Burying Proust

I have decided that it's time to tie up these Proustian ramblings with a red ribbon and leave them be for now. I have recently moved from London to Brussels, so I figure that alongside a new city and a new life, it would only be fitting to begin a new blog, too. Of course wherever and whatever I write, the spiralling sentences of Sir Proust will never fade in their influence, and of course wherever and whatever I end up, I will always remember this little corner of the internet I shrieked and sighed and soliloquised into for three years.

Yours with madeleines and bedspreads,

Sarah

When London Tires...

So I’m moving countries again. After three years, five flat moves, two jobs, twenty two countries visited, one sister moving in, the same sister moving out, far too many awful coffees and far too few blog updates, I’m off to a place where I am certain to feel woefully inadequate with this one clunky language I carry around with me.

Surprisingly, I’m not feeling very pre-emptively nostalgic about leaving London, whereas usually around this time I would be running my fingers along stair banisters saying, ‘This is the last time my hand will touch this place’, lingering by the kettle as it shudders while it boils, thinking, ‘Maybe this is the last cup of tea you will make for me’, analysing the patterns on the curtains wondering if I’ll remember how they looked a few years from now, and generally trying to squeeze as much sentimental value as I possibly can from an IKEA lamp.

Maybe it’s because I’m not moving to the other side of the world this time, or maybe it’s because I feel like I’m actually ready to leave this city. A lot of people will probably fling that famous old quote at me: ‘When one is tired of London, one is tired of life’, but to me that quote (sorry Dr Johnson. I do love your Dictionary though!) erroneously makes it seem as though you have a choice about how you feel with regards to London, rather than the other way around. Let’s just put it this way: I’m not tired of London; London has tired me. Of course sometimes London has made me feel energetic and jubilant, but on the whole the relentlessness of the place has brought on a limescale-like fatigue. It’s white, persistent and flakes of it come out in my tea.

I don’t want to make out like London has somehow rendered me powerless, or that the way people feel can sometimes be completely independent of their surroundings, but I do think that London’s treadmill continuousness and its full-to-overflowing population means that it’s capable of calling up certain reactions and behaviours within you that start to stick after a while.

So I am ready to go, but as the subtitle of this blog should probably be “Written by Sarah the Sentimentalist”, I thought I’d look backwards for a bit before looking forwards, and remember some of the things I will miss and some of the things I will not miss about this city.

Things I will miss about London:

• Unexpected moments of kindness and hilarity in cramped conditions. Once, on a typically sardine-packed peak hour tube from Edgware Road to Baker Street, I found myself nose-to-nose with a white-haired gentleman in a tweed coat who had obviously been out of the ‘tube scene’ for quite a while (if he’d ever been in it to begin with). As usual in the morning crush, the sardines were silent. The only sounds were newspaper pages turning and the occasional muffled cough. It is quite typical for trains at Edgware Road to sit on the platform for a few minutes before continuing, and after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, the white-haired man waggled his eyebrows at me and piped up, ‘Well isn’t this lovely? They’ll be bringing the tea round in a minute!’
• The grandness. Say what you like about London in comparison to other European cities, but when you come from Australia, London will always bowl you over with its vast supply of extravagant buildings. I look up less frequently these days, but the sweeping curve of Regent Street with all its glowing expensive shops, the orange blush of the Houses of Parliament by night, the long streets of identical white terrace houses, the blocky architectural experiments jutting out along the Thames: all of these are just so… grand. Sometimes I like grandness over simplicity. Only when I’m visiting, however. I couldn’t maintain grandness myself.
• The spectacle of life going on: rain, hail or shine. No matter what time of day you venture out in London, or where you might go, other people will always be around. I’m pretty sure that even if you walked down a back alley in Streatham at 4:30am, you would bump into a bunch of freegans going for the same dumpster you had your eye on. I’ve caught buses from side streets in Zone 4 at 3:00 on Tuesday mornings, taken strolls in Maida Vale at midnight and gotten up at 5:00 to catch the first tube from Whitechapel, and there were always people around, getting on with it. It’s somehow comforting to see the swirl of life continue at all hours of day.
• Speaking of which, I generally love those very early or very late times of day in London when you get to see the city emptied of all the hurry and all the haughtiness and all the brouhaha. People smile at you in the street when they pass you at 5:30am. They do not do the same at 5:30pm.
• Brick Lane. You entranced me on my first visit, and I think I will always love you. Just don’t let any Café Neros or Zaras open on you. Please. Stay just the way you are, for as long as you possibly can.

 Things I will not miss about London

• The drudgery of life going on: rain, hail or shine. Yes, it’s an interesting paradox: some of the things I love about London are also the things that I hate about it. It fluctuates. So even though sometimes it’s comforting seeing people milling about even in the small hours of the morning, sometimes you don’t want to see anybody at all. Sometimes you want this city to yourself. You want to walk around and pretend like you’re in The Day of the Triffids or something: London is deserted, you’re the only one to see all the sleeping buildings, and you can twirl all the way down Pall Mall with no one to stop you. Even if you don’t want the centre of town all to yourself, sometimes you just want your own little space. Unless you go home to your thimble-sized bedroom in your sewing-box-sized flat, you will never have that here.
• The way that London turns you into one of those people you once laughed at. When I first arrived here, I thought it was hilarious when I saw people running for the tube: sprinting down corridors, knocking down infants and risking their fingers and torsos to wrench themselves between the rapidly closing tube doors. It was like a sad version of Indiana Jones or something: City Hero and the Race to the Office. Now, however, I have grown to learn that tubes are a little like traffic lights. Just as when you hit one red light you tend to hit them all, when you miss one tube you tend to miss them all. Run for the tube, however, and it’s like getting green lights all the way. I’ve also come to learn that the ‘2 minutes’ countdown on the display boards is not a perfectly precise Swiss 2 minutes. It’s a grossly underexaggerated London 2 minutes, lasting anywhere between 5 minutes and 10. And you see? London is a place that makes you feel that waiting 10 minutes for a train is the absolute height of public transportation incompetence. And you see? It all makes sense because if you have to wait 10 minutes for a train, you won’t fit onto it when it arrives! That’s how it works. In the beginning it all seems absurd, but in the end, you see why people in cities must become absurd in order to function.

My last blog was about my first day in London. When I arrived, I had nowhere to live, no job, no friends, and no idea. Now I have all of those things (well, let’s not get carried away. I have an idea, but it’s only about a gerbil and a packet of skittles), but somehow I’m ready to start all over again. This time I already have somewhere to live, someone to love, a handful of friends and my gerbil + skittles idea, so we’ll see how I go…

A Reminiscence of Proustian Proportions

I moved to London three years ago today. I hear people say the following sort of thing quite frequently, but it really is true that sometimes it feels like I’ve been here a lot longer than that, and sometimes it feels as though I stepped off the plane yesterday.


This may not be interesting to anyone other than myself (but hey, I’m not kidding myself I have hordes of ardent followers for a blog that’s about as ‘current’ as tea-cosies), but I remember my first day in London so vividly I could probably draw pictures of its various parts, zooming right into tiny details like the blonde hairs that grow on people’s knuckles. So, for this blog I’ll just pretend that I’m writing for the dedicated audience I know I will always have: myself (don’t worry, sometimes I’d prefer to watch something else, too. Sometimes I even have to tell myself to stop eating Maltesers and pay attention), even if only to tie a string around my memory for a time when it finally doesn’t feel like yesterday that all this began.

Carmen

I remember the lady I met on the plane from Sydney so clearly that I’m certain I’d recognise her instantly if I passed her in the street. I guess it’s obvious why I remember her so well: because for me, getting on that plane was a momentous occasion. It was the final end point of the year-long drudgery of pouring 1.6 billion lattés, cappuccinos, flat whites and short blacks (incidentally, those last two options don’t really exist in Europe). I was probably ready to latch onto the first friendly face to express an interest in the life I was about to begin. On the other hand, maybe the God of Big Decisions (let’s call him Bernie) had sent her along specifically to make me feel better about moving to the other side of the world without any conception of what might happen to me after I arrived.

