Merry Christmas

It scares me to think that if my Dad was a lumberjack he'd look like Ernest Hemingway.

I think an excess of family has done something terrible to my brain. Spent Christmas at a bizarre country cottage extravaganza that was part awkward family reunion and part giant house party full of complete strangers (who we invited along to ease the awkwardness). Along with my immediate family of four there was my aunt and uncle and three cousins, plus three kids Olly brought with him from the UN conference in Poland, four Japanese college friends of my aunt, who had nowhere else to go, and a hamster called Hamlet. Half of us ate vegan chickpea curry, with spinach, while the others had pheasant, venison sausages, and gravy, so everyone was happy. And dessert was gluten free christmas pudding with soy cream, amazing.

Now I'm recovering by locking myself in my flat, where no-one related to me can find me. My Christmas presents this year consisted of a pad of origami post-it notes, two books, a hideous eighties jumper for my collection, and a pair of enormous rainbow shorts. My housemate Sam spent Christmas day birdwatching in Sussex, so I can't complain. We are both recovering by playing with Hemingway's head, and redecorating the flat while our other housemates are away. Check out the previously beige living room-

Paris is full of dead people

Went to Paris for a week, which was awesome, although there seemed to be a morbid undertone to most of my activities. I went to Pere Lachaise cemetery and visited the graves of Moliere, Proust, Edith Piaf, and Colette. It was freezing cold and I walked like a drunken person the entire time because my feet were frozen solid, but the graveyard was amazing and I became obsessed with these creepy porcelain flowers heaps of the graves have on them. They have soft beautiful green moss growing in the crevices between the petals. I also went to the Catacombs, which are a huge network of ancient tunnels underneath the city, where thousands of peoples bones were relocated from the Paris cemeteries in the 17th Century. We walked for about two kilometers in these dark stone tunnels underground until we came to the ossuary, which just went on and on and on for miles, with human skulls and bones stacked head height on either side of you as far as you could see. They search your bag at the end of the tunnels to make sure you haven't stolen any bones. It creeped me out, I tried to hold my breath the entire time so as not to breathe in dead people, so I ended up giving myself a splitting headache.

The other highights were the Palais de Tokyo, which was having a 'Baby Disco' the night we went, and an amazing vegan restauraunt that did Franch style tofu in red wine. Also, I was on a train on the Metro which actually ran over a man on the tracks. We were all terrified and locked in the carriage while everyone outside was screaming and running around, and then, amazingly, this man pulled himself out from under the train, totally unharmed. He was a bit dirty and bruised, and in total shock, but he must have managed to duck underneath the train as it went over him. Other than this all I did in Paris was eat macaroons, drink Kir, and walk around a lot on my stupid club-like frozen feet going to galleries.

Helsinki

I went to Helsinki for the weekend and ate a lot of cake and drank my bodyweight in terrible coffee (the Finnish have the highest coffee intake per capita of any nation). It was dull and grey and disappointing when I got there, and I was staying in a hostel inside the 1952 Olympic Stadium, which didn't help since I despise anything Olympic. But on the second day there was a massive snow storm and everything became spectacularly beautiful, though cold. I was wearing extremely inappropriate shoes (check out www.hel-looks.com for confirmation), and I kept falling over in the middle of the street and getting horrible bruises, but the snow made me too happy to care. I went to lots of cool design museums and galleries, and touched a dead reindeer, and ate cloudberry jam, and drank mulled wine in little huts by the roadside. And once in a cafe a bunch of drunk skinheads harrassed me and chased my into the street trying to touch me and saying gross things in bad English.

I thought that was going to be the low point of the trip but then I got a ferry out to this little island fortress called Suomenlinna in the middle of a snow storm and got lost and actually though I was going to die. It was impossible to see more than twenty centimetres in front of you, it was freezing, and the island was total wilderness with no lights or buildings or people just huge piles of snow and crashing waves and rocks. I finally found one person who completely ignored me when I threw myself upon her asking for help, so I burst into tears and abandonnned myself to dying in a snow drift in front of an abandonned old hall. Luckily, it turned out to be the youth hostel, which was in darkness because I was their only guest (probably their only guest in years). It took me an hour to defrost my hands, and they're still a funny colour two weeks later.

Three square meals

Its Sunday night and I'm recovering from the massive vegan Sunday roast my friend Jess cooks us every week (with Linda Mc'Cartney sausages, which I find creepy, and amazing crumble with soy cream), and from the passion which the many hats Stephen Fry manages to wear in his travels across America (BBC 1 @ 8:30, woot!) seems to inspire in us.

