The Club

The Droste effect or Mise en abyme––an image of an image in its image, in which that image wormholes into an abyss, recurring ad infinitum. An imperfect metaphor, but what comes to mind when I think of a club with the purview to review the London Review of Books.

The Club, while human in scale––small, personal––will be expansive of mind. It will have as little to do with computers, screens and social media ‘reach’ as possible. Like the Review it will be rooted in history, it will be decidedly untrendy. Thank god it will not be flashy or pithy. After all, reading the London Review of Books is a private, thoughtful and committed act, and the Club should reflect that.

At the end of 2019, seven years after first subscribing to the Review, it was apparent that the LRB was one of few constants in my life. As I ran the risk of losing track of myself, it reliably appeared at seven addresses from Melbourne to London to Sydney and back to Melbourne. A wellspring of information and ideas, it broadened the otherwise narrow field of trending topics toward which one can be channelled if not careful, conscious, conscientious. Dare I say reading the Review had become part of my identity.

When I was in London I would pass time in its Bookshop and Café, attend its events. In 2014 I saw Akhil Sharma and David Sedaris in conversation, and one of them, I can’t remember which, turned to the tightly packed audience sitting between the bookshelves and said something to the effect of ‘you are my people, we are a family of sorts’––a touching sentiment when you’ve outgrown the family you were born into and have been remiss to start your own. If not DNA, then what better to share than a common identity based on what is arguably the best literary journal of our time.

I decided to place an ad in the LRB’s famed classifieds. Not in the ‘Personals’ (Sexually, I’m more of a Switzerland), lest someone think I was suggesting a veritable orgy, but the truly neutral ‘Notices’ section. In the tradition of classified ads, I kept it short and sweet, giving great thought to the punctuation, even staying up late one night to phone Ellie in Sales to make payment.

So it was my little ad appeared in Volume 42, Number 1, the 2 January 2020 edition, on page 42:

Melbourne, Australia. Avid readers of the LRB with interest in meeting fellow LRB enthusiasts for monthly club, contact Amy for more: degustibusandvirtue@gmail.com.

Wherever I may roam…

Beyond what was said in black and white, I was looking for a few things at the time, between the lines.

Too accustomed to focussing on life’s negatives, I wanted to foreground the positive, so deepening my relationship with the LRB and connecting with fellow-feeling humans seemed like a good place to start. As a polluter I was also hoping to address my propensity for international travel.

On returning to Melbourne from a trip to Europe in October 2019, I’d declared that in 2020 I would not fly overseas. A fairly paltry assertion I was unsure at the time I’d meet, even though as a backdrop of flames blazed across Australia, it seemed the least I could do was curb my personal carbon emissions.

Without travel, and as an Australian with a global outlook unwilling to give up a cosmopolitan, international identity and transoceanic friendships and sensibilities, I knew I’d have to take personal responsibility for fulfilling my worldly urges. Luckily I (with my attendant privilege) have to hand all the tools to engage with ideas, creativity, culture, histories, hopes, horrors and art, music and film from around the world, from the comfort of home.

And just because I’m staying home, I thought, this being 2019 and all, it’s not something I need do alone. I approved the copy, paid for my ad, sat back and waited.

*

Late January 2020 I got my first response, from Joan. Then came Meredith and David, Debi and Lachlan... None knew what to expect. Some were cautious, others catalogued their reading habits by way of credentials. I had interest from a man in country Victoria and another in Brisbane.

I suggested our first meeting take place on a Saturday, in the city, at the shoulder time of 4-6pm that allows one to drink tea or wine without it being weird. We would, I suggested, get to know each other with general conversation about why the LRB; which writers and themes we find most resonant; recent issues: issues. We would also structure the session with a directed discussion and in-depth review of one selected article.

I selected ‘Vodka + Caesium’, an essay on Belarussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich, by Sheila Fitzpatrick, from Vol. 38 No. 20, 20 October 2016. I would lead the discussion.

Sheila Fitzpatrick stands out to me among many excellent writers for exposing a whole world I cannot fathom. I extract clues. She’s an Australian. Writing for the LRB, about…Russia? Russian history, politics, writers, defectors. But of course. Just because you’re Australian and you live on this island at least an eight hour flight from anywhere.

We are people of the world, we have libraries, we can read.

Fitzpatrick delivers an armchair experience of the USSR, Russia, Ukraine, etc, the GDR––East Germany––a kind of travel that has taken me to places that no longer exist, places physically and temporally inaccessible and places I’ll likely never go, not now I’m trying to be good, and definitely not now I’m not allowed.

Fitzpatrick’s piece on Svetlana Alexievich inspired me to read Secondhand Time, and her own book, Mischka’s War, which in turn led to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5; to Russian film Beanpole (MIFF 2019) and HBO’s dramatisation of Chernobyl; to the Bellingcat Podcast on MH17, and to not necessarily connect all these things in the process, rather my experience of them.

Permission I felt was granted by another LRB favourite and contributing editor, Marina Warner, who wrote in a piece for Prospect magazine that the critical thinker should: “Think about how you’ve experienced this, how the words are acting upon you and why, what the writing is doing to you when you’re reading, what associations it brings up.”

Me? My experience? Warner’s was an invitation to the personal, maybe even a directive. But who was I to participate in critical thinking? Who was I to argue. It’s true I wanted to risk a critical practise, something with which I’d split after three failed attempts to engage in the university, where on the one hand there is talk of “think for yourself”, but as far as I could tell, only ever reward for regurgitation.

*

Saturday 22 February 2020, the world still seemingly normal. There were five of us around the table. No one said yes to wine, which worried me. I had notes and I felt quite silly. I introduced our subject, Svetlana Alexievich, born Ukraine raised Belarus (in what was then the USSR), studied journalism, worked as a teacher, journalist, editor. Writer of “documentary novels” at the “boundary of reporting and fiction.” She won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for books Fitzpatrick calls “collective oral histories”. Testimony.

Alexievich describes Secondhand Time as a “diagnosis of the contemporary social consciousness”, luring me in with the promise of a glimpse into something foreign I can’t comprehend: Soviet, sovok, homo sovieticus. Who are these people? How do they live? What motivates them?

In Beanpole (reviewed here in the New York Times), we are invited inside the kommunalkas, where “like the thin young nurse nicknamed Beanpole, the men and women…don’t complain or even speak much about their suffering, perhaps because it would be like describing the air that they breathe.” Air that, on account of all that communing, one suspects was cloying, claustrophobic.

The film takes us to post-war Leningrad––another non-existent destination––where we see war through women’s eyes, a perspective to which Alexievich is also committed, as for being half the story, it’s much too rarely told.

The Second Sex. Secondhand Time. This old thing? Looks familiar. Tired. Worn.

Alexievich gets people to talk. She suspects it’s because like them, she’s a sovok. She lived through it.

The Consolation of Apocalypse. That’s what she calls Part 1. I think about the word consolation…There is no prize, yet still we go to war. And what for? Capitalism keeps winning. Other ideologies come and go––religion, facism, communism––money has beaten them all. “Life is better now, but it’s also more revolting.”

Alexievich is writing what feels like a reckoning. Which is what good journalism should always be. Uncomfortable for everyone. She says of her process: “In writing, I’m piecing together the history of ‘domestic’, ‘interior’ socialism. As it existed in a person’s soul. I’ve always been drawn to this miniature expanse: one person, the individual. It’s where everything really happens.”

Yet with the personal comes tension with the group––with national and nationalistic tendencies. In an interview on freedom of speech you can find on YouTube, Alexievich says that their individual inventions remained an apparition. Unreal. They came up against “the ‘red man’, the mass person, an aggressive aggregation, a gross projection of ego” and were subsequently unable to grasp the freedoms they wanted, the way they defined them, as they looked––to them––in their own personal utopias.

It turns out each witness is unreliable for having thought that everyone shared their ideals.

Alexievich acknowledges the unreliable witness: “Their stories had nothing in common except for the significant proper nouns: Gorbachev, Yeltsin. But each of them had her own Gorbachev and her own Yeltsin. And her own version of the nineties.” Fitzpatrick goes a step further and reminds us that Alexievich herself is unreliable… Which is why her undertaking, the documentation, must be expansive, forensic, nuanced. It is only in its bigness that Secondhand Time can avoid dichotomies. No one person is good or bad, right or wrong. A reminder that if you’re reading one story it’s probably the wrong one.