I doubt Carmen would remember me. For her, this was just a routine flight back to London; she was actually headed straight to the office as soon as she landed at Heathrow. But I remember her: she was middle-aged with warm eyes, mid-length wavy dark hair and she wore a bright blue blouse. She had a chirpy voice that went on and on like little bubbles in an unwatched pot, already chattering away on her mobile when she took her seat next to me, and still going at it with an aunt or grandmother or something when the plane was reversing out of its parking spot. When she finally hung up it seemed that her conversational appetite had not waned, because she immediately introduced herself (entrée), then asked me about myself (main) and then proceeded to calm my quaking nerves by reminding me that my future was a glorious unknown that I was free to craft in any way I wanted (dessert). After I’d stopped sniffling, I learned that she worked as a colour stylist. That is, it was her job to tell people what colours they should and should not wear to suit their complexions. She didn’t offer any free tips, but I do remember wondering whether she might be secretly judging my outfit, and would later scoff to her CSCs (Colour Stylist Colleagues, although – to be honest – I’m not sure many people can claim this as their profession. I was surprised even one person could do this full-time, and make a successful enough living from it to be able to afford trips to Sydney every few months. Maybe she just had a rich husband, or she owned a prize-winning dachshund) that someone with such pale skin shouldn’t wear so much black and white.

Wherever you are now, Carmen, thank you for being a bubbly reassurance to me on my flight from Sydney.

Covent Garden Imaginings

All I knew when I got on the tube at Heathrow was that I had to exit at Covent Garden. I saw it on the Piccadilly line tube map like a beacon: all the other names might as well have dropped off the map and into the hair of the people sitting beneath them; the only stop I cared about was Covent Garden.

Covent Garden! The beginning of my journey! The station out of which my life in London would sprout! The first place that up until that moment would only have been a name to me, but would soon be filled in like a paint-by-numbers picture as I came to learn what this ‘Covent Garden’ thing actually looked like!

Erm, Covent Garden turned out to be the wrong station. To be fair, my friend Pete (the one London acquaintance I had, who agreed to put me up for a few weeks until I’d found my feet) had told me that he lived there, and hadn’t provided further elucidation on that point. I’d sent him a message on the tube to let him know I was on my way, but it wasn’t until I was perched on my suitcase outside Covent Garden station, feeling the cold nibble my fingertips and watching the morning workers flounce confidently down the cobbled lanes and past the pristine, glass-fronted shops (I suspected, but did not yet believe, that one day I too might know where I was going in London, and might also afford some gloves to accompany me there) and cursing my luggage for preventing immediate exploration, that I finally received a response from him explaining that, actually, he lived closer to Warren Street or Goodge Street. Newborn to London as I was, I asked him which tube stations were closest to those streets, and he responded with a wink, ‘They are tube stations.’

Oops. Two mistakes already. What a good start.

Somehow I worked out that the Northern Line (punctuated with both Warren and Goodge Streets) didn’t run through Covent Garden, so I got directions to nearby Leicester Square and continued on my way. I remember feeling very foolish wheeling my two massive bags down Long Acre, but I’ve since discovered that it’s pretty much only in London’s outskirts where suitcases are a rare species: in central London they’re as ubiquitous as pigeons. Even at midnight on a Saturday in Soho you’ll see someone trundling luggage along. At Spitalfields Market on a Sunday morning a little one will bump into your ankle as a woman tries to find an eccentric last-minute gift for her cousin Yuras before heading back to Minsk. Come to think of it, the sound of wheels clunking along the pavement outside of my bedroom window reminds me of London almost as much as the sound of foreign language conversations interrupted by a tube driver’s loud but incomprehensible announcement. It is a transitory place.

McDonald’s Porridge

I chose to get off at Warren Street, but I’m still not entirely sure why I settled on this stop rather than Goodge Street. Pete was in a meeting and couldn’t come to collect me straight away, so all I can think is that:

(a) I must have been in dire need of coffee
(b) Maybe I thought that ‘Goodge’ sounded petite, whereas ‘Warren’ sounded relatively expansive, so I’d be more likely to find a coffee shop near a ‘Warren’ than a ‘Goodge’

I’m pretty sure point (a) was right, but point (b) was definitely wrong. Warren Street actually had nothing around it apart from that golden-arched familiarity I could visit anywhere in the world: McDonald’s.

From my experience pouring 1.6 billion lattés, cappuccinos, flat whites and short blacks I had developed (and still retain) snooty standards when it comes to coffee, so I opted for a £1 cup of McPorridge rather than a £1 cup of McSwill and hauled my luggage up to a brightly coloured cube seat. By this stage I had been awake for well over 35 hours straight, so my eyes felt like two golf balls that had been rolled in salt, doused in petrol and then teased repeatedly with a faulty lighter. I sat there downing this sugary concoction, willing my eyes to stay open, and blinking out of the window for the one and only face I could hope to recognise here.

Just as I was beginning to hallucinate that all the cars driving by were actually beds on wheels with covers of different colours, I finally saw Pete trotting across the road towards me. I must have been fading fast at this point, because I remember nothing of our reunion. All I remember is that when we made it to the ex-council block of flats installed right next to the BT Tower, he announced, ‘This is me, unfortunately’ (a line I’ve proceeded to use when introducing people to almost everywhere I’ve lived in London). I also remember that…

Tea Makes Everything Better

You’re right, Katy. As soon as we made it inside, we dumped my suitcases near the front door and Pete turned to me and asked, ‘Cup of tea?’ Never in my life had I been so happy to hear this question. It was almost as if he’d asked me if I’d like to be introduced to John Cleese, because he just so happened to be sitting in the living room with a plate full of freshly baked white chocolate, raspberry and macadamia nut cookies. Just like Sir Cleese (with or without the cookies), tea perks you up after any situation. Pete poured me some tea, my fingers came back to life, and the clouds behind my eyes lifted briefly so I could take a good look around at…

The Flat that Hygiene Forgot

My second Proustian post painted a pretty petrifying picture of Pete’s place. In hindsight, however, this so-called ‘flat that hygiene forgot’ was probably nicer than most of the London flats I have consciously chosen to live in (a certain Whitechapel lodging with brawling squatters for neighbours springs to mind). It was sort of unkempt, I guess, but most flats housing groups of 20-30 year olds in London show the way people in this age bracket tend to regress to a pre-evolutionary state while living here. My flat-cleanliness-ometre was probably far higher than it should have been in any case, seeing as I’d also just moved from a place where we had to coax the house to an immaculate state before leaving it for a few hours, lest any potential burglars cast judgment on our apparently unsightly standard of living.

It had a big living room with black leather couches, two shoebox-sized bedrooms, one larger bedroom where the dish-hoarding somnambulant and winner of Flat 225’s ‘Sloven of the Month’ medal lived, a poky little kitchen with blue cupboards, and a mould-ceilinged bathroom with the first light-switch-on-a-string I had ever encountered. On the table in the kitchen there was also a basil plant I killed through neglect while Pete was in Canada. After he specifically asked me to water it, too. Sorry about that.

Topshop and Carnaby Street

The best thing about living on Clipstone Street (W1W, for all of you Londoners out there. What a postcode!) was its proximity to pretty much everything. Once I’d downed my tea and taken a little nap, Pete led me down the posh Fitzrovia streets, around a corner and then straight into the Topshop’s flagship Oxford St store. On any other occasion I may have tried to convince Pete to just leave me there for a few days, but on this particular day I said to myself, ‘You may like those white 60s go-go boots now, but will they keep you warm when you’re sleeping under a bridge because you couldn’t find a job? Hmmm. Yes. I mean, No.’ So we left and continued on to Carnaby Street, stopping to have a pub lunch that cost about as much as I’d saved through not buying those boots.

Midnight Panic

When I went to bed that night in strange room with shadowy London swirling around outside my door, I felt a cold and intense sense of doubt. Nothing bad had happened throughout the day, but I assume the full impact of cutting myself adrift was starting to hit. The only person I knew in this entire country was Pete, someone I’d hung around with for a couple of days as he backpacked around Australia with his boyfriend, and who happened to be leaving for a holiday to Canada in two days.

As I often do when I’m feeling emotional, I pulled out a big pick-axe and started digging myself even further into the cave by putting on the wrist-slashingest songs I could think of. All my favourite songs in a minor key. Anything slow, soft and melancholy.