Its gross and rainy here, the air looks clear but if you step into it its like taking a really cold and unfortunate shower, and it now gets dark by 4:30pm, which means I keep accidentally eating dinner at five o'clock and getting sleepy. I now have four quilts on my bed and I'm preparing for constant hibernation.

Its been a good weekend, Anna B and I went to some amazing Danish documentaries being screened at Shunt on Friday night- they turned one of the old railway tunnels into a whole plane carriage with reclining aeroplane seats and air hostesses and you listened to the sound through hi-tech head sets. Then yesterday my housemate Sam and I went to Cambridge for his best friends housewarming party. Nobody told me it was fancy dress, and everyone else had made a massive effort, so I had to whip something up out of paper and sticky tape. It was musical themed, hence all the photos of Chicago-style flappers, and I ended up as a bit of a half-hearted last minute Mary Poppins. Everyone at the party was scarily brainy, doing PHD's at Cambridge in cancer research, but I did manage to bond with one of the hosts who has just got a job working at the local sewerage plant wading through pooh all day.

Night of many wigs

Guy Fawkes night!

Guy Fawkes night is a huge deal here, young Londoners have been blowing off unnecessary body parts for weeks now, and the streets are full of smoke and the constant wail of ambulances and police sirens. I made mulled wine and go ridiculously over-excited on the actual day, but two of my housemates got sick so we didn't make it to any of the massive bonfires around town where they actually burn lifesized effigies of the pope. One day...
Instead we bought about six kilos of explosives from our nearest supermarket and blew massive holes in the lawn of the local childrens playground. It was rad, the whole skyline of London was erupting and the parks were full of cheering drunken people who were too cheap to buy their own fireworks but sure got a kick out of ours. This is my housemate Tom about to light one of the little baby rockets we got. These were a bit pathetic, but we also had ones the size of four bricks which could have blown up a car. I can't wait til next year.

Three exciting things

1. I met Kenneth Anger! Actually, that's an exaggeration, I touched his shoe. But it was a beautiful moment. And then he spilled his beer on me, so I am never showering again. I went to a secret screening of his new films (blurgh), in the old railway tunnels under London Bridge- it was all pitch dark and scary and filled with candles and smoke machines. I didn't even know he was still making films- he's had so much plastic surgery he looked about forty.
2.I have family! I spent the weekend in Sheffield being spoilt rotten with big family dinners and living it up in a swanky apartment with all my cousins, am still recovering from the sheer quantity of food we managed to consume.
3. I'm going to set fire to things! Tomorrow is my first ever Guy Fawkes night, so my housemates and I are stocking up on mulled wine and fireworks (you can buy them at the local supermarket, ridiculous country).

So thats three exciting things in what is otherwise a desert of boredom..... This week is 'Reading Week' so I have no classes but masses of essays to write and I've turned into a revolting library slug. Joyous.

Good looks run in the family

Hell is a hairdressers convention

A couple of weeks ago I got recruited by this swanky hair salon across the road from my work to be a hair model for the London Hairdressing Expo, which was today. Little did I know it was going to involve eight hours of pre-dying over the past week, in which I went from brown to orange to red to purple, followed by a two hour horror fest today where I had to sit on a little stage, not moving, as my head was brutally attacked by a pretentious wanker in really tight jeans while a huge swarm of Italian hairdressers with hairy chests mobbed me and took photos and spun me round and round on my chair until I felt sick. It was utterly bizarre, and they caked me in so much makeup I looked like I was dead. My only escape was a tiny temporary cupboard where I managed to hide and scoff chips with a few franticaly smoking off-duty security guards. It was a total nightmare- five thousand shallow, narcissistic, bleating, over-peroxided, underfed, hairdressers crammed into one convention centre and fighting over fluro pink metallic scissors and platinum hair extensions for dogs. On the plus side; I got paid, I stole the t-shirt they dressed me in, i got mobbed by Spanish women who wanted to touch my hair, and I got a total thrill out of wearing a big security pass around my neck that said 'Model'. On the down side, I am now hideous. And when I wash all the product out, I'm going to look like Ronald McDonald.

Hamster love!