Considered not exactly a history, nor a historian, on account of her handling emotion, “not just the facts”, I think while reading that surely there’s a boiling point, or critical mass at which we can accept that emotions become fact enough to be historically relevant.

“Suffering as information.”

A witness speaks: “The mysterious Russian soul… Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What’s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there’s just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. ‘Reader’ is our primary occupation… All the while, we consider ourselves a special, exceptional people even though there are no grounds for this besides our oil and natural gas.”

A witness speaks: “1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Krushchev! He’s the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticise the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends.”

A witness speaks: “With perestroika, everything came crashing down. Capitalism descended…90 rubles became 10 dollars. It wasn’t enough to live on anymore. We stepped out of our kitchens and onto the streets, where we soon discovered that we hadn’t had any ideas after all––that whole time, we’d just been talking. Completely new people appeared, these young guys in gold rings and magenta blazers. There were new rules: If you have money, you count––no money, you’re nothing. Who cares if you’ve read all of Hegel? ‘Humanities’ started sounding like a disease.”

A witness speaks: “I’d often reminisce about our kitchen days… There was so much love! What women! Those women hated the rich. You couldn’t buy them. Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb…”

*

In her Nobel acceptance speech Alexievich said, “We all live in the same world. It is called ‘The Earth’. A barbaric era is upon us once again. An era of power. Democracy is in retreat. I think back to the 90s…At that time, it seemed to all of us…to you, and to us, that we had entered a safe world. I remember Gorbachev’s dialogue with the Dalai Lama about the future, the end of history…”

The unreliable witness speaks.

Power, horror, does not go away. It shape shifts.

*

I ask if anyone would like a glass of wine. Everyone says yes. Either a sign that they’re enjoying this, or they can’t bear it and are too polite to leave.

I read from Slaughterhouse 5.

“‘I am from a planet that has been engaged in senseless slaughter since the beginning of time. I myself have seen the bodies of schoolgirls who were boiled alive in a water tower by my own countrymen, who were proud of fighting pure evil at the time.’

This was true. Billy saw the boiled bodies in Dresden.

‘And I have lit my way in a prison at night with candles from the fat of human beings who were butchered by the brothers and fathers of those schoolgirls who were boiled. Earthlings must be the terrors of the Universe! If other planets aren’t now in danger from Earth, they soon will be. So tell me the secret so I can take it back to Earth and save us all: How can a planet live at peace?’

Billy felt that he had spoken soaringly. He was baffled when he saw the Tralfamadorians close their little hands on their eyes. He knew from past experience what this meant: He was being stupid.

‘Would––would you mind telling me…what was so stupid about that?’

‘We know how the universe ends…we blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.’

So it goes.”

I think of the heroin addict, and how we’re all living a long-drawn-out suicide in real time; living in that state where a person “wavers on the edge between being and non-being.” Suicide is one thing. As the existentialists say, the absurd is another. Down here in this state we must embrace the project and do the things that must be done. Samizdat, bone records, here is where the art is, the art of living, existence. The despite which. The “thinking beyond their mourning.”

The thinking which if we cease, sees the space filled with trolls, cronies, QAnon.

The Bellingcat podcast on the downing of MH17 over Ukraine provides a perfect example of what we’re up against. Employing investigative journalism and open source research the Bellingcat collective expose what happened and the ways in which it was covered-up, not only uncovering incontrovertible proof that a Russian surface-to-air missile (a Buk) brought down the flight, but also the ways in which the Russian approach to truth has d/evolved since the dissolution of the USSR.

 “Back in Soviet times Moscow tended to try and push its own answer to whatever dilemma was around. It had a clear ideological stance. It would try and convince people of its truth. But Putin takes a post-modern approach––rather than attempt to espouse a truth, he questions: ‘what is truth, will we ever know what truth is?’”

They sum up today’s political playbook as follows:

1. Deny everything

2. Offer alternative explanations

3. Create a confused information space

4. Bury the truth in as many bizarre theories as possible.

“Scramble the information space.”

In a database of nine million fake tweets seeding pro-Russian fake news, conspiracy theories and disinformation, Bellingcat researchers identified a peak of 65,000 tweets in a three-hour period on 18 July 2014, the day after the downing of MH17.

*

The HBO production, Chernobyl, opens on the subject of Truth:

“What is the cost of lies?” It asks.

“It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth, the real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognise the truth at all.”

*

I look around the table. They’re not bored. Meredith, prepared, experienced, better read than the rest of us, wise, with great tempo. Alex, analytic, schooled in all the isms, speaks in full coherent sentences off-the-cuff making light work of a complex politico-historic context. Zed interjects with the Croation experience: compare and contrast. Lachlan is mainly quiet, but he’s an active listener, effusive. We’re riffing. The bottle is gone and we’re at time. I’ve lost the thread if ever there was one of what I’m saying. My contribution feels no more sophisticated than quotable quotes, and I don’t think I can see what my point is but we’re buzzing. I’m mainly imploring people to read and listen and see the things I’ve seen, cementing our fellow-feeling. And no, really, I was put off too. What’s wrong with subtitles? I don’t understand why it’s in English, just like I don’t understand why there was an English Wallander set in Sweden. But that I quickly got over it, fixated on the kind of awfully excellent televiewing experience of witnessing inefficiency and incompetence and unable to look away chanted ‘this is not good’, ‘this is not good’, ‘this is not good’ as if I could arrest something that happened back in 1986 that we full well know happened despite their best efforts to contain the truth.

We’re saying goodbye, and we’ll do it again they say, and I’ll bring wine says another. And I think this year’s going to be fine! We have our next subject. More readers have responded to the ad. Our Club meets again in a month.

Except as you know, it didn’t. And it isn’t. And while the LRB still arrives, I find myself mainly talking about the supermarket and the size and consistency of the dogs’ poos these days––on which I’ll spare you the details. I desperately need to revive my kitchen table conversation. Invite guests into my home. Club together.

I know that if conversation is all I lost in 2020 I’m on a good wicket, but I also know that without it we lose the thing that foments our art and activism. Something we can’t afford to lose sight of for long. I hope like hell I snap out of it soon.

The Dutch family

I travelled. And as Australians who travel can do, I wound up with a partner not from here. In my case he is European (politically, culturally, socially); and Dutch, more specifically. With elderly, unwell parents (in law) we now travel annually to the Netherlands to check they’re still alive. Though this puts me in an environmentally uncomfortable position it does give me the opportunity to maintain far flung friendships and experience Europe’s many delights (small dogs, pastry, passive smoking) and my favourite of all European cities––London–– which may or may not technically be in Europe (I’ve lost track), but which definitely remains European.

Something of a favourite spot in that city, a regular haunt––if you could call once a year a regularity––is J&A café in Clerkenwell. A lovely little Irish place, transplanted into central London, for cakes and savouries and decent sized pots of tea, and where today, after arriving from Melbourne late last night, B and I, jetlagged and on the edge of nausea, order three-cheese toasties on thickly sliced soda bread. Dense and savoury we dig in, revived by the home comfort quality.

Ireland. My ignorance flares up when I think of it. That country that isn’t in the UK but is in Europe, despite the UK being bang in between. And that has on its northern border another country that is in the UK but now not in Europe, and which is called Northern Ireland so seemingly has something to do with Ireland (the island) and not much by the sound of things to do with England, but, which sees itself (in ways, in parts) as more English than Irish. No one will like my suggestion that it would surely make more sense were it part of Ireland (the Republic) or renamed the West Islet of England. Just like no one much likes or liked or understood or understands the Brexit facility (or functionality) of the ‘backstop’. It’s more than a little demeaning to have your purpose as a place distilled to this. Rear end. Last resort.  

B and I wash our very late lunch down with an enormous pot of Earl Grey, because of course what makes London great is not only how European it is, but how British. We already feel far from last night’s arrival at Heathrow, when dead tired, unclean, I wanted to take the express and get it over with, but B wanted to take the tube, which of course can be a novelty, but which drags and drags, and thrift and convenience aside is hot and gross and dirty and smells of burnt rubber. I wish I’d insisted on the express. We changed from the Piccadilly to the Victoria Line at Green Park, and finally emerged from the underground at Highbury & Islington. Already intimate with the area I anticipated the warm giddy flush of the return, but instead had the same reaction I’d had 18 years earlier, on my very first arrival.