I’d told myself before I left that I wanted it to be hard. I had told myself that I wanted it to be difficult and I wanted to cry and feel miserable because the harder it was, the better it would be for me in the end. I would have no one to help me out of this situation but myself, and if I got through it, I would know that whatever I achieved was due entirely to my own efforts.

I now felt very naïve for having made this declaration, even if it was only to myself. It’s all very well to be so valiant from a distance, I thought, but now the time has come and you’re lying alone in a shoebox-sized bedroom in this grey, freezing country, with no one to comfort you but Thom Yorke. Alright, alright, I know I could have made a better musical selection. Ol’ Thom may understand what you’re feeling, but he isn’t like John Cleese with a plate of biscuits: he’s not someone you should be turning to when you’re trying to feel better, especially when he’s howling out such ominous lyrics as ‘I can’t do this alone.’

I wondered whether I had really meant it. Like Proust’s array of bedrooms that morph and sweep around him as he sleeps, all sorts of silly thoughts started pushing themselves into my head. Long curly strings of sentences such as: I want to go home, why on Earth did I come here, how pathetic would it be for me to turn around and go straight back? but I can’t go back now because it would be so embarrassing, I’ll have to stay if only to save face, oh you stupid girl, if you were craving a change and wanted to build a life for yourself away from everyone else, why did you need to move to the other side of the world for that? why couldn’t you have just moved to Melbourne? 712.35 kilometres is already quite a long way, but if it absolutely had to be another country, why not New Zealand?! Aussies and Kiwis proclaim their distinct national identities constantly! if it was cultural difference you were after, you should have popped next-door to learn te reo Māori and become a tā moko tattooist…

I ended up asking my Mum to call me, and she did, but somehow I could feel how far away she was. I’m tempted to say that the phone line was bad, but I don’t remember that being the case. As far as I remember she sounded clear and close enough. It was just something about the coldness outside, the sensory overload of Oxford Street, my chequered carry-on bag sitting calmly by the side of the bed. I was definitely here. And she was definitely not. Of course I wasn’t afraid that something was going to happen to me, but I guess what I was coming to realise was that if something did happen, there would be literally no one around to give a shit.

So there you have it. That’s how I fell asleep on my first night in London: with regretful sentences and thoughts of disaster on my mind. Apart from a select few, I think I’ve kept this last fact to myself for the past three years. Everyone who’s ever walked with me past Covent Garden station has been regaled with the edge-of-your-seat tale of my arrival (I got off at the wrong station! Oh, the plot twists just keep coming!), but I suppose I never wanted to admit to anyone that my closing thoughts on my first day in London were about how quickly I might be able to leave it.

Obviously I didn’t leave it. I stayed, and those regretful sentences and disastrous thoughts were good enough to relocate themselves somewhere up near Dalston. I don’t go there, so I probably won’t ever run into them again.

I’ll try not to get too sentimental about all this (as if I haven’t been too sentimental already), but it has been a sunny, rainy, hopeful, hopeless, uplifting, depressing, enlightening, confusing, black, white, hungry, full, turbulent, smooth-sailing, spontaneous, constrained, tiring and energising three years. I’ve grown more than toenails when you don’t pay attention to them underneath your socks all winter.

This may even be the year I decide to move on...

Early Riser

London at 5:00 on Saturday mornings seems like a more contented place. Long lazy shadows stretch out across the empty streets and the stores are all still sleeping: their eyelid shutters down and their chairs all nicely tucked in. The bus doors yawn to let a lone pair of feet step inside, and the pigeons sit all plump and puffed out on window ledges: even the crumbs haven’t arrived yet. The tubes zip along like athletes in their prime, unweighed down by the oversized, fidgety human meals they usually lug along inside their bellies. You can hear every clunk and squeak the train makes along its way: the little noises aren’t muffled by newspaper pages turning or the tinny sound of music in countless white earphones. Even the two people you pass on the street give you a knowing smile as you walk by, like you’re sharing a secret: that sometimes the best time to be out is after the nights and the beers and the high heels and the leering looks and the chandeliers and the sushi trains and the pub peanuts and the rambling conversations and the sprigs of mint in mojitos and the yellow lights on black taxis and the swaying queues and the kebab shops are all over.

A Llandilo by any other name...

Last weekend I went to a place completely new and yet familiar to me. It was a town I grew up in, and yet I had never been there before. All of the houses and the shops and the signs filled me with nostalgia, yet the memories they brought back were based somewhere entirely different. Confused? Let me wash away the incredible shroud of mystery that is certainly encircling your mind after these Sherlock-stumping sentences and tell you: I visited Llandeilo in South Wales, and I grew up in Llandilo, New South Wales.

Much as I love unique tongue-twistery Australian towns like Woolloomooloo, Coonabarabran and Murwillumbah, I spent the first 20 odd years of my life in a tiny Welsh-named suburb best known for being on the way to somewhere else. People in neighbouring Penrith and Windsor, perhaps with a whiff of English derision, claim never to have heard of the place. I guess you’d call it a ‘one horse town’, but for the fact that horses probably outnumber people in Llandilo.

All we have is a fruit and vegetable shop, a post office, a school, a volunteer fire brigade, a fish and chip shop and a Christmas tree farm. There’s also a little church and a little hall which you can rent for your next square dance (call Maud on 7774 3287 to book (but not at 4 o’clock because she’ll be out feeding the horses then)). This sounds like rather a lot, but when you consider that footpaths in Llandilo are rarer than caterpillars wearing gumboots, and that the entire population of Llandilo can probably fit into the hall and still have room to practice their latest hula-hooping routines, that should give you a clearer indication of its size.

It’s hard to say whether it’s because Llandilo is so ‘inconsequential’ that I found this trip so thrilling, or whether I would have been excited even if my hometown was a bustling metropolis, but when I made it to Llandeilo I was grinning like a Cheshire cat who had just discovered a bowl full of mice doused in double-cream. Of course I’ve made comparisons between places I’ve visited before, but nothing like this. Absolutely everything my eyes fell upon sparkled with twin-citied enchantment: the flowers on the street became flowers I was seeing in Llandeilo, the car parked on the side of the road became a car parked in Llandeilo, the delicious wild blackberry I ate off of a bush carried far more meaning that it would have anywhere else: ‘I am eating a blackberry that grew in Llandeilo!’

Before arriving, I had already learned that, just as ‘Wales’ is pronounced differently by Welsh people (they give it two sing-songy syllables so it comes out as ‘Way-yels’), ‘Llandeilo’ is not the smooth-sounding Aussie-fied ‘Landilo’, but is pronounced with a generous injection of phlegm: ‘phllllegm-andilo’. Llandeilo in Wales is still semi-rural, but it actually has far more to its name than its Australian offspring. This meant that apart from smiling at the flowers, cars and blackberries, I could delight myself even further by noticing: Llandeilo has a bank! Llandeilo has cafés! Llandeilo has a town hall! And, bizarrely, Llandeilo has a luxurious boutique hotel?

I’m never usually one for touristy knick-knackery, but here I wanted to buy anything and everything with ‘Llandeilo’ emblazoned onto it. We went into a cookwares store (Llandeilo has a cookwares store!) and explained to the shopkeepers that I was looking for something ‘made in Llandeilo’ because I’d come all the way from the other Llandilo in New South Wales, Australia. And, would you believe it, not only had the two shopkeepers been to Llandilo in NSW, they actually got engaged there. They were British, but lived for a time in Richmond, which is just up the road from Llandilo. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything made in Llandeilo, but they did give me a bag with ‘Llandeilo’ written on it, which I filled with postcards (Llandeilo has postcards! Alright, alright. I’ll stop that now) and some other mystery gifts which will be weaving their way home very soon.

It’s a well-known fact that when British settlers arrived in Australia they deemed the place ‘terra nullius’ (empty land). They then pulled out their giant cattle-branders and stamped the newly conquered landscape with names from home: Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff, Blackheath, Stanmore, Ipswich, Salisbury, Stratford, Warwick, Sheffield, Penrith, Swansea, Lland(e)ilo. I’m not sure whether they chose the names because they saw an actual resemblance to the equivalent town back home, or whether it was just to quash homesickness by surrounding themselves with familiar words*. Maybe it was a mixture of both. If we take the ‘familiar words’ angle, though, I can see from my trip to Llandeilo that there is some comfort to be derived from seeing a word that you know embedded deeply into a patch of land that is not home. The view may be different, the weather may be different, there may be hotels instead of Christmas tree farms, but there is still this glorious name touching everything, and you feel strangely possessive of it and tied to it whether it is really ‘yours’ or not.