Tragically I'm not brave enough to broach the subject of a hamster with my very houseproud flatmates, so I'm consoling myself by pestering my cousin Anna's new pet Hamlet. He's so cute and pointless! He has no tail and basically no legs and all he does is eat and roll around the floor in a lime green plastic hamster ball. He's the coolest thing alive. Back home, we're growing a bulb of purple organic garlic on our front porch. This is taking a surprising amount of effort and passion, and I think its about as close to a pet as we're going to get.
In between bouts of aggressive Hamster fondling I am in the process of being fired from my job at the cupcake store. I went out for a drink with the Polish managers, who are both girls about my age who work like slaves and speak very little English, and I admitted my extreme hatred for the owner of the store (the sleaziest, angriest man alive) without realizing that one of the girls is involved with him. Whoops. Also, I keep eating the icing off the cupcakes because I get so hungry after nine hours without a break, and I've started giving away cakes for free to any customer who looks a bit broke or has a nice face. Clearly, I'm not top employee material.
School is going well, I haven't offended any royalty yet and I made it all the way through the single page of recommended reading they gave us last week. I'm only there two days a week at the moment so in between I've been hanging out with way too many visiting Australians, getting lost on epic bike rides around the city, and spending all my money at the British Film Institute or this amazing bar/art space called Shunt that I discovered in the tunnels under London Bridge. Its vast and dark with strange light installations and different theatre and music performances every night, and you can literally become lost wandering in old pitch dark train tunnels before suddenly you come across a pinball machine or a stuffed shark hanging from the ceiling or a crazy film being projected or a cluster of comfy chairs around a bar.

keeping busy...

the prehistoric oxford boating society

Went to Oxford for the day with my friend Whitey to press our noses against the big iron fences and dream of going to pretty colleges. We jumped the fence and snuck into the Botanic Gardens for a while, they have a big bed of sunflowers that are at least ten foot tall and all the little old wooden boats are lined up in the river waiting. Ate a lot of cookies, was disappointed by the castle, and bought a rad set of plastic dinosaurs from awesome junk shop.

So it turns out I now go to college with Princess Eugenie, which means there is a constant throng of camera men lurking outside the front gates of Goldsmiths. I saw her in the hallway, she looked lost and lonely, it was all very disappointing for my first royal sighting. College is awesome though, it has long black and white checkerboard tiled hallways and its heaps smaller than Melbourne Uni so it feels a little like being back in high-school. Only everyone is much better dressed. I haven't actually started class but I've met all the people on my course and already been given a reading list which should occupy me for the next eight to ten years.

This week I went to visit my aunt and uncle in the countryside, they live in this beautiful little cottage by a huge lake-I also bonded with the people at my work finally, when I discovered that the German girls all love Scrubs, and we celebrated by going next door to the bar where we traded cupcakes for free drinks all night. I'm a little slow so although we were the only girls in the place it took me about an hour to notice all the soft porn on the walls an realize we were in a gay bar. Check out the art in the background-
I've been exploring my local area and its actually pretty cool, we're in the midst of two big local arts festivals at the moment so there are heaps of gigs and art events going on everywhere. I went roaming round Deptford markets, which are just around the corner, yesterday and got soaking wet but I found a mad fully-functioning Super 8 projector getting rained on and rescued it for six pounds! The only Super 8 film I have though is 'Tarzan and the She-Devil'. Last night we went to 'Nail The Cross', the annual New Cross music festival, which had five different venues and rad music and projections in all the different rooms. Saw These New Puritans, Clinic, Archie Bronson Outfit, and heaps of bands I'd never heard of, and fell in love with a tiny grime singer called Micachu who I tried to bribe into coming home with me with blueberry cupcakes. Now I'm horribly hungover and I haven't even started my summer reading even though term starts tomorrow.

New job, new house, new badge...

Today has been a mixture of large failures and small victories:

1. I failed to make any friends. The International Student Vegetarian "Buffet" was in fact one home-made pizza and a bowl of salad in a tiny very shabby church hall. There were about 150 students, most still smelling strongly of airoplanes, all competing viciously over one packet of paper plates and a single sixpack of beer. I had a bit of a freakout when I arrived, because I literally walked into a room full of strangers all already ensconced in conversation, but I overcame this after three solitary glasses of Diet Pepsi and spent the whole night following around one Dutch girl who made the mistake of talking to me. When that conversation faltered (after we had jointly encountered about fifty American cheerleader types, all on exchange together, and two Russian girls in white latex zip-up boots) I made a bolt for the bathroom, tried to chat up one normal looking guy in the toilet queue (who totally snubbed me, you can't blame him), and I then totally panicked and fled down the street. It was, all in all, not a resounding success. Also, there were very definite hints of organised religion in the air.

