Lovely London: First Impressions

• Everyone hates the weather. It snowed! Sure, it's March. Sure, the last time these people saw sunshine we were all still pondering the likelihood of the Mayan end of days looking anything like this great new film 2012. Sure, sure. But you're Londoners. It's in your blood to cope with this kind of weather. You're meant to relish it, and then come to my country and complain about our weather.
• That's just the way the Tube smells. You know that sour, old milk kind of odour? Apparently, there isn't a choice about that.
• There's less obsession with royalty... Unless you make the rookie mistake of seeing a magazine stand and learning than the royal baby is now the size of an apricot or an eggplant or what-have-you.
• ...and more with James McAvoy. Him! Mr. Tumnus! The guy who played the guy with muscular dystrophy! Goddamn Gnomeo! He's a big shot action hero now and, it would seem, London's favourite stepson. In the past four days, seventeen action films in which he holds a gun aggressively on the poster have been released. He is acting in MacBeth, Hamlet and the Tempest, all at once. I think I saw a cologne in Boots. Now, I don't have a problem with any of this, and he seems like a pretty nice bloke from his Wikipedia article, but all I can say is that I didn't see it coming.

I guess I should've paid better attention to Wanted.

• Squirrels are great and nobody cares. Have people been desensitied here? I don't get it. Can't they see the little hands?
• There are dead celebrities everywhere. William Blake is a bit of a hero to me. His poetry is outstanding. The effect he had on his contemporaries, and indeed on English literature, is rivalled only by the greatest writers in human history. His work is poignant, captivating, political and proud. Oh, right, and he's buried to your left there.
• You must make your peace with limb loss. Have you been caught in those train doors? I have. Ouch.
• Food is better than Jamie Oliver told me it would be. I mean, really. I expected to find legions of pasty, miserable people lolling in the gutters since, once they tipped onto their backs, they were incapable of righting themselves again, WALL-E-style. If not that, I was waiting for some poor anaemic to pass out on me. Well now, I haven't seen any school dinners so perhaps I can't talk, but has J.O. not been in central Londom recently? PRET A MANGER IS EVERYWHERE. And I can't move for the number of Whole Foods. I know it can't be all this glorious but I'm still waiting to see a queue go out the door at Macca's.

First image sourced from here.

 

Long night, White Night

Melbourne threw its own Nuit Blanche. I think this whole world's most liveable city affair has kind of gone to its head. Australian culture dictates that a night out must must must involve booze, lest it be labelled a waste and gay. My charming countrypeople! So what started out as a bright evening of culture and jazz dissolved, by about 3 or so AM, into a distopian day-night with tumbleweeds of empty vodka bottles, Pie Face wrappers and abandoned shoes. I wish I'd taken a picture of the bottle-o because it was empty. I mean it; spirits gone, two little miniature bottles of bourbon arranged thoughtfully on the middle shelf.

 

Aiie, but I am being negative. My own White Night was... multi-faceted. That has to be the word. Highlight of highlights: I saw Cent une tueries de zombies (have a look if you don't mind the gore). 101 zombie deaths cleverly edited into 40-something glorious minutes. Not for the faint of heart. (They even included my favourite zombie death, but be warned: this video is graphic.) I also got to see Flap!, the very best live outfit in Melbourne, perform, which was excellent as always. They have this way with an audience; it's hard to describe. Every time I've seen them (and I admit, there have been a few) it takes about three songs for them to win the crowd completely over. You know the kind of person you don't actually know, but feel close to and want to buy a pony for? That's this band. They're good value folks.

After the zombies and the music it was getting towards that eerie stage I told you about. I'd said goodbye to J and IMJ (soft!) and just sort of wandered. Things get very strange for me when I'm low on sleep. I don't remember much, but I have distinct memories of trying to walk toe-heel instead of heel-toe. What can I say? In the immortal words of Honey Boo Boo Child, girl's gotta get her beauty sleep.

I resurfaced at 6am, ate too much breakfast (cold scrambled eggs, bleagh) and went home, then to work. Probably should have had a lie-down beforehand; probably shouldn't have drunk six espresso shots in half an hour. Was it all worth it? You know, I think so.

 

Eternal Brunchtime of the Constant Dine

I figured that, after quitting my jobs (oh joy! oh bliss!) I'd have time to do all sorts of things I used to enjoy; you know, sleeping and smiling and breathing. But -- my God, and I never thought I'd say this -- being a Lady Who Lunches (my ultimate career goal, no lies) is damn hard work. Not only have I had to brush my hair, but I've been flat out, going from one cafe to the next. In the last week, I've had more flat whites than I've seen in a season.

It's been so lovely to see everyone. I didn't realise I had so many sensational people in my life until I started saying goodbye to them. I didn't realise how much I'm leaving behind, really. It must be that cliche of leaving and appreciation and lack thereof.

It still doesn't feel real. I suppose it will when I'm being rained on in Hyde Park -- ooh, actually, writing that gave me a bit of a chill -- or being rained on at Portobello rd, or even being rained on in BHS as I try to piece a life's worth of linen together.

Thanks to the magic of scheduling, it's exactly (exactly) a week until I leave. And once I'm over there, I'll have lots of exciting things to say. How thrilling! See you then, if not sooner.