I wonder if the early settlers ever thought about the full-circle impact this ‘naming’ would have on future generations. To them, they’d always know the original town first, and its dryer, browner, less-densely-populated equivalent second. To us, the children who grew up in the dry, brown, empty namesakes, it could only ever be the other way around. Looking at the map of Australia in comparison to the map of Britain, we might even wonder why on Earth they decided to stick Swansea just down the road a bit from Newcastle…

I left Llandeilo with a little bag of stuff and enough photos to fill a bathtub. The next stop will have to be Penrith, which is where I tell everyone I’m from since no one ever knows Llandilo. I’m pretty sure the Penrith in Cumbria will have some stark differences to the Penrith in Western Sydney. When you tell someone in England you’re from Penrith they beam at you, angling to score an invite to your quaint little cottage near the Lakes District. When you tell someone from Australia you’re from Penrith, their face drops and they make all sorts of unfair assumptions about you. All those from The Riff, am I right?

*Although the politics behind this process of renaming a so-called ‘empty’ land is something that makes my heart hurt, writing about it would be another blog in itself, so I will leave it be. I will, however, remind everyone that the original inhabitants of the Australian region that became Llandilo were the Dharug people.

Acropolis Now

Earlier this month, I picked up another country to add to my European card collection. I chewed on the powdery pink bubble-gum and stuck ‘Greece’ into my collector’s album, in its proper place before Slovenia and after Andorra.

In card-collecting terms, I guess ‘Greece’ would be sort of like getting Robin in a set of Batman cards. He’s essential, he’s always been there, and his expressions are known throughout the world: ‘Holy smokes, Batman, a sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold’. What? That’s a well-known ancient Greek saying, isn’t it? No? Okay, okay. Let’s replace it with: ‘Jiminy Crickets, Batman, the unexamined life is not worth living’.

Athens is slightly more refined than Robin, of course. It’s been wearing the same outfit for centuries, for a start, not experimenting with oversized codpieces in the 90s. Its monuments are peppered across the city map within easy walking distance of one another, and while you plan your route for the day you get that strange, humbling sensation of heading somewhere where eminently more important people than yourself once went. Surely Socrates decided quite frequently, as I did while I was there, to head up to the Acropolis after he’d finished his breakfast. He licked his finger and collected the last few flakes of his croissant from his plate the way I did, put on sandals the way I did, and strolled up through Monastiraki the way I did. Of course when he got there he had slightly weightier matters to discuss than me. I’m also fairly certain he was never asked by someone with a deep Southern American drawl where they might find the restrooms. No, apart from potentially walking the same path that the bearded man himself once walked, the only other connection I can make between myself and Socrates is that I know that I know nothing, too. The croissant for breakfast in ancient Greece comment proves that much…

I wandered from ancient monument to ancient monument, and once again thought about the stark difference between daily life in Australia and Europe. I examined a Corinthian column that had collapsed in the neat way that sliced bread does when you let go of it, and willed someone back home to phone me so that I might say, ‘Oh yes, I’m just poking around the Temple of Olympian Zeus right now. You? What’s that? At Coles buying potatoes?’ (Part of the point in collecting cards in the first place is to brag about it, right?). I also witnessed a slice of Athenian tradition that would never in a million years develop in Australia: that is, the changing of the guard at the National Parliament. In Australia you can actually climb up onto the grassed roof of the Parliament building in Canberra and roll down it. Outside the Parliament of Athens there are guards dressed in red velvet caps and shoes with massive black pompoms on them who perform an intricate, slow-moving dance every couple of hours. This dance consists mainly of two men moving in perfect synchronicity, balancing on one leg, scuffing the floor with their feet like horses do, and generally providing what seems to have been the inspiration for Sir Cleese’s rather famous sketch. You’d almost laugh if it wasn’t for the guns in their arms.

Of course this seriousness and precision is not necessarily the way that modern-day Athenians lives their day-to-day lives. Aris, our couchsurfing host, explained that most Greek people don’t have much respect for law and order, or – at the least – that they ignore it because they know it won’t be enforced. Everyday life can therefore be quite chaotic. Marc and I noticed this ourselves on the boat trip we took from Piraeus to the Greek island of Aegina. When the boat arrived, there seemed to be no disembarking policy of any kind. If there was such a policy, as Aris had pointed out, it definitely wasn’t enforced. Instead, as soon as the ropes were tied it was as if someone picked up the boat like a packet of muesli and shook it violently over the port: cars, grannies, children, motorbikes, dogs, bicycles, caged birds and women carrying bags of pistachios all toppled out at once. They bumped into each other and honked their horns and barked and zig-zagged their way to wherever it was they were in such a hurry to get to. It was enough to make Australia seem like the most orderly and straight-laced place in the world. We may roll down the roof of our Parliament building, but we take turns to do it.

So there’s a bit of a paradox in Athens. The Parthenon is lit up at night and broods over the city like a stately grandfather, while down below the people shout and bustle and protest. Of course it’s not as crazy as all that, but with the social situation in Greece being what it is right now (I would try to summarise this situation for all those who do not know about it, but I fear it would come out as fuzzy as Effie Stephanidis’s bouffant), it is not as staid as its silent relics might suggest.

After throwing my sandals frosted with Acropolis dust back into my London closet, I blow a bubble and flick through the pages of my card collectors’ album. I’m not sure I’ll ever get the whole set, or which country Batman would be in this analogy, but for now I’m happy with this ancient new addition. As Robin would say: life must be lived as play.

Slovenia and the Fear of Squished Mitsubishis

Marc and I went to Slovenia a few weekends ago, and I drove on the wrong side of the road for the first time in my life. By the wrong side I mean the right side, of course, although there are probably a fair few people who would protest at that comment, claiming that the right side is the right side. To me, left is right and right is wrong. For anyone who doesn’t drive, I guess it could be described as like playing a game of poker through a mirror. Not a normal mirror though; a mirror like those theme park ones that are all warped and make you look like you have a really skinny forehead and really fat knees. You remember the rules, but everything is backwards and the cards seem a different size and shape than usual. What’s worst is that you seem to be competing against people who are highly skilled at this mirror card game. They slap down a royal flush in seconds and scowl at you for taking so long to make a move.

We rented the car at a hotel in central Ljubljana, and there was no opportunity to practice in a parking lot first. Nope, it was a hill-start off of a ramp into the middle of city traffic. The first thing I did was reach for my seatbelt over the wrong shoulder, and shortly afterwards – through the warped mirror that made me believe that the right hand side of the road was as far away from me as milk is from the front of supermarkets – I clipped a curb and scratched the hubcaps. I could already feel my heartbeat in my fingers, but then we made it onto the motorway and I somehow sidled my way straight into the fast lane. An instant traffic jam swelled behind me as I puttered along at 60kmph in a 130kmph zone. Lights flashed, horns honked.

Now, there are times when you can talk yourself out of panic, reasoning to yourself that you’re just overreacting and it’s not really as bad as all that. But when it feels like you’re driving something the size of a blimp down a space the size of a fingernail clipping, and you’ve got an angry stream of Slovenians overtaking you at 130kmph, shaking their fists and saying things that cause their small children to peer out of the back windows at you as they pass, it’s slightly more difficult to quash the feeling that you’re either about to die and take everyone with you, or that you’re soon to have a squished Mitsubishi, a hefty bill and post-traumatic stress disorder on your hands.

I eventually snailed my way into the outside lane, trying to act as if I wasn’t embarrassed about how panic-stricken I felt. After a few kilometres of motorway, the fireworks stopped exploding in my veins, and the thoughts ‘get out of here!’ and ‘zgvqkjzl zzzvvv’ stopped skipping across my brain. Marc, my non-driving navigator, and Tina, an American Couchsurfer along for the ride to Piran, did their best to calm me down by letting me know that I didn’t need to make any turns or fear any roundabouts for at least half an hour. There was nothing but straight road in front of me, and the Slovenian sun was pounding down on a day that had been forecast to rain. I sped up and made my way through the easy curves in the road, and the fear of squishing our Mitsubishi began to subside. My stomach still felt like I’d eaten something a little out of date, and I kept glancing at the gear stick on my right with what some might call an unwarranted amount of trepidation, but I carried on.