2. I then didn't have the guts to go home and admit my failure to the housemates who were so eagerly barracking for my success, so I sat in a park staring into the distance and contemplating my friend-less future for an hour. Then I found an internet cafe and watched the whole of Scorpio Rising on full volume, thereby alienating the rest of the customers.

3. I guess the above counts as a minor success.

This is my house-mate Sam (actually sorry thats a cupboard. Below is Sam) who has alerted me to the existence of 'Sleeveface', a website and encroaching world order devoted to taking stupid photographs of people with records over their faces. This is about the most exciting thing to have happened to me for days.

I've been working in the cupcake mine nine hours a day, and sampling my way through the entire range of English ciders at night. They have raspberry and lime cider here! Or blueberry cider! I'm never coming home. Also saw a really cool gig by this guy Jeffrey Lewis from New York who kept pausing in between songs to tell bizarre stories about the rise of communism, in rhyming verse, accompanied by a big book of hand drawn illustrations which he called his "films".

Today at work some bastard stole out tips right in front of us- he just wandered in off the street, pretended to be looking at something behind the counter, and then emptied the tip jar into his pocket! We get paid minimum wage and our tips amount to about 15 cents a day so he can't have ended up with much, though I'm outraged. A girl sitting out the front also had her bag snatched, so clearly Covent Garden is a dangerous place to be.

In other news I built a cupboard for my room from some stuff I found in a dumpster and lugged back all the way from Greenwich on the bus. My biceps are now huge but my cupboard is rad.

Three things I love

Damn, I was trying to upload pictures of the mould I was growing but I'm not quite on top of this whole technology thing. But I do love mould. Meanwhile, I also love tax refunds. I just got two grand back off the government, so I spent the day drooling in an art supply store and bought the most beautiful set of professional artists felt tip pens. They were mind-blowingly expensive though so I only got a range of very muted colours, which is why theres a bit of a recurring theme to some of the drawings on this page. Wow its amazing how quickly this blogging thing soothes you into thinking people actually care about your inane ramblings.

In other news, my housemate Sam and I are in the process of starting up a regular Friday night gig at the Deptford Arms, where he'll DJ and I'll get to have a go at VJing, woot! Since his music taste is eclectic, and mine is just bad, the night is going to be called "Dogs Breakfast". (Although actually I don't think Sam is too keen on this idea).

I hate blogs, they seem like the most self-centered egotistical exercise, but I'm lazy and I'd rather do this than email everybody. London is pretty rad, its crazy how quickly its suddenly begun to feel like home.

I've moved into a house in New Cross, which is right next to my new college, in an area thats fifty percent fried chicken shops and neighborhood drunks and fifty percent big wide tree-lined streets and old beautiful houses. I live in the Garden Flat (at 18 Jerningham Rd, New Cross SE14 5NX London, send me stuff!), which has a blue front door and a big scruffy back garden and three lovely housemates. I live with a couple, Tom and Vanessa, who are both working full time in the city, as engineering eco-science type people, and Sam, who's a Masters student and part time DJ. They've just completely renovated the flat from scratch so everything is covered in paint sheets and smells deliciously toxic. We think we have a mole living under the house because something keeps burrowing along and raising the floorboards, meaning its a bit of a lottery whether or not the doors will open and close each day. Big red double-decker buses go right past my front door, and I'm one train stop from London Bridge so its easy to get into town. My room is little and square and white and brand new pristine clean, so i've set to work destroying it with my brand new set of textas.

I don't start school for another week and a half so I've been exploring London and searching for the perfect bike, in between shifts at my new job. I work in the worlds cutest, brightly colored psychedelic cupcake store in Covent Garden, called Candy Cakes. I work Friday to Sunday making coffees and sandwiches and generally contributing to the global obesity epidemic by stuffing tourists faces full of cake and sugar. The cakes are pretty amazing, they're really bright colors and exotic flavors and they pile them up so high its like working in a little fortress built of cake. Unfortunately, its a pretty horrid place to work since you never get a break, the shifts are really long, its minimum wage, and you end up filthy and covered in brightly colored bits of icing. As soon as my housemates get sick of eating cupcakes every weekend I'll probably start to look for something else.

We're not allowed pets in my new house, which is a tragedy, so the hamster/gerbil I have dreamed of for so long is going to have to wait (or live quietly in the bottom of my wardrobe). I'm consoling myself with our vegie garden, in which there is one lonely beetroot which looks like it needs a bit of love. I've also been trying to feed my way into my housemates' hearts by cooking massive and overly ambitious vegan pies. I may just be trying to distract myself however, from the fact that (as everyone keeps pointing out to me) I have no friends.