Sarah Illenberger's watermelon

 

Collins Quarter

 

For everything else there's MasterCard

via Instagram

My UK visa's been approved! Now there's nothing between me and London (except a month or so and Abu Dhabi).

In celebration, I think it's time to tell you all about my fortnight-long love affair with England, in May last year. Much like The Bridges of Madison County, it was passionate and intense, will last me the rest of my life and resulted in a dress I never wear. Unlike The Bridges of Madison County, it wasn't God-awful drivel. I was in London and Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford and had such a lovely time that even thinking about it makes me giddy.

I'll start at the beginning. Throughout my senior years at high school, my teacher (and, later, my friend) M (or Ms S, depending on the year) coaxed me into public speaking competitions; you know, stand up, cue cards, disproportionate amounts of passion. It's an awfully good thing she got me into it, though, because it turned out that I wasn't actually rubbish. In fact, I was doing rather well for a while. My crowning glory was the Plain English Speaking Competition: I won the state final and went on to represent Victoria at Nationals in Sydeny, where I met some excellent people and was interviewed by a hero of mine. Anyway, the impromptu topic was a dream and the judges took a shine to my laissez faire attitude towards presentation, and suddenly I'd won the competition and was going on to represent Australia in London. Needless to say, that was pretty exciting.

May rolled around and off I went. There were a little more than fifty countries represented and we spent our time frolicking about Westminster and the equally noble Queen's Ice and Bowl (turns out Bohemian Rhapsody is known in all corners of the globe). I didn't come anywhere near the title, but that was hardly the point of it all. A week in London enough.

And I could go into how great that week was, but you don't want to read that many paragraphs. Just conjure up all those glorious cliches about eyes opening and friendships forging; you get it.

That's me in the centre, casually throttling the future President of Mexico.

The weather was hilariously good (how often is English weather preferable to Australian?) and my little family took off to go exploring. I mean, goddamn, there were bumblebees; real ones, all fat and fuzzy and slow and wholly unlike those miserable speedy bastards we have here. Our time in Bath was enough to make me want to relocate. Everything matched! It was great! Oxford was equally stunning. We spent a couple of days at a haunted house, too, where we'd stayed for Christmas a very long time ago. (No ghosts, but not for lack of trying. Did see a rabbit though.) The only let-down was the Roman ruins we visited, but I think the lesson -- plan your ruin visits ahead because some are underwhelming -- was enough. And the fields and fields of canola... I understand the hullabaloo everyone makes about the English countryside in spring now.

London struck me as a sort of huge, limey Melbourne. Everyone always said the cities were similiar and now I see it. Lots of bluestone. So, by that logic, London is a bigger Melbourne with better public transport and £30 flights to Stockholm. I once announced to my parents (at the height of my then-infatuation with New York) that they mustn't ever let me move to England; they must absolutely talk me out of it if I tried, too. Clearly, that didn't work out.

Hurr, skurrl.

 

Get your act together, please

Well, it's a month exactly today. And not even a good, long month; February, the Tuesday of the year. Sort of eerie to think that, at almost exactly now in a month, I'll be twitching about, sleepless and anxious, chasing up the thousand loose ends that will doubtless appear the moment before I move to London. Damn, the closer it gets the more I'm sure something unexpected with eventuate and it'll all collapse and never happen. It seems like too big a thing to happen to me.

What's been going on in the interim?, I hear you shout. Well, stunningly little. Hate my job. If I didn't know I was quitting so soon I'd quit. (They don't know I'm leaving, by the way. Terrible me!) Honestly, the sight of anything in the bread bin at home makes me very uncomfortable. A bakery has to be the worst place for a person terrified of burns and disgusted by mornings to work.

With most of my Serious Travel Things (visa, flights, job, home) taken care of, I'm happy to procrastinate through the rest and spend my off-time watching TV. We don't even have Netflix in Australia, you know, so I'm at the mercy of whatever's on. Sometimes this is great (Bargin Hunt, QI, Poirot) and sometimes this is dreadful (My Kitchen Rules). All this QI, incidentally, hasn't been helping my Alan Davies stress dreams. (They're awful. I wake up in a panic because I don't have enough money to buy that wretched farm in Kent he pushed on me, or because I've forgotten to fill in that form he needed. It's bizarre. I must associate him with England or something.)

All this rambling, aside from beng demonstrative of my current state of mind, is my way of announcing that I'm back. I'm back, and I'm getting my act together (maybe).

A quiet moment

Dropping in (to my own blog, hm) to let you know that I'm going to take a moment off from blogging. I know that this is such a scummy thing to do -- not to mention atrocious timing seeing as my blog is, well, basically brand new -- but I just don't have the energy or content. I don't want to create rubbish for you; I want to write quality, and if I can't then I see no point in continuing. Recently, I've been working two jobs, trying to sort out my visa, university, the old, uh, move 20,000-odd kms away... It's taxing. I hope to be back by mid-Feb at the latest with more WitW (do you actually like that?), moving to London things, photographs of buildings and maybe even nnneeeewwww cccooonnttteeeennttt (substitute in your own wiggly fingers and ghost accent). In the meantime, here are pictures of great actresses with ravens from my Pinterest.

See you soon!