On the way to the coast, we stopped at a massive castle built into the side of a cliff: 

Predjama Castle, Slovenia

and went on a tour of the UNESCO-listed Škocjan caves. I don’t have a picture of the caves, but they were absolutely gobsmacking. Bulbous yellow stalagmites were hunched around the cave floor like giants embarrassed about the state of their skin, and dagger-like stalactites poured menacingly down from the ceiling the way they do in particularly difficult Super Nintendo games. After weaving our way through the silent drippy bits we made it to perhaps the most impressive part of all: a cavern the size of a football stadium with a rampaging river fizzing away thousands of feet below. Actually, my skills of guesstimating when it comes to distance are pretty inaccurate, and the whole cavern was only lit by these tiny little lamps perched on the edges of the safety rails, so it could have been anywhere between eight feet and three thousand, but however far down it was, it made me feel very small.

I’m happy to report that we made it to both the castle and the cave without further hubcap scratches or panic attacks. I realised at some point that I wasn’t using the rear-view mirror at all, but by the time we parked the car for the last time that day, I felt like I was beginning to get used to this mirror poker game. A tiny seed of confidence was sprouting inside of me.

The next morning, however, as we clambered back into the car and Marc showed me the map of our route to Lake Bohinj, my little seed of confidence began to quiver. Apparently I’d agreed to compete in the 2010 Slovenian Mirror Driving Championships: driving up and over the rather daunting Julian Alps.

I forget sometimes that driving can be a psychological experience almost as much as a physical one. Once you know how to drive you don’t think about it anymore, but any learner driver in a manual car will tell you that you have to psych yourself up before you can face a red traffic light balanced on top of a hill. When it came to mirror driving through the Alps, I found myself wishing I had been more emotionally prepared. Driving on the wrong side of the road up a mountain was worse than that first motorway experience. There were hairpin turns, pot-holed roads, no lane markings, snow, steep inclines, old men hobbling along making their way to the next town, and yellow warning signs depicting cars leaning over a precipices with rocks crumbling underneath their tyres. All that might have been manageable if it didn’t seem like there was only room for one car along those two-way mountain passes, and if all the locals weren’t blazing through there as if they were high school bullies who’d seen my ridiculous sprout of confidence and decided it was time to try out their new weed killer. I’d tried to work my way up into the pros too fast, and these guys reminded me that I was still an amateur, shaking in my boots as the masters zoomed on by. I literally flinched whenever another car approached, and pulled over again and again to let tail-gaters pass. My driving was fine (if a little slow): it was mainly my mind that was letting me down.

I gathered from Marc’s appreciative outbursts that the scenery we were driving through was spectacular, but I was too busy clenching my teeth and fearing each bend in the road lest it reveal a speeding truck or a group of adventurous children on bicycles to spare a glance at the snow-topped peaks and sprawling valleys. To his credit, Marc was very patient throughout all of this, offering support and encouragement over the 3 hours it took to make it to our next destination. I was probably overreacting by coming to a dead stop when cars approached from the opposite direction, but as a non-driver, he kept his mouth shut.

In the end we made it to Lake Bohinj and then all the way through to Lake Bled with both the car and my nerves intact. Getting back onto a motorway was actually a relief after far too many sightings of those ominous yellow signs with cars falling over cliff edges.

I don’t think I could say that I achieved a gold medal in the 2010 Slovenian Mirror Driving Championships, but at the least I should get a dinky trophy for participating. I’m probably the mirror driving equivalent of Eric Moussambani at the 2000 Sydney Olympics: just giving it a go even though we don’t really have the right equipment for this sort of thing where I’m from.

In a strange way it did sort of feel like I’d succeeded; that I’d actually accomplished something. I had crossed the Alps without toppling over the edge or decimating any groups of cycling children. By the time we returned the car to the hotel in Ljubljana I could change gears using my right hand as if I’d been doing it for at least two days. We weren’t even charged for the hubcap scratches.

The only issue with this re-sprouting of my seed of confidence is that Marc has cottoned onto it. He is already scouring maps of Europe looking for higher mountains, dodgier roads and the largest populations of retirees who enjoy ambling along cliff tops after lunch. If the end destination is anything like Lake Bled, though, I think I might be tempted to try my amateurish hand at this poker game again:

A path in London

Sometimes, in London, after crowded train rides and broken escalators with people clambering up them and briefcases swinging and the clomp of heels and the black backs of men in suits in front of you and tinny announcements and school kids’ laughter and newspapers left on seats and shifting queues of people at bus stops and the tight buzzy sensation of static behind your eyes, you unexpectedly find yourself down a little path with a clearing to one side and you realise you’re all alone in this place. It’s a melancholic, refreshing feeling.

'Episodes': Return to Australia Part III (of a still yet to be disclosed number of parts. This might be the last one)

Woolies, the Helpful Supermarket
One thing any Australian who comes to London is surprised by is that check-out chicks (or blokes) never pack your bags for you in supermarkets. Even if you’ve got two trolleys full of supplies to re-stock your bomb shelter, you’re on your own when it comes to stuffing it all into bags on the ‘other side’. Before the ‘self-checkout’ machines were installed, a regular trip to the supermarket ran a little something like this:

***

I place all of my things onto the conveyor belt, making sure to keep the jar of basil and tomato passata at the front and the melba toast at the back. Once I’m satisfied that I’ve placed the bananas in an optimal position within the line-up, I tap my fingernails on the silver edges of the conveyor belt, and watch the prophetic scene of the person in front of me unfold. This unfortunate soul, who for all I know might have a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering, is trying frantically to keep up with the merciless check-out chick, who is wearing a badge that says, ‘WINNER: fastest scan-rate in the UK. They call me Lightning Fingers.’ His groceries topple and jostle down the slide to where his reusable bags are waiting, and the concentration on his face is intense as he shoves in celery stalks, frozen pizzas, garlic bread batons and packets of chocolate-coated almonds.

I can’t help but make judgments about his ordering system (or lack thereof) as he goes along. ‘I would never have placed the lettuce there,’ I think. ‘Who puts lettuce in front of ten cans of chick-peas?’

Lightning Fingers has finished long before he’s had a chance to make a dent in the hodge-podge of items that have accumulated around him, and she leans back in her chair and raises an eyebrow at me to show that she’s sympathetic to my plight: being stuck behind this tortoise who doesn’t even know that bread is always the last thing you should put on the conveyor. I notice her raised brow but keep my eyes forward: it would be foolish to feign kinship now when we both know that in a couple of minutes we’re going to be on opposite sides of the grocery battle.

The man finally finishes, and fumbles around in his backpack looking for his card. Lightning Fingers sighs loudly, and I can almost see him scribbling a mental note to keep his card in a more convenient location next time. In fact, I can see that he’s learned a lot of things for next time. He inserts his card into the machine, with a defeated yet determined look. ‘Next time, Lightning Fingers. I’ll get you next time…’

He makes apologetic eye-contact with me as he loads the bags up onto his arms, but all I can do is bite my lip and grimace. It’s my turn.

***

When I went home, I had become so accustomed to treating each supermarket trip like a military operation, that I was stunned when the Woolies check-out bloke smiled at me and said, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and then proceeded to quickly and efficiently pack all of my things into bags (even putting crushables over to one side so that they might be placed on top at the end). He wasn’t working against me! He wasn’t even working with me. He was working FOR me.

How marvellous.

'Episodes': Return to Australia Part II (of a yet to be disclosed number of parts)

I went home to Australia for a month in December. Rather than trying to squeeze everything that happened into one blog, which would be as difficult and time-consuming as tipping two similar 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles out onto a table and then putting them back together again using only the toes of my left foot, I thought I'd write a few 'episodes' blogs instead: bits and pieces of events, thoughts and whatnots that transpired while I was there. Taken together, hopefully they'll create a bigger picture anyway. (I'm just praying that that picture doesn't end up looking like this.)