What strange and unusual hell is this?

Dingy buildings in a state of disrepair, crippling traffic, homelessness, drunks, all cold, dark, wet and sad looking. All the poor people looking like they existed in a nightmare from which they couldn’t wake. The chic dining spots etched into the streetscape, glassed frontage, soft lighting––I couldn’t bear it. The rubbing up against each other, not exactly unique to London, but so starkly pronounced, I couldn’t see past it. You can understand the sentiment in mainland Europe ‘go ahead, go’, like it was ever them that couldn’t suffer the loss of this member state. Feeling hopeless for the sorry lot of fellow humans can make one think dark, ungenerous thoughts. So by the time we wheeled our way to a friend’s place to seek solace, I was cured of my obsession with London. Just like that.

Of course when I said so out loud, B correctly suggested I wait until morning when, of course, walking through Canonbury’s more pleasant streets in the light of day (warm, dry) and arriving at The Place (another favourite café) I decided I was suitably happy to be back. Mellowed, maybe. New artwork adorned the walls. Mixed media abstraction with crescent moons and geometric blocks. Shapes and colours borrowed from Kandinsky that told of a trajectory of influence from Russia, threading west through Germany and France. Oasis on the stereo, of course. Oh, and the barista was Italian. Of course.

B and I made a series of emphatic observations about being back in London, but excited as I was, when I suggested it might be my last time, he thought it unlikely. But I don’t know, things are complicated, this global thing isn’t working out so well...

I’m thinking, when will this encroaching unease––unpleasantness––escalate into complete chaos? That’s what I’m thinking. And, where do I want to be when that occurs? London doesn’t feel like a city that’s going to weather the next century well. So Brexit? Boohoo. I’ve more often thought ‘the Continent’––for its train connectivity, and because I have the luxury of making that choice, but increasingly it’s Australia that feels like a safer bet.

We walk to what was the senseless Highbury & Islington squareabout, but which has had a very nice makeover, a rethink from a traffic management and pedestrian perspective. We boarded a bus, sat upstairs and soaked up scenes of a bustling London. Then we walked. Covent Garden, Embankment, across the Thames to Southbank, The National Theatre to The Tate, then back across the Thames to St Pauls, from where we dragged our feet to Clerkenwell––and here to J&A, for a very late, jetlagged lunch. 

That was a few days back now, but time expands and contracts, conflates and forks off in strange ways when travelling, and while journaling––with narrative licence! I now sit in bed in the attic room of B’s family home in Zutphen––which is where we sleep when we visit the Dutch family––where its warm and cosy and where B will have me try and wrap my mouth around the Dutch gezellig, and laugh at me lying under the small glowing stars and alongside an old school map of the Netherlands, where each time I try to locate Zutphen, never find it where I expect it to be.

As usual, UK customs were happy to see me leave the country, but I had been surprised on arriving that Australians were suddenly eligible to enter through smart gates. No sweating. No grilling. Just a camera flash and a green tick digital display. A pre-emptive (re)turn to the ‘colonies’ and away from Europe? In comparison, it was our usually smooth Amsterdam arrival that had uncanny hold ups, what with long queues waiting for a human to wave you through. And after waiting an unusually long time for our baggage, we eventually found it winding its way around a carousel for a flight arrived from Istanbul.

B’s brother was waiting among the cute fluffy dogs at Schiphol to speed us off to Zutphen. On the highway, as directed intermittently, he’d hit the break to bring his speed down from 130 to 100km/h. He explained that the limits were implemented to help meet new nitrogen oxide emissions targets. The approach in the Netherlands toward setting a goal, and a stretch goal, and to even still aim beyond it makes me feel sad about Australia, how defeatist we are. In the drive to reach EU targets, the Dutch are innovating and educating and shoring up their prospects in a new intelligent economy. The Dutch appear to have a plan for everything.

Last night the family sat down at the table to stamppot and Dutch sausage which is about the most disgusting of all Dutch meals. I washed it down ever so politely with a puritanical amount of red wine. Today, B is in the backyard levelling the brick path, but he’ll no doubt break soon for tea and apple tart. Tomorrow we’ve been tasked with clearing out the Dutch family attic. And eating more apple tart.

The sizeable attic space was bursting with three generations of junk, among which were the more curious boxes filled with wooden crosses, and more disturbing still, box upon box of toy guns belonging (he tells me) to his brother. So many guns. Thank god this is not America. We drove to his brother’s place uninvited to deliver 10 boxes of stuff (toy guns, lego, model planes, cars, beer bottles) and watched the blood drain from his face. When his wife got home she completely freaked out, and neither appreciated the fact that another 10 boxes might turn up tomorrow. We left them to discuss being adults with ageing parents and responsibilities. We picked up their daughter from day care, did the grocery shopping, cooked a stir fry and sat down to salvage their relationship.

Also found in the Dutch family attic, one deflated dolls head and one inflated muscle-suit. How could we not?!

I’d done my bit, so I bid the Dutch family farewell to commence my onward travel through Europe. B and I spent a night together in Amsterdam before he went back to do more time with lesser family members. Surprisingly, our train broke down outside Arnhem, and out-of-order station escalators reminded us of past trips to Italy where most everything useful is currently rotto, awaiting repair. Even the brand new metro we’d hoped to take north to our bridge house was on the blink. So we emerged from Centraal into driving rain to take the free ferry across the IJ. Already wet from the river crossing and facing a half hour walk in the rain, we ducked into a bar to dry off, drink beer and wait for the storm to pass. We settled in at De Pont, me with my Vedett blonde and B with his La Chouffe. We soon got to that point in the night when you decide to eat cheese for dinner and have one more beer, just a small one––a flautje––then in a break in the weather, made a run for it. The bridge house was definitely gezellig, but tired and bloated, B and I made the unanimous decision to wait until the morning and promptly fell asleep to the sound of the occasional duck making a water landing.

Wide awake and ready to go, walking the Jordaan, we admired the architecture of the canal houses while also fearing for the sinking slumping city it is. Farewelling each other in front of Centraal, B took off south to visit extended family in Uden and me, to Schiphol for a flight to Milan. What a long day of two halves it would be, as it tends to, when you wake up in one country and go to bed in another. Ah Europe.

AB, an old friend from Sydney, living long-term in London, had flown in from Gatwick half an hour earlier and was enjoying a beer in terminal two. ‘Rudderrrrrrr’ she called across arrivals. We embraced. I took a healthy swig of her beer, and we were Australians on the road once again. Finding the Malpensa express was easy enough, but ‘express’ was an oversell. Well over an hour later, we pulled into Centrale, Mussolini’s behemoth construction. An impressive feat, like many impressive feats––at what cost a fascist? Sadly the taxi queue was long and despite the many efficiencies of Milanese taxi drivers, we waited so long we had to go directly to Ratanà for our 9pm booking. Classic travellers, we arrived with our wheelies and under-dressed for the occasion. The room was nice, the service ‘proper’ but the Milanese risotto with osso bucco that is the house speciality was frankly gross. They’d also run out of cheese which seemed a critical misjudgement, so while I ordered a tart, AB looked morose until we paid the bill and got back in a taxi to our hotel. Hotels aren’t my thing, and this was no exception. I was bothered by a mosquito and my sheet loosened from its moorings, making for a frustrating night, exceptional only for being expensive.

The next morning, a very pleasant train ride in heavy fog, chit chat with an elegant Italian lady and as we reached the coast a little rain clearing to blue skies. When we disembarked at Santa Margherita Ligure, the sun was shining with some brilliance. Our hotel was a short walk from the station and being the off-season, we were upgraded to a room with sea views. We dumped our stuff and went straight to the pool, but after that initial dip, swam strictly in the sea, the Italian Riviera offering a divine, lazy, jade-green buoyancy.

A spectrum of terracotta and green­––window shutters and elaborately detailed balconies. Begonias, freesias, all sorts of lantana and other weedy flowers that never looked so good. Stairways winding up hills through accidental gardens. We ate fried octopus and bruschetta, we drank beer, we swam again. We sunned ourselves never worried we’d burn in the soft Italian sun. I ate pasta three nights in a row without digestive issue. Pesto Genovese the first, tomato, anchovy, capers and olives the second, swordfish and pine nuts the third. Could I be as pretentious to say that from now on, ‘I only eat pasta in Italy’. How do they do it so well? Perhaps the question is, how do we get it so wrong? 

