life.

From Club To Cathedral

It’s been an interesting weekend so far, which probably means it’s going to be a terrible week. This year I still haven’t managed to find that fine line between unwinding from the week and getting so completely unwound that you can’t get yourself together for the next one. In case my mother is reading this, I have to clarify that I don’t mean that in a drinks, drugs and bad, bad men way, I just mean it in a not doing my work way. Which she shouldn’t have a problem accepting, given that I’ve been like that my whole life.

The Gallery at Turnmills on Friday was well worth the eight pounds (the best thing about getting on the guest list, given that their members’ bar vibe was more like a slightly run-down sandwich shop than anything else. Note to whoever does the music: Playing Air, good. Just chucking the entire Air album into the player, not so good.) We were a slightly disparate group united only by the fact that we were all Vish’s friends who all enjoy clubbing, but given that conversation isn’t exactly a factor that defines the success or failure of a club experience, it felt far less awkward than any other kind of social event would have been. Less enjoyable moments of the evening included losing Russ for an hour, which was stressful given that he had my money and keys, and I didn’t fancy throwing myself on the mercy of the various dodgy characters who tried equally dodgy pick-up lines on the nearest lone female they could find. Being sandwiched between Crazy Elbows At Eye-Jabbing Level Girl and Very Sweaty Shirtless I’m Sooo Cool Because You Can See My Calvins Over The Top Of My Well Filled Trousers Guy, as was my unfortunate situation at one point, can also lead you to contemplate giving up the unequal fight for dance floor space and just rocking to and fro in a fetal position. But it was, all in all, a good night. :)

After spending my Friday night in a mother-worrying activity, I decided to spend my Saturday night doing stuff that would make her happy. There was a youth celebration mass at Westminster Cathedral, which most of the people in Newman House, as well as the Singaporean Catholics, were going to, so when I woke up (at 4 pm!) I decided to make the effort, despite the worrying possibilities that the words “youth celebration” suggest. Thankfully, it wasn’t that bad – they did, for the most part, manage to strike a balance between making the mass a little more upbeat than usual and making the stupid assumption that all youth like electric guitars, full drum sets and feelgood but ultimately meaningless outbursts of praise when they go to mass. The marked lack of enthusiasm displayed by the congregation whenever the songs did involve clapping was truly heartening. So there, Charismatics…

So now I’m sitting here with some honeyed water and some, er, ham (don’t ask), with a big bands compilation on, and I’m happy with two well-spent nights. Give me a club or a cathedral, Heineken or honey water, Timo Maas or Tommy Dorsey – it’s all good. :)