The Porridge Incident

Asiana Airlines Flight OZ601 from Seoul to Sydney. About two hours before landing, I made the somewhat catastrophic mistake of selecting porridge over an omelette for breakfast, believing that eating eggs on a plane is never going to be pleasant for anyone concerned. But, after the tinfoil-covered dish was placed in front of me, the flight attendant leanded over to drop an unexpected condiment on top: a small plastic fish filled with what was apparently a perfect accompaniment for this meal: soy sauce.

After 20 hours on planes, my mind cogs could only muster up the energy to think, 'Soy sauce is to porridge as she must be is to joking' (which, I'm sure you'll agree, fails the basic rule of analytical comparison). That little fish casually tossed onto the tinfoil lid was an immediate and unsettling omen of the horror that lay beneath. With timid fingers, I slowly peeled up the edges of the foil, letting the fish reveal his purpose. He was there to muddle and mix in with that delightful breakfast food sure to whet even the fussiest appetite: prawn and broccoli studded porridge. 'Studded' isn't even the right word, as that implies that there was a little 'spring' or 'substance' to the porridge that a prawn or a broccolo might get lodged in. No, these prawns and broccoli were submerged in a transclucent white gunge. It looked like a sad combination of fake snow and tepid water, and it slopped around as the plane hit turbulence.

I didn't taste it, but I'm fairly certain that this porridge wouldn't be described as 'sweet' in the same way the gloriously goldeny-syrupy porridge I was looking forward to might be. Instead I folded the foil back down over the dish, turning away like a child whose innocence has just been shattered.

Lesson learned: When ordering meals on an Asian airline, you can save yourself a traumatic culinary experience by asking, 'what's in it?' before making your selection. This holds no matter how confident you may be in your knowledge of the ingredients of basic dishes.

The City that Never Sleeps

When you live somewhere for a fair amount of time, you get used to the sounds that swirl around outside your door. In London, I'm now accustomed to hearing the squeaking of bus brakes, the whoosh of cars, the whirl of sirens and the growl of motorbikes as they tear up Putney Hill. They're all mechanical noises, and they drown out whatever else might be around.

On my second morning back in Sydney, I was staying at my friend Kim's place, and a forgotten noise woke me up at 5am. In a tree outside her window, what sounded like hundreds of birds were squabbling, flapping, chirping and talking like overexcited women after a Hugh Grant sighting. I felt like I'd woken up in the middle of a jungle, but it was actually just a flat near the beach in Coogee.

I remembered that Sydney is a city that never sleeps, mainly because of the wide range of animals that keep you up all night. In Summer it's fruit-bats bickering and warbling as they gobble the nectar from Silky Oaks, cicadas humming and screeching in a strangely synchronised rhythm, or a lone mozzie who thinks of himself as an intrepid treasure hunter and your ear as a cave of rubies. In Winter it's usually a collection of little birds who plink out quick three-note tunes to one another every couple of minutes, dogs barking in the distance, or another ruby-hungry mozzie who'd heard a rumour of this hidden cave and has come to investigate.

The animals carry on all day and all night. But I guess their efforts would only really stunt the sleep of newcomers to Australia, because after a couple of days back home, I could sleep through all of those noises again. Well, apart from the mozzies. No one can sleep through a sound like that.

Old Doors, Old Houses

On the trips I've taken in Europe, I'm always teased when I am suddenly overcome by the sight of a really old door. A grand, intricate door that dates back to the 1400s or something ridiculous like that. I react this way because, growing up in Australia, my perception of 'oldness' is slightly skewed. Suburbs in Australia look 'old' to me when they have faded fibro houses built in the 70s. That's the 1970s...


More episodes to come.

Water Drops and Hills Hoists: Return to Australia (Part 1)

My Dad's family moved to Australia from England in 1959. One day my sibings and I were trying to work out what might have prompted such a move, so we asked our Grandad for the back-story. With a glint in his eye and a smile on his lips, he said he would tell us why he chose Australia over anywhere else in the world.

When the kids were young and they lived in Liverpool, he said, he and Nana used to have to hang the washing up in the kitchen. It was hung up high, and when he got up in the mornings to make some Ribena for the little ones, water drops from the washing would fall down the back of his neck. He hated that sensation, and dreaded it, but there wasn't anywhere else the washing could go, so he just had to put up with it. One day he was complaining about the water drops falling down the back of his neck to a friend, and his friend said, 'You know, in Australia, you can hang your washing up outside, and it's so hot that by the time you hang up the last thing, the first thing you put up is already dry!' Grandad jumped up and exlaimed, 'That's the place for me!'

Now, my Grandad had a tendency to tell a funny story over sad facts, so needless to say there were other reasons for the move, but I still like the idea that water droplets from washing could provoke someone to move their whole family to the other side of the world.

Water drops do suggest slightly larger miseries, of course. England's weather is one of the reasons why so many of my Australian friends and family looked at me with complete and honest incredulity when I told them I was moving to London. Why would you leave the luxury of being able to hang up your bed-sheets on the arms of a glorious Hills Hoist in your own back yard, watching contentedly as they ripple and billow in the warm breeze, absorbing the light of the sun? Why would you exchange that for a mouldy little line off of a city balcony, a rickety drying rack clogging up a living room, or a dingy Laundromat where your sheets flail around in a horrible black space, injected with artificial air and deprived of every sheet's dream: sweet sunshine?

I explained to the incredulous that I wasn't moving to London for the weather. (To be on the safe side, I also clarified that feeling pre-emptively sorry for my potential future bed-sheets would not stop me from moving there, as I assumed most British sheets are born knowing that they will not be able to aspire to a life in the sun. Instead they must limit themselves to a more modest hope: perhaps a lucky day when they might stretch out within a massive tumble-drier all alone, not having socks or underwear bashing them in the face and guts.)

No, I moved to London for other reasons. But now that I have lived here for nearly two years I will admit that the clothes-drying solutions I have had to come up with have taken some getting used to. I can see why Grandad must have reached the end of his rope. In my Whitechapel flat I started drying my towels in an inexplicably hot storage closet. I could only wash one towel in any load, and then I'd hang it over the clothes-rail inside the roasting cupboard, returning to rescue it from an advanced stage of rigor mortis the next day. It seemed... unnatural.

After all sorts of imaginative responses to 'The English Laundry Predicament', I returned to Australia for a visit last month, stepping out of Sydney airport into one of those impossibly heavy 43-degree days. I had a thick black coat with me, and my suitcase was packed with clothes that had been dried in a Putney Laundromat. When we finally pulled up to the house, the first thing I saw was a fitting surprise organised by my Dad. There, strung up on our giant Hills Hoist, bearing the spray-painted inscription 'Welcome Home Sarah!', was a white bed-sheet waving and fluttering in the sunshine.

A sight like that must have been Grandad's dream.


NB: I guess I should point out that it is quite possible to hang things up outside in the UK Summer. Provided that you own an 'outside' to hang things up in, that is. I've come to the conclusion that British bed-sheet oppression has as much to do with living conditions as the vagaries of the weather. Of course that's not doing much to 'sell' London to my Australian nay-sayers. I've just pointed out that not only is the weather bad over here, a lot of people don't even have their own outside area from which to scowl at it.

A Little Pea in a Big Town

I grew up in a place where if you didn't have a car, it was like being marooned on a desert island. Only instead of oceans I was surrounded by grass, and instead of palm trees it was cows I watched swaying in the breeze. Well, they were never 'swaying' so much as 'chewing', but they did have milk inside, like coconuts do.

I take pains to point out to people that I didn't grow up on a farm; we just happened to have cows, horses and a small menagerie spread out across acres of paddocks. My neighbour out the back did have chickens at one stage, and a working well, but ours wasn't a farm. Our cows were only there to keep the grass down. If anyone reached for Daisy's udders she probably would have raised an eyebrow and then given you a warning poke in the temple with her horns for being so forward.

I remember sitting in the living room on days when my only companions had been the palm trees mooing in the ocean. I'd keep an eye on the end of the driveway for Dad to pull in with the car, and when it finally happened it was a joyous event. Not only was there going to be a person to look at and talk to, but the car could take me to where lots of other people were; where there were shops and coffee machines and cinemas and things were happening. Of course we had a TV, and sometimes my siblings would be home too, but I can remember being stuck at home alone, watching slugs leave glittery trails in the garden, wandering around the perimeter of the house for no particular reason and putting CDs on as loud as they would go because the neighbours were too far away to complain. In times like that there was the sense of an enormous space I was rattling around in, like a lone pea in a family-sized tupperware container.