We walked to Portofino along the coast on a path elevated in the forest. We stopped at a small swim spot called Paraggi, which was how swimming would be in heaven. We continued to Portofino and joined well-heeled Italians for Saturday lunch, ordered grilled fish, drank white wine. Thank goodness we would return by ferry.

Is this how we as Australians come at Europe? As travellers, as a destination? For some certainly. For others it’s nonna, abuelo, yiayia and opa. It’s food, it’s a sensibility. And for some, it’s little more than high school history––time now to look to Asia. Politically, it’s something we’ve come at primarily through past (and present) attachments to the UK, but perhaps we now need to discover a more intimate exchange, a diaphanous exchange, diffracted, embracing its plurality as something we’re well positioned (as an immigrant nation) to tap into alongside the lesson of its project––a necessity––to be something whole, one, coherent.

A slightly overcast day the next, we decided to train to Vernazza––the second of the five famed towns of the Cinque Terre. Finding the town horribly touristy we took to the walking trail immediately to get up above it all, look out over the coast line. The steep stone path, not for the faint hearted, weeded out the majority. I was sweating as we ascended 800 stone stairs––a woman from New Zealand keeping count. AB and I, who look these days like something between American, lesbian and middle-aged, women who’ve ‘let themselves go’, had her for a fellow traveller, and independently of one another thought we’d shared some kind of lesbians abroad moment when we stopped to catch our breath and have a natter. But when around the next corner we passed a handsome older Italian man, shirt off, hairy chest glistening with sweat, she stopped having sped ahead and called back to us, ‘now that was a good view’.

After AB flew back to London from Genova, I took a train north to Lugano, a town just inside the Swiss border. A thoroughly grey, wet day I was very pleased my Italian friend Patrick was there at the station to pick me up. I met Patrick studying philosophy in London, and thought he was being polite (taking me for a philistine) when he introduced himself as Patrick.

But surely you’re Patrizio? I asked.
No, it’s Patrick, he said.

And while I thought it would be fabulous to have a friend called Patrizio, it would have been terribly uncouth to go ahead and call him Patrizio just because I thought it sounded more Italian. Patrick picked me up in a black Audi TT. We bought a couple of bottles of red wine and sat by his window watching the rain pour out of the sky as we chatted through to the early hours.

I woke to a blinding brightness, the same window exposing rings of mountains under clear, crisp far reaching blue skies. We got in the TT and at the press of a button, the roof folded in on itself. We giggled a lot. Of course the car wasn’t his. At the summit of Mount Brè we sat out on a large terrace and ordered beer and bratwurst. On a couple of mountains in the middle distance there was the lightest dusting of snow. Not enough. We walked a trail and found a partly shaded spot to rest and chat more, admire the trees with their yellow turning leaves. There was nothing we didn’t cover––films, books, popular culture, science, death, politics, philosophy, space, the future, the past, love, life, engineering, health, identity, vanity, work, labour, vocation, the left, the right, the system, fuck the system, blowing up the lot.

Next, Geneva, on the Western edge of Switzerland. The train broke down on the first leg between Lugano and Zurich, which goes against the national character. Disembarking at a small regional station to board a local, all-stops service, everyone waited patiently on the platform. One woman started speaking to me in a foreign language. In response I asked, ‘what language are you speaking’, like if she answered German it would have been any different to her answering French. Just as the languages change as you travel across Switzerland, this cross-country train trip mapped a shift in architectural and gardening styles, from the bucolic ornamental Italianate in the South, to the clipped, pruned and ordered German north, and to the rambling vineyards and rustic French in the west.

I was in Geneva to collect my friend AC for a girls weekend in Antwerp. A seasoned Australian expat, she scooped the kids out of the bucket bike and when husband S got home, we bid him bon chance and wheeled off to the bus, train then plane to Brussels International. Another short train trip and we were in Antwerp, checking into our hotel in Sint-Andries. Hungry, we eagerly took our table at Le John, but when the waiter came to take our order, I was stunned into silence by an unexpected Australian accent. With him looking at me quizzically, I finally found my tongue, and asked what he was doing here. He told us all about his Belgian boyfriend and throughout the night, stopped by the table and we would reminisce about home. Australians. We’re everywhere. Yet we rarely speak of diaspora as other ethnic nationals might. For better or worse, identity can align around ethnic nationalism, and we could––there is some potential––to borrow and evolve the best bits, and create solidarity in an Australian identity. But without any agreement on republic and treaty, I won’t hold my breath that our motley crew might build some sense of self any time soon.

Antwerp was all about fashion and AC and I enjoyed discussing clothes and craftsmanship and spent considerable time unpacking my now long-running issues with and conflicted interest in fashion and style––my fear of frivolity and vanity––my fear that my interest could indicate poor character, or a poverty of character. Fashion has always felt at odds with my anti-everything attitude; Spartan tendencies winning out to the detriment of my image (plain, austere, holey). We came up with some novel, practical solutions to the problem, like having a minimum spend I must make on clothes each year, a minimum number of items I must wear each day and a maximum number of times each week a particular item can be worn.

After a lunch of croque monsieur we were back on the street, this time looking at interiors and objet d’art, making the most of the Saturday. Sunday, shops would be shut. Remember religion? We finally made our way to the epic Antwerpen canal and circled back into the old town for churches, very old buildings and gilded statues. The next morning we had breakfast at the food store at Hotel Pilar where I wanted to be all the people brunching there all at once. We walked more cute neighbourhood streets and looked at ornamental roundabouts and photographed ordinary people’s houses. It was finally time for goodbye, time to return home to Australia, enriched by my small European exchange as always.

Back at home in Melbourne with my Dutch partner I continue to exist with the subtle effects, the difference, the knowingness of a diversity of experience that comes after some time in two worlds and the small uncertainty I have every time I step out into the street that I might have looked the wrong way to check for oncoming traffic. Where if a road is deserted I sometimes get a sense of vertigo as I try to recall which side I should drive down, or from which direction I should expect to see cars approach. When I step into an airport, that nether zone where I don’t know where I am, where I could be anywhere and nowhere, untethered. When I’m both places at once.

Car city bitch

Clocked ten weeks back in car city. Within six hours I got my first speeding ticket, and after a hundred-odd hours since spent penitent on Sydney buses, doing the tedious commute from South Maroubra, I've moved to the relative sanctity of inner-city Redfern so I can walk everywhere and pretend the burbs don't exist. I maintain a daily mantra––a self-sell that it's the right time, bury the hatchet, make peace yaddayadda––which I hope will have an impact as it's exhausting not to mention boring to try so hard (and fail so dismally) in a city so revered for being shiny. I dare say both me and my long-suffering Sydney fan club would find it far less tedious if I could just enjoy myself. Full-time work is dispiriting, but I haven't quit yet, so there's hope that the system will have its way with me eventually. Come visit, it's great here and I'm a delight!

In the wake of the South Australia energy 'crisis', North Maroubra headland wind farm does its bit to prop up the national grid.

I, human

Luton airport as a last goodbye to London is a bit of a comedown... but the preceding week was high with a no-shoes-please party after which Jake went home wearing Nico's and Nico went home in nought but his patriotic, Aussie flag socks. Nico (aghast): 'where are my shoes', Jake (confused): 'why are my feet so sore'... and B and me waiting at Angel in the next day's drizzle, watching Jake sheepishly approach the 'shoe exchange' wearing his only other pair––some rather snazzy, but Sunday-strange dress shoes.

Fantastic friends and one last free philosophy lecture on existentialism, and I had to admit it had all been pretty great, if at times frustrating. Serendipitous then that the morning my leave to remain expired (and to where and what, who knew) I got news of a job offer from Carriageworks––a multi-arts centre in Sydney. Any creeping sense of failure at departing a demi-philosopher turned on its head, and despite leaving so many great things behind, I was suddenly excited about the future.

But immediately, there was the matter of the van der Lans clan initiation which is 'Winter sports' and which variously involved waking up at 3:30am for the 10 hour drive to Austria, flinging myself inelegantly down red runs, eating my body weight in bread and cheese, sharing naming rights with Amy-the-dog, and creatively but politely saying no to dessert (first dessert and second dessert), still recovering as it was from early-evening deep-fried sugar-encrusted treats.

Driving across Germany, we passed road signs for places like Bad Homburg and Bad Meinburg, and I'd shake my head, 'tut-tut-tut, Bad Homburg', and B would say 'THE WORST! It's true. Important people told me.' And we'd laugh until the next sign, and do it all again, and laugh some more. It was by now around 5am and doing a very respectable 140-150kmph, B would be overtaken by a flying VW or BMW, and I'd say 'see, real Germans, not like those FAKE GERMANS, the Dutch!' And like the rest of the world, we tried to keep our spirits up by laughing about it all, unsure how else to pass off the madness...

A week later I was in Hong Kong in positively double digit degrees, met by the wide smile of SG who whisked me away to his little Lamma Island paradise where he and AC maintain their perky physiques by living atop a dramatically steep hill. On these hilly isles, the civil engineering merit of retaining walls isn't matched by the unfortunate decision of the monitoring body to drill the plaque: ‘slope registration' into every cement reinforcement. Construction is rampant, life is vibing, the green is receding and the sky sags under the weight of pollution. You can feel the curve of the earth here...

I'm at the airport this very minute, waiting for my flight south to Sydney. A very different life awaits. For a start, I may be able to replace these hole-filled clothes and retire B's borrowed jeans (also at risk of splitting any moment now). I'm already booked in for a haircut, and as for the job, well it might do something to legitimise the self. Once again, poor long suffering and most excellent parentals will take me in til payday, so for anyone Sydney-side, you'll find me in Maroubra with the frogs et al. May the adventures continue.

The view from above––Mittleberg and the Mid-levels.

They'd say I had it coming

Nice sentiment, but not exactly. Illustration #2 the more accurate.

Somehow, despite an attitude problem and tendency for insubordination, I got through high school without a detention. The penalty point system, which in many ways was 'soft on crime' but also a precursor to mandatory sentencing, determined that the third penalty point would––only but always––result in detention. I was an expert at balancing two penalty points, avoiding a third until, at the end of each semester my sheet was wiped clean.

It was a shock then when flying into London from the Netherlands recently, I was detained at Her Majesty's pleasure by the enthusiastically rabid border police. Like all lengthy, tortured debates, we disagreed from the outset with differences of opinion on the basic definition of the terms: what it is to be a 'visitor', a 'student', a 'tourist', what is legal and illegal, what it is 'to live', to 'be living'––to be a human. Without a resolution in sight, I was asked to wait (locked) in a 'female holding room' (cell) after my belt, scarf, shoes, jacket, bags and phone were removed from my person, and searched. 'What's this?' 'a book on Rembrandt', 'What's this?' 'coffee beans', 'What's this?' 'dirty underwear', 'What's this?' 'my diary'. He looked more bored than I was worried.

Five hours later, spent of adrenaline, having somewhat enjoyed the telling of my life story for the small moments of clarity that surfaced, and with absolutely no interest in actually entering the country, they released me so I could enjoy Christmas in Dorset as I'd promised Al we would. Sure, I thought, Dorset is probably nice, but London––am I done here? The whole thing might just have cured me.

The next day on Holloway Road amid the grey, wails and body fluids, I saw this drawing on a hoarding. The system is abusing the gaping wound in our sides. But at least out here it's organic madness. Of course the madness of the security complex and detention system in the UK is better demonstrated by those with bigger issues than an administrative fuck-up by their sponsor university. To get an idea of the hypocrisy and infringement of human rights, I highly encourage watching this short film.

Working Illegally from Standoff Films on Vimeo.

Even clean hands cause damage

Los guantes. I'm pointing at them. Blue, latex, M-for-medium, stuttering 'g' 'g' 'g' imploring my brain for more, but again get only as far as 'g...'. The Spanish dishy puts me out of my misery and says 'los guantes'. Gloves, of course.

The exercise is part of my desperation to make more of a summer spent waiting tables. When I screw up my knee, I work harder still to compensate for my poor standing, interrogating the Bulgarian chef for a detailed history of a country I can't even place on a map. I will get something out of this. Anything!

Despite my collapsed knee-cap, the NHS-appointed physio is terribly polite about the state of my body. I wonder why until my hydro-therapy sessions where in my swimmers under fluoro lights I realise compared to the general hospital populace I'm in good shape. Getting around on crutches I'm suddenly struck by the sheer number of people similarly (and now I want to say crippled, but I think it might be wrong, yet it seems so right, it seems that's exactly what they are) crippled (by life, by London, by lower/fewer everything). I try to figure out why there are so many lame people in London, whether we've let our bodies go to waste, or the city's such a bitch it's broken us.

On the bright side, the chat is amazing. Guys trip over each other to give me their seat. I'm touched and more than a bit surprised. I persist with the cafe on reduced activity, a-grade painkillers and the novelty of saying no, we're out of sparkling mineral water and watching the unruffled unravel. I get my mate Jake a job. He's an out-of-work geophysicist, and it makes me feel like less of a loser to undertake menial tasks alongside a big brain like his.

I open up at 7 one morning, unaware the pest controller had been in the previous night. I barrel in proving to no-one I'm a morning person, and pull up stuck, shaking a sticky tile from my sneaker. The situation sinks in and as I kick my leg like mad to detach the damn thing I see mice––tiny, shivering lumpettes––dotting the floor. I scream and back-track outside into the path of the Bulgarian, who thinking I'm the inquisitive type describes how they die. We wait for the heavy-footed pest inspector to return and put us all out of our misery.

By the end of summer I was spent. I decide to take a 'time out' from study and subsequently lose what meagre 'work rights' I had. With the colder weather the buses have started smelling of hot babies and warm chips and I'm wondering what the hell I'm doing. Thank god for friends, because at nine pounds a margarita, tequila remains a temporary solution at best. In an attempt to rediscover the love, I went to the Tate yesterday, but it just made me sad. The usual: 'please don't touch the artwork' had been updated with an addendum 'even clean hands cause damage' and I couldn't (and can't) get the sentiment out of my mind.

Berlusconi's mani pulite trial comes to mind.

Mauvais, mal, misère...

I'm laying bare my hand. I have, no tricks. Something similar is happening in America: the Great. Trump is naked irony amassed while over here the press wets itself with concatenation (Brexit/Regrexit). Summer is happening and while summer's definitely nice, it does enhance the smell of piss in the Kingdom's capital. Persistent niggles, discomforts and disappointments amass into a shit-show. When I receive my pap smear results in the post I open the envelope to read 'all clear' and I'm flooded with joy. I've been so starved of good news that to be considered medically 'normal' is a shockingly positive assessment. Despite a love for London, it doesn't love me back. I settle for the nuzzling affection of a neighbour's cat. I've fallen for her bow-legged trot, downcast eyes and ageing greys. Kitty can do no wrong, and when I find a poo in the garden or a cat-shaped impression in one of our plants, it's always some other hoodish cat that's to blame. Black cat, crossed my path, I think everyday is gonna be my...

Mercy!

To care about voting nowadays

The minute you emerge from the home to the olfactory frenzy of the city, you’re on. Like it or not, this city of smells, few of them good, serves that small, but not unimportant purpose of letting you know you’re alive. And to be alive, is surely the first condition for creativity. Switched on, the senses embrace chaos and thrive on drawing it into tangible order. Your foot taps to his beat––the headphones hardly personal; you smile as she belts out a tune––cycling past too fast to be self-conscious. A sticker on that pimped out Macbook: THE FINE ARTS ARE NOT FINE. You wonder whether that’s because they’re base or vulgar or if the point is they’re underfunded and therefore not OK.

Now I’ve got my coffee and my breast pocket is pinging––it starts. A motley WhatsApp group is feeding a long-running joke about Slavoj Žižek, the wildly gesticulating Slovenian philosopher. Somewhat envious of his bona fide eccentric credentials (he has a lisp and a tic) he is the commentator we love to hate, with the balance landing on ‘love’ because in a city like London we have the opportunity to experience his particular brand of enthusiastic pessimism on a regular basis. It was the same crew who introduced me to existential poet Fernando Pessoa (the Portuguese), author and agitator Italo Calvino (the Italian) and defender of the Undercommons Fred Moten (the American). Yes, it is in London that I’m most exposed to the creativity of the world. These expats, (in this case Isabel, Patrick and Ashleigh respectively), adventure far from their home-lands and assemble in cities to continue the exchange of information, ideas and innovation that have propelled humanity and creativity for centuries. It’s this collision of dynamic forces that makes stuff happen.

I am the Australian. In return I tell them about Pauline Hanson (and the drag act Pauline Pantsdown whose comeback may be imminent as the former has inconceivably been returned to the senate), the ever-quotable film The Castle (‘how’s the serenity?’), our abhorrent record on detention, and a bit about Asian nations on which I’m better versed than them. I recommend an Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, as his defiance of the Dutch colonisers (who imprisoned him) and of Suharto (who placed him under house arrest) is a story that should be heard; a prescient reminder the new establishment may be no better than the old establishment.

Though on the surface cities appear to favour the establishment, they actually depend on an organic undercurrent of creativity. The establishment is staid, whereas creatives are in perpetual movement and all that activity creates a need for community. People to perform, people to watch, people to paint, people to see, people to talk, people to listen, people who’ll make the coffee and always bring treats, someone, anyone! with a car––or a van––a van would be perfect… Instead it’s a bike on a fine day, on the rest––the majority––I descend into the depths of London, a rodent ferreting my way through the red oesophagus of the underground thinking endure. But I come to my senses and observe: as a writer, everything’s material, even these seemingly mundane moments. There is a steaming cold sore in close proximity, an old woman with a gummy smile and excess saliva, a preacher with blue rings around deep black irises. If I get off at Oxford St, I smile back at the looming Topshop model and think look at the size of those teeth! There is a shrunken man sitting at the foot of a grand stone edifice. He’s chewing slowly. I imagine him toothless. He fists a crumpled McDonalds bag, grubby fingers producing a few more limp chips which he mashes––a not-displeased look on his face. He has a sign that reads ‘please help’. Well, exactly.

If it’s early I’ll walk past people stretching and rubbing weathered faces after their slow wake from the night before. Blankets flung to one side––sad and crumpled––looking thin and not at all warm enough to fend off the weather. They are silent. I am silent. Later, they’ll be interrupted in their public bathroom ablutions by teens who amplify their obsession with image, leaning over basins to closely examine every perceived imperfection just an inch from the mirror.

I think of Deanna Roger's brilliantly proud face. The way it moves when she throws down words. Uncompromising. I saw the spoken word poet perform live last month (the timely, rhetorical, Who cares about voting nowadays? Indeed), with a raw energy I associate with anticipation. It’s in city streets that anticipation meets possibility; in the corners, lanes, nooks and crannies––in urban decay and renewal. It’s drinking beer at Freud’s in the middle of the a.m. talking shite about some creative or political or enterprising project, getting up the next day and doing something about it.

Commune of good cheer

My thighs have exploded, I fear permanently. Running is not an option, and the most taxing thing I've done since lending my bike to B all winter (I know, what sacrifice!) is a five hour stint in Harrods, styling our very own AB, on the same day as the London Marathon. Job done, she took off to NY with more letters after her name than any grad I know, Céline pumps in the bag. After my jeans suffered a gaping wound in the vicinity of the crotch (which, I sadly can't claim is 'bike related') AB gifted me two pairs of unworn Acne jeans, which don't fit me either, but will be quite the incentive to initiate a morning routine of leg raises and other low weight bearing contortions. 38 you see is a PHAT number. I mean, look at it!

It all started with breakfast cupcakes, there was of course pizza, and a detour down Sunset Boulevard (via the Tabacaria*). 'Sunset Boulevard, brutal boulevard, like you we'll end up in the ocean'... I love the darkness in this line from the ALW adaptation. It reminds me of Bill Hicks's 'Arizona bay'. I'd work both the title song and Tool's ænema into my post-modern interpretation of the classic, in which Isabel goes to LA to get Blair off drugs. Disappear here.

While I'm supposed to be getting a grasp on key philosophical concepts like 'judgement' and 'critique', I'm yet to understand why the word 'facticity' triggers disdain whereas 'thingliness' [Dinglichkeit] tickles. And so most of my study goes. There are serious writers and ideas on which I can find little more to say than 'useless', 'waste of space', then some that resonate so much I'm moved to impression (the undercommons) or depression (the new spirit of capitalism). It will be a measure of my maturity to what degree I let this devolve into an exercise in smart-arsery, or take from it those things that will necessitate a commitment to change/ing. I note down essay ideas like 'Art: it pisses me off too', 'Kanye: you conflict me', and 'Shit, I'm a communist, how the f*** did that happen' and wonder if I can make anything of it in this forum (the 21st century university) or whether I'm forever destined to fall in the gap between the academy and the people.

In football news, West Ham have played their final game at Upton Park (this is like the Rabbitohs playing at Redfern) in a typical performance that saw fans pitching tinnies at the Manchester United team bus (before the game) and the players steal victory late in the second half. Ah the Hammers, apparently Olympic Park will tame them (fascist infrastructure). It might not have snowed this winter but London spring has so far been a downpour of blossom petal confetti, with a handful of days suited to kerbside drinking late into the evening.

nb. *The poem, Tabacaria, by Fernando Pessoa was introduced to me by Isabel as part of my education on all things Portugal. It's not exactly cheery, but it's perfectly me and lovely all the same. Look it up.

Bill Hicks does stand-up while Glenn Close does standing ovation.

Counting beans

Spring, and the daffodil-laced strip-parks of this very nice, Corbynite, northern suburb stop abruptly when you step out onto Holloway Road––a dart of reality, that cuts from the permanently screwball Highbury and Islington squareabout, and deposits you on the A1 past Archway, where should you persist, you'd hit Edinburgh in around seven hours. Walk south where my street intersects instead, and in under ten minutes you reach the natty Nag's Head market where its all-weather, connected cabanas host micro-business operations like a single basin lavado and cortado, two table sushi bar, and empanaderia with 100% tatty, rattan interior.

Local supermarket Morrisons, dedicates shelf space, aisle by aisle, to cuisine of the ex-colonies with which, starting with Gungo peas, I plan to experiment. Hopes of becoming some kind of exotic, woman-of-the-people, bohemian Buddha of Suburbia, scuttled by the discovery Sea Isle Gungo peas are a product of Italy, owned by a UK company and could just as well be plain old lentils like I've, you've, we've all been eating for years. Inspired by the Panama Papers, I did a search on Sea Isle Limited and found, like any good English company, it's owned by an enterprising Indian guy. Well, was. It's been consumed by KTC Edibles, also owned by an Indian family, but in which the RBS is heavily invested. So like all of us, I guess they're 'owned' by the banks, and who the crap owns them? I know I'm talking Gungo peas (at 38p a tin!), and using layman's search skills, but still it's worth asking.

Thank god there's someone on the important stuff with investigative mettle (go direct to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for less BS – https://panamapapers.icij.org/). While watching their words incredibly carefully, it's pretty clear once you start reading, that obfuscating financial offshoring activity is either criminal or grossly greedy, and to my mind, in this day and age, neither are defensible. Unfortunately, they're also utterly unsurprising. What's at stake here isn't whether what's exposed is ultimately deemed legal or illegal (by a system inevitably playing catch-up), but whether irrespective of legality, there's any change, recompense, redistribution, or other action taken on what is and isn't ethical. If not, minor embarrassment for the mega-rich will abate in days, and another layer of apathy inducing impotence will be cast over the general populace as another episode of leaks simply affirms what we know, while life goes on. And by life, unfortunately I mean growing disparity and continued arms production. What do you think's going to happen... seriously?

While you think about it, I'll correct the record on my previous assertion re: the uniformity in dick and ball doodling. It seems not all men are created equal after all, this beautiful gold rendition is for me, in the lead by a long shot.

Golden dick and balls by the N19 'highline', London, and Sea Isle Gungo peas.

Hetero-queery juvenalia

There's a pressing need for intellectual thought to be de-institutionalised before an irreversible rigor mortis takes hold. My lecture notes are mainly asides to stop me screaming. I scrawl instead: 'shut the f- up'. Still, I, no-one acts. I scratch: 'we are all prostitutes' on the page; and on account of our passive agreeing that it's remarkable, 'yeah, remarkable only for being shit' (underline underline), I'm afraid we're all complicit. Fantasies arise: 'Atomic bacteria eat the earth!' We're watching it happen, and all the 'words, words, words' have no meaning, no active praxis. False words are the new pollution, a post-'enlightenment' problem that like war, men inflict with such regularity you may wonder how they get anything done, and what for that matter the women might be doing. Laundry? Well, at least that's something. And no, I can't be blaming men for everything, but give a man a pen, soon enough he'll draw a dick and balls. And no matter the diversity in dexterity and drawing skill among men, each iteration of dick and balls will be the same.

Meanwhile my doodling skills come along in leaps and bounds. Stick figures depict castration theory, the Lacanian 'wall', the 'crisis in archiving', a deconstruction of what was once 'concrete', and my fantasy face-off: Rimbaud v. Rambo. I'm coursing closer to the definition of schizophrenia, but the world may beat me to it. Trump is possibly the president America (and we all) deserve. It's perfect. It fits the pure farce of our time. And Brexit? Care factor..? I don't trust the debate is anything more than the replacement of one set of rules with another, of one set of interests with another, and I doubt those interests are those that interest the 'people'. Vale Marx. I am but a word machine. I've been thinking about humans and how we rebel now. Who it is we can respect. And where it is we can go. Then I read this: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/frances-stonorsaunders/where-on-earth-are-you and it didn't exactly cheer me up... but I urge you to read it.

Next week: Daffodils!

Dickheads and doodles.

A little bit of Devon, a whole lot of baloney

Ufff, February. Where were we? Oh yeah - we were back in 2015, heading for Devon, where brown with mud to the rim, my mid-shin gumboots almost went under on more than one occasion––a fine line I won't risk again–– upgrading to knee-highs before I next venture to England's soggy lowlands. While we were all seriously enjoying our holiday––wine and cheese in front of the fire––occasional bracing walks into the wilds of the moors, I got seriously started on the reading for my first two essays. Nico proved a good sport, answering questions concerning castration and the phallus while he made the morning's coffee. There were days Al stayed in bed for fear I'd ambush her with gender identity questions like, what is a woman? for which she has no time, and on which once finally pressed, I was availed of comic relief from the pyschoanalytic, her comments making their way into my final drafts (which may or may not go down well with my professor as 'legitimate' research).

Those two essays have now been submitted, with one featuring a cheeky critique of Lacan, the other a celebration of the 'tomboy' or all things 'periphery' in a reclamation of territory available to 'woman'. If anyone's interested I may try and post them at some stage. I haven't solved anything yet (world peace?), but I think I made some small points worth making. Baby steps.

Celebrities. A topic on which I usually say little. But, in the space of a week, I found myself taking coffee alongside, first––Kiera Knightley, and second––Sienna Miller. Where? A girl doesn't tell... Also in the last week, I've acquired a live-in boyfriend (rather KR has acquired a temporary live-in couple) having left my place in Dalston to commence the hunt for a small square-metreage with very high ceilings as B and I take on cohabitation. No more share-housing for me. Quelle surprise!

Ah, the French...

So, this is Christmas

It was midway through December when I realised we'd arrived in this most latterly month of the year, the one that throws up Christmas with its tinsel, baubles and epileptic lighting, and your therapist asks with extra intensity: are you ok? I walk past Her Majesty's newly privatised* Royal Mail service and Dalston is dribbling all over the footpath and I instantly decide not to 'do cards' this year. Like roads in Beijing, schools in Malaysia and apartments on the Costa del Sol, I think we need to trial a time-share arrangement for major holidays. This being the most major, it may gain more traction than the baby-share scheme I floated with Miriam a few years back.

I'm escaping the city for a spot in Devon promised to be remote, with an open fire and cows. I picked up a hire car today and jerked my way around London for a couple of hours picking up supplies so I can go off the grid in a somewhat posh way over the next ten days in my new, sort-of-posh Aigle gumboots. It's wet due west, but in the city it's still mild and most of the ice rinks have closed because they've melted.

I tried to get festive by engaging with a homeless man hawking for money in a cafe. I knew the cafe had nice, substantial sandwiches and I asked if he'd like one. They're ridiculously expensive, but I wanted to get in the giving spirit. He told me he'd really rather go to McDonalds and buy a burger and a cup of tea. But why, I spluttered––pointing and appealing to the nice looking sandwiches, freshly made, laid out on the counter. He rubbed his hands together and said but the burgers at McDonalds are delicious and I love them. Then he said, I'm Jamaican, Jamaicans love burgers... And I thought aren't Jamaicans supposed to love chicken, which is a hugely stereotypical thing to think... Finding no suitable counter argument, I asked again - are you sure you wouldn't like a sandwich, while reaching for my wallet and wondering why I was acting so constipated all of a sudden. Could I be such a snob I couldn't accept the idea of my money––what a few pounds––being spent at McDonalds? What was it I was giving him and why? There I was judging a sandwich superior to a burger, when surely the superiority lay with the gift of self-determination, so I deferred to his better judgement and gave him the means to do what he will... I hope you too do what you want this Christmas! It's not like being good is getting us far. Merry, merry!

*this month's recommended reading––James Meek, Private Island. Who owns England?? And it's not who you think.

I borrowed this bit for ten days, but I've since given it back.

The week*, in feelings...

Sean G rolled into town, down the escalator at Shoreditch High Street, well-cut navy suit, louche––no tie. His laugh singed with an infectious Aussie twang, he brought the last of the balmy evenings and an easy familiarity. The following week, in front of an open fire, Caitlin, here from New York indulged my whinging about modernity, identity, and control (in the face of my Linkedin stare-down**), allowing Al, (poor, long-suffering) to deal quite rightly with my repeated and infantile 'but I haaaate it', with 'do you hate money!'

Well no. As it turns out, money is super useful when you do stupid shit like lose your keys when your housemate's away in Finland and you need to pay some burly Israeli guy to break down your door and replace the locks with shiny new expensive ones. Watching the drill spray metal shards onto the footpath, you think about the manicures you don't get and then you think: I bet Slavoj Zizek isn't on Linkedin. Then you call your lover and cry, unsure whether this is about your status as a philosophical nobody, the 200 pounds, the rain, the state of the world, or the fact you simply miss him.

Amid the cacophony of crap that is 'the state of the world', I've been properly and surprisingly struck with the revelation that there are more nice things happening than not... This is huge; I haven't been inclined to glass half full for a very long time. Unfortunately, it was the jolt of another day's 'dramatic events' that caused this involuntary shift in gears. Here's a summation of the thoughts that followed: The world is peppered with dramatic events that don't impact me but make an impact; events echoed by further events that may or may not impact me, that maybe should do, but can't, because of my inability to bear being so impacted by events upon which I can't possibly bring any bearing.

Egocentric since we each saw our reflection for the first time––at an age too young to produce anything other than a deranged sense of 'self'––we conjure guilt as if the self-reflexive remonstration will in some way substitute for the real thing. But guilt is an utterly impotent emotion, an illusion of feeling something in the absence of having felt anything at all. Despair leads nowhere but depression, and anger, whose bedfellow is violence, perpetuates idiocy and thuggery. Action––seeking justice, reconciliation and dialogue––starts with a committed practice of peace, and one can't practice a long and lasting peace without adopting a modicum of optimism. And so it is in choosing to practice peace, that I'm compelled to be more optimistic.

Two days after my epiphany I'm at Royal Festival Hall for a lecture with rock'n'roll billing: Zizek, Varoufakis, Horvat and Assange. They're discussing the democracy deficit, an absence of aspirational ideology, class conflict and borders (and they're discussing Europe!). When the steadfastly pessimistic Zizek, concedes conceptual ground to the more optimistic Varoufakis, I think––maybe there's some momentum in this thing. Assange took it a step too far suggesting some kind of 'third-way' like a new Christianity that's a combination of Christianity and Islam (as if there were only two ways to begin with or that the 'original' ways––which as it turns out are not so 'original'––are worthy of replication in any way shape or form). The discomfort grew as he rambled on, missing the point entirely, and Horvat finally cut him off, no doubt thinking the guy's clearly gone mad holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for all this time.

Anyway, I'll put my mind to the ideology thing, and if I come up with anything semi-decent, I'll run it by you. In the meantime. Be good.

*Which week? That week Paris happened and the 'one minute silence' fell victim to supersizing.

**in the Amy Rudder v Linkedin staredown, Linkedin won. If you're so inclined, note, I am not the chiropractor.

Zizek, lost on stage as Assange looms large, and as for linkedin, well?

You say potato, I say atopotatos

Not a philosophical joke (that may end up being me), but there you have it, my very first philosophy joke. Once I dream of Nietzsche (please let it be Nietzsche and not the horse*) I’ll don a black skivvy and officially launch my London Philosophy Club. Some contrast given the first club I joined O-week of '96, was the Sydney University Ski Club. nb. 1. I did not, nor have I ever attended Sydney University, and 2. I had never ever then seen snow. I thought as a student of Central Saint Martins––best renowned as a fashion school: Chalayan/McQueen/Katrantzou––I’d be inspired to up my game, but so far I’ve been either too cold, too wet, or in too much a hurry to do better than jeans and a jumper. Now my bike’s back in one bit and resigned to riding in ‘sensible cycling gear’ I’ve finally cast off any hope of becoming ‘muse’ to one of the fabulous court-shoed, be-skirted boys on the MA Fashion, as well as any pretension that this time around, university might be sartorially different to the first. But it’s definitely different.

Yesterday. The Professor: What kind of text is this?The students silent, avert their gaze. Professor: When you read this, what type of text do you think you’re reading? The students fidget, shift in their chair. Unable to bear the awkwardness brewing in the room, I come up with the most ridiculous sounding thing I can based on the essay title, which begins: 'After criticism, new responses to blah blah blah...' Me: Uh, post-critical? Prof: Interesting. So what do you think that means? Me: Do you want to ask someone less cynical? A beat. And because I realise it won’t kill me to say it… Me: The author blends theory with analogy to create an accessible, more personal entry to the text’s thesis. Give me a bucket.

So why philosophy? Good question. This time it was the mini-cab driver asking. He wasn’t the first. He was interested because he thought he sensed a return to the popularity of studies in the discipline. Astute! Though we had time and we were enjoying a healthy banter, I went with a shockingly (to me at least) simple answer. 'Well,' I said, 'the old ways of solving problems aren’t working, it may be worth thinking up some new ones.' He seemed happy with that. And I felt in that moment like there’s potential for something entirely valid in what I’m doing. And that I can still bridge both worlds if I keep my wits.

For now though, my world revolves around Dalston, where British-Caribbean culture meets East End geezer meets um, how else can I put it? art school hipster. There was nothing intentional about how I wound up here, but I love it. My place has all the modcons, like a kebabery on the corner, coffeeshop across the road and a local pub where, I have it on good authority Jarvis Cocker likes to hang out, and they play Premier League on the big screen. A few of the older warehouses in my street have been converted to artist and film studios; even Bombay Munch, my local curry house quips it’s a 'creative Indian eatery'.

*apparently Nietzsche had a bad dream that involved a horse and subsequently went mad.

In pursuit of substance, or at least, subsistence...

Stop, science time

Yes boys and girls, MC Science, a.k.a Ma Rudder is in town, so it's science week––except it's three weeks––and let me tell you, it's been said, and I can verify, science is everywhere. We're talking orreries, astrolabes, theodolites, miniatures, models and moulds, faience, glass and porcelain; the temperature at which things burst, the method by which things are made, the squabbles surrounding patents, and all the ethical issues in between.
But who's complaining? Moi? Mais non, for while Ma Rudder's in town, dining is strictly a matter of desserts, which makes all the talk of the industrial revolution more doable.

From the sports desk, JC reports West Ham is in an unsustainable equal third position in the Premier League, and when he tells me why, for a minute I think we're fielding this 40-something, mid-90s Croat national that he's so excited about, but he corrects me––Bilic is the now manager––that person in Aus, we less pretentiously call/once called the 'coach'. JC, a one time Norwich resident, regaled us with stories of beautiful cliff walks and beaches in county Norfolk, so Mum and I hired a teeny tiny Fiat and set off from Cambridge (more science) for the faded grandeur of coastal villages and cathedrals.

Back in London and with induction events at Central Saint Martins this week, I've finally done away with my Australian number (I've been warned it will be reassigned so make sure you delete it) for a +44. But today's extra exciting news is that UAL has awarded me a small grant, a not untidy sum given the aforementioned dive in the dollar (did it rally behind Malcolm at all?), so don't mind my poking fun in my application: 'I plan to use my 20 hours' 'right-to-work' to save for the second year while undertaking the first. I fear this means more corporate copywriting - alas, what's a girl to do! I'll have my studies to stimulate the grey-matter, so one more year of less-than-inspiring work won't kill me. My situation would be helped if the Aussie dollar hadn't gone from buying 60p (when I hatched this hair-brained idea) to 42p (today). If only our government had been a little more creative during 'the boom' my bank balance might look a bit better. Having said this, I'm aware my 'hardship' may pale in comparison to another's, so I trust your discretion and judgement in accepting or overlooking my application.'

Judged equally on one's financial situation as well as academic merit, it was a little cheeky. But honest! Anyway, you can give me a bollocking any time on the new +44, which is still on iOS for all you apple fans out there.

The English seaside. They have sun too.

To rage against…

There I was in London one minute distilling my very essence into online forms and financial data, when I was told definitively that despite all advances in modern technology, the bifurcations, hooks, whorls and spurs of my fingerprints must be measured in Melbourne and only Melbourne and the 16,900km that stood between me and a particular biometric recording device counted for nothing.

One laboured chapter of Wuthering Heights, a weighty September Vogue, and countless hours later, I was in Abu Dhabi, then Melbourne, then across town––patted down, I was ushered into a small room, where delirious I was scanned, photographed and registered, before being packed back to London to marry up my measurements with the real thing and collect my micro-chipped residence permit (is it always on? Can I turn it off?).

There was time enough for D to beat me by six points in scrabble and retain the title for the conceivable future and to tete a tete with O, with whom I’d been to see Gypsy on the West End just days earlier. I don’t know if this is all fabulous or a bit yucky.

I trimmed an hour off the edge of my jetlag travelling backwards to Amsterdam to meet up with WB and attend a VDLs family function where I was easily the shortest person not sitting at the kids’ table. Ah the Dutch. There was an experiment in cycling selfies and mass consumption of cheese, stroopwafels and apple pie/tart/crumble, which we offset with long forest walks and canal-side rambling (true).

After a week together in London I’ve now said goodbye to my tall friend in preparation for Mum’s arrival. I know I know––I said something about doing my Masters. It kicks off in under two weeks now, so the pressure’s on to find a house and a job and make like I’m not precious/picky and/nor on permanent holiday. Hm, nothing like some new stationery to make me realise shit's about to get real.

And I thought I’d said goodbye to these two for good.

Expensive bosh

Leafing through Philosophy Now in the Swiss Cottage library. Someone has added comments in biro; a spindly hand I associate with an elder member of society. Derrida is ‘clownish’. An article on ‘Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction’, is ‘bosh’ and Noam Chomsky ‘pillock’ has his name defaced so it reads Chimpsky, which frankly, I thought a bit childish. I looked at the shocking state of the seven older men with whom I now shared the room. One with a bulbous nose, asleep. Another obsessively rearranging chairs, noisily shifting them from one side of the 'quiet' reading room to the other. One absently flicked through Dancing Times, the rest read newspapers with screamy headlines that appeared satirical, but weren't.

This, after my morning coffee in an NW6 cafe, where Lyn introduces herself to me over the LRB and assuming I’m a ‘reader’ tells me about the funding cuts planned for the city’s libraries. I just must go up to Swiss Cottage and sign the petition. I do/did. Today, in the National Portrait Gallery, I run into the same Lyn who, astounded by the coincidence, asks me for my email address and is my first new London friend. I remember London being like this back in '01, but even I thought that perhaps times had changed. My latest intel has it that the guest list of the minute is that of the US Ambassador. Apparently his parties are fantastically caj-fab, so I ponder how in the next two years I might come to score an invite. I also learn the embassy is shifting from Mayfair to Battersea, which I assume is a coup for the developers of the new Thames-fronted site, but it’s more pragmatic than that – a security issue foremost, for they can’t be building bomb-proof bunkers amid the