Things to do when you're home alone:

• Stare at your own eyeballs in the bathroom mirror for 15 minutes at a time
• Clang out new tunes on the piano, trying to utilise those sad sounding E-flats as often as possible
• Move from the cupboard to the fridge and back again (and again and again) to see whether your eyes may have missed a block of Top Deck or a punnet of juicy raspberries
• When the above point fails, come up with ideas for fruit and vegetable installation pieces for people's birthdays (see picture A)

Picture A

• (Picture A has also been 'repackaged' with twigs and flowers, and has subsequently morphed into all sorts of different materials.)

It can be great being home alone, but sometimes, staring at your own eyeballs in the bathroom mirror, you can easily drift into a mindset that says, 'All the fun is happening somewhere else. All those people - out there - are getting on with it, having a whale of a time, without you.' You might even imagine groups of people - laughing as they casually sip their drinks at a bar, sitting in cafes having coffees and saying things like 'George needs to learn to be more independent' or 'Barbara's gone off Mike again' - or just one person crossing at a busy intersection with a stride that says, 'I am late meeting all of my friends for the launch of that big thing.'

The squiggly veins in your eyeballs don't seem nearly as interesting as all that.

Now I have moved to a city, and even though I've been living here for a while I still feel like all of my Christmases have come at once knowing that I am a two-minute walk away from supermarkets, department stores, hairdressers, restaurants, bars and a rather addictive ladies fashion store that shall remain nameless. Buses purr by as regularly as Simpsons re-runs, and there is a neverending story of pedestrians passing my front window.

I'm finally in the midst of things. Things happen all around me, I can see people doing things and rather than feeling like I'm missing out on things, I can look around as I'm walking by a bus-stop and know that I am being seen as doing things too. Even if I'm just going to buy a can of kidney beans, those bus-stop people can see me pass and say to themselves, 'Oh yes, she's got plenty of things to do.'

But (there had to be a 'but' coming, right?) for all of this, sometimes the neverending story of people almost offend me just by being there. The thing about that past sensation of being a lone pea in a tupperware container is that the space around me was all mine. I could roll around and daydream about other vegetables and take as much time staring into my pea-eyes as I wanted. Now, when a train door opens and I see that there is simply no more room in that moving tupperware container for one more little pea (and the peas already onboard do not seem to care about my plight), it feels shocking. What are all these other people doing in my space? Why can't I get onto a train when I want to? I realise in that moment that I'm being selfish, but suddenly I don't have time to perform a probing exploration into my innermost pea-psyche because I have to hurry over to the other platform to make sure I can squeeze onto the next container.

It's hardly a new observation to say that time and space go together, so when there's no space your time dries up too, but it's still something that is difficult to accommodate to when you're used to one or the other.

At least now that I've experienced both sides I can use them against each other to remind myself of certain things. When I'm feeling cramped I can imagine myself in another time, looking for entertainment in palm-tree cows or my own eyeballs. And when I'm feeling like all the fun is happening somewhere else, I'll try to remember that sometimes all people are doing as they stroll determinedly by is going to the shop to buy a can of kidney beans...

Wouldn't it Be Loverly

I work at a college in central London, where course fees are at a level synonymous with a certain mode of dressing. The idea of 'student discounts' is almost comical when you observe that in this place, the students flounce about in D&G while the staff get by in H&M. Maybe not the staff at the upper echelons of management, who get biscuits in posh individual wrappers rather than a communal platter of Ginger Snaps, but in general, 'the rest of us' do not come from backgrounds that would have allowed us to actually study here.

This month, the students have returned from their summer holidays, so the main quadrangle is again clogged with cigarette smoke emitted by 18 year olds wearing the kind of haute couture you see advertised in Vogue with the guffaw-inducing pricetags. No stumbling out of bed and showing up on campus in pyjama bottoms and a jumper with peanut-butter stains down the front here; these kids stand leaning near the sleek automatic doors in bejewelled jean pockets, massive be-golden-buckled bags, glossy skyscraper heels, suede loafers, silk scarves, cashmere sweaters and blazers made out of the kind of fabric that is too well-heeled to show any inclination towards pilling.

To give an indication of the brand of student that might be found lounging amongst this perfumed platoon, here are two examples:

1. A nineteen year-old Lebanese boy showed up the day before the start of term and said he wanted to enrol. He was told that this was fine but he would have to organise for £13 070 to be paid immediately. He said that that wouldn't be a problem, and casually strolled to the Finance office to arrange it then and there.

2. A girl from India arrived with staff. Her 'people' routinely brought snacks into her during her exams, and when even these banned culinary interjections did not help her to pass, and she was consequently sent packing, her parents pulled out their financial ace-up-the-sleeve and tried to buy her way back in.

Now, when you turn up in the morning and realise that your entire outfit probably cost less than the eyelet on that seventeen year old Italian business student's shoe, it can summon up some pretty visceral reactions. Those of us amongst the 'great unwashed' often huddle together and gossip from the sidelines, our conversations fluctuating between three basic emotions:

1. Disgust. In the fact that we are handcuffed to our desks with only a faux-diamante brooch shaped like a water buffalo and a pocket full of mismatched buttons and paperclips to show for it, when these kids can nip down to Tiffany's and buy a diamond-encrusted buffalo brooch only to discard it the next week for the new trend in bovine accessorising.

2. Envy. That these kids can keep up with trends in bovine accessorising and then pop over to Minsk to pick up some truffles and champagne flutes full of emeralds to distribute to their classmates on a Monday morning. We'd all love to give our friends champagne flutes full of precious stones, too, but through the limitations of our life stations we can usually only offer displays of affection via stick-figure drawings of a guy with his unnaturally long arm around another guy's shoulders, 'me' and 'you' written atop their heads.

3. Pity, or 'poor man's pride'. This usually comes after the 'envy' stage, when we consider the possibility that a stick-figure drawing might actually be more valuable than a glass of gems. Poor man's pride is when you start saying, 'Yes, but they'll never have what we have'; this being a level of street-smarts and common sense that can only be gained through playing fridge-tetris* with your sixteen other flatmates and having fortnightly arguments with the landlord over who should buy a mop.

(*For the uninitiated, fridge-tetris is a fascinating game played in flats where there is one fridge between eight or so people. It is a 'squidgier' and more forceful game than real tetris, and involves a much higher risk of exploding milk cartons and shattered jars of raspberry jam. If you can successfully navigate a little electronic broccoli down the screen and house it snugly between a tower of yoghurts, a pack of cherry tomatoes and a roll of Edam someone brought home from Amsterdam, the fridge bleats out 100 points and then transports you to the next level when you realise you forgot to put in the bouquet of beetroot, the family of kiwifruits and the pack of cumquats you need for your 'beetroot surprise' dessert.)

We twist around between these three emotions, arguing and becoming defensive and angry or serene and philosophical. Some days we simply stand watching in bemused curiousity, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells out onto our scuffed Primani boots. But although the dollar signs standing in the quadrangle provide us with daily reminders of our own 'lot', and our conversations about them are as constant as the Russian students' love for test-driving conceptual clothing, I wonder if they ever peer at us through their curtain of cigarette smoke, pondering whether there may be something in these primitive drawings we're always giving to each other.

Books and movies are full of 'fish out of water' scenarios where 'average' people are ushered through secret passageways into sparkling lives full of butlers and their very own fridges, and wealthy people must suddenly come up with new gift-giving ideas (the ol' faithful cup-o-emeralds now out of reach) and find themselves lost in the mire of public transportation systems.

Watching the shimmering society from my sunflower-seeded corner of the quad, I have decided that it is not realistic to wait to be ushered through a secret passageway into caverns of rubies. My workmates and I have employed our fridge-savvy street smarts and come up with a plan. The details are sketchy, but we will steal a few eyelets from Prince Al-Khalifa’s shoes, sell them and then see what it’s like to live the life of a student.

Illustration by Melanie, Fridge-Tetris champion 2008

Falling Chopsticks and Lonely Streetlights: the path to Sark

I've always liked those Rube Goldberg machines. You know the ones. It starts off with someone nudging a chopstick off a shelf which then lands onto a marble which rolls into a matchbox car which falls into a precariously placed bucket of water which spills into a set of scales which lowers and stretches out a slingshot which fires a yellow bouncy ball into a red cabbage and in the end a little wind-up monkey lights a candle or something. Those born in the 80s might remember that Mousetrap game as a good example (along with the way your 8 year-old hands and body had to stay unnaturally still lest you accidentally bump the board and set off the whole plastic sequence of events that took sixteen episodes of Heman to set up).

Even the simplest of endings, like a monkey lighting a candle or a dart piercing a goldfish, had to go through a meticulously constructed set-up for it to happen at all.

Some people think that their whole lives have been designed like this; that there is some old codger who is setting off seven billion Goldberg machines at once, with different 'end points' for each of them: some of us pierced like a goldfish and some of us choking on a chocolate-coated peanut.

Even if you think that that's a load of codswallop, it's still interesting thinking about all the precariously placed buckets and falling chopsticks that had to happen to lead to whatever you're doing right now. I think about it all the time, usually at stupid tiny moments like when I'm chopping cauliflower or eating hummous.

When I was on the Isle of Sark recently - the smallest of the Channel Islands near Guernsey and Jersey - this 'Goldberg Machine' feeling was particularly potent. If my uncle hadn't given me the Gormenghast trilogy when I was 15 years old, I more than likely wouldn't have caught a bus, two tubes, an aeroplane, a taxi and a ferry to end up on this small island with only one street-light and an adherence to feudal laws.

All sorts of other things had to happen too, of course. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that although all my falling chopsticks and slingshotted bouncy balls may be endlessly fascinating to me, others would find them about as thrilling as watching a dormant cheese-grater for six hours.

Let us test this theory now. Here are some of the things that had to happen to lead me to Sark:

I had to move to London, be introduced to Couchsurfing, plan a trip to Brussels, discover the profile of a Couchsurfing host there who listed the little-known Gormenghast trilogy as amongst his favourite books, stay with him, become friends, discover that Mervyn Peake (the author of Gormenghast) had written another book based on the Isle of Sark, be contacted by my friend months later and told of his intention of making a documentary about Sark (and other 'micro-nations') and asked if I would like to tread the ground where Sir Peake once lived with him and his girlfriend.

If your eyes felt weary half-way through that, please draw a picture of a cheese-grater and post it to me. If you found it utterly gripping, please reward yourself with a spoon of peanut-butter and then post me the spoon. I will add them up and give you the definitive result in the next edition of Testing Things Scientifically (a quarterly publication. Readers of the next edition receive a free spoon that smells of peanut-butter).

I made it to Sark continually wondering if I would have gone there at all if my uncle had given me Latour's Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy instead. That would have been a shame, not only because I probably would have crumbled underneath the expectations put on my 15 year-old mind by my family, but because Sark is an eccentric little island.

Some facts about Sark:

- It was the last feudal state left in the world up until 2008. They have a Lord known as a 'Seigneur' who is in charge of upholding some of the ancient feudal laws.
- One of these ancient laws is that cars and 'modern' forms of transportation are banned on the island. Transport is via horse-and-cart, tractor, bicycle or on foot.
- The population is around 600 people. I think I pass this many people on my way to the tube every morning...
- Children born on Sark are encouraged to leave the island once they reach a certain age so that they can experience other things and see whether the 'Sarkese way' is for them. A lot of these children end up returning to Sark.
- Sark only has one street light, which makes getting home from the Dixcart Hotel Bar to your B&B a slow-moving and pothole-filled task.
- Sark is closer to France than England, but nonetheless remains a self-governing British dependency. English is the official language, but all the place-names are French. In 1990, a French nuclear physicist named André Gardes arrived on the island clad in combat gear and carrying a semi-automatic rifle. He tried to singlehandedly reclaim the island for France. According to the Guernsey Evening Press of August 24, 1990, he was fined £200 and sentenced to seven days in prison. A rather light sentence, you could say...
- Everyone knows everyone on Sark, so a couple of Belgian journalists and their Australian colleague are quite easy to spot on the roads.

Most holidays that I have taken involve cathedrals and squares and monuments and pock-marked maps from where I've tried to circle things without leaning the paper on a flat surface first. On Sark we had a map, but since the island is only 5.45 square kilometres, we ditched the map and just walked in the general direction of an 'edge' we hadn't seen yet. This isn't quite as ho-hum as it sounds, when you consider that the paths looked like this:





And the 'edges' looked like this:

Julien & Salomé at Window in the Rock, Sark

As a result of Julien's journalistic efforts we were introduced to a few locals who explained that on Sark the policeman can also run the shop, tend the gardens of the Seigneurie and teach advanced dentistry (or whatever else), and that for this reason they never really feel constrained by the idea that there is a 'career' everyone must actively pursue. I love that idea, mainly because I feel like I could have been an ace badminton player if only I hadn't limited myself by sticking obsessively to the alphorn. I may be able to play Messe für Alphorn und Chor with the world's premier alphornists, but sometimes I imagine feathery shuttlecocks shooting out of the horn's mouth and find myself wishing I had the time to follow some side-interests. Don't tell my colleagues at Alphornbläsergruppe Oberaargau this, though. Ulrich would be very disappointed in me.

Alphorns aside, after various cliff-top walks and talks, pats of local Clydesdales and strolls through the Seigneurie maze, it was plain to see why Sarkese children come back to the island after their enforced periods abroad.

It is easy to romanticise 'island life', forgetting about the boredom, conservatism and gossip, or even to reach the conclusion that because island life is quiet and slow-paced that it must be 'simple'. But after leaving our doors unlocked when we went out and having only one daily concern - how to dodge puddles in the no-streetlights-blindness of night - all three of us agreed it would be a comfortable and open place to live.

It looks possible, though, that Sark's own Goldberg Machine may be leading it to something less open and comfortable. A wind-up monkey has lit a candle, and this candle is sitting perilously close to a microfibre bathrobe. On one of our clifftop walks, we noticed a sleek black helicopter approaching. This helicopter made a beeline for the Sarkese version of Tasmania: Brecqhou (an even smaller island separated from Sark by a narrow channel of water). In particular, it was heading towards this:




This is the mock-Gothic castle on Brecqhou, commissioned by twin British billionaires the Barclay Brothers. These fellows, who also happen to own the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly and the Telegraph Media Group, bought the island of Brecqhou in 1993.

We had of course heard about these men from almost the first second we arrived, and as we sat dunking chocolate Hobnobs into our tea with a local artist, it became apparent that these brothers are generally viewed by islanders as the possible outcome of a liaison between this man and this woman.

You can read the full account of their spoiled billionaire antics here, but to give you a condensed version, after contesting the 'backwards' feudalism of Sark so that they could have free run of their cars and helipads on Brecqhou, and bring the whole of Sark into the 'modern age' by updating the island's hotels, infrastructure and tourism (I have no doubt that the words 'Sark' and 'Rococo interiors' do not fit together), their representatives were voted down by the democracy they themselves had pushed for. Obviously this did not go down well. Billionaires will have their way, after all. They had invested a lot of money into Sark - in hotels, pubs, restaurants and construction companies - and retaliated by closing all of these businesses, leaving at least 100 people (or one-sixth of the population) suddenly unemployed. With Christmas only a fortnight away, I might add.

The children of Mr. Evil (sorry, I mean Doctor Evil. He didn't attend 6 years of Evil Medical School to be called 'Mister', thank you very much) and Ms. DeVil retreated to Brecqhou and have stayed there ever since. Talking to the lady in the tourist office, there seems to be a general feeling that the Barclay Brothers are over in their Brecqhou castle knitting things out of Dalmatians while they plot and scheme their next move. This 'quiet island life' may be the precious last moments of calm before the next storm.

If another billionaire storm ever happens, I am going to do all I can to support Sark, even if all I can offer is a few illustrations of the Barclay Brothers dressed in Dalmatian suits with knives and dead puppies at their feet. And if that day ever comes, I will be able to douse the flaming bathrobe with water from the bowl of a pierced goldfish, and when someone asks me how I came to be drawing such highly detailed pictures of dead puppies at my kitchen table in London, I will put down my pen and explain. It all began when my uncle bought me the Gormenghast trilogy when I was 15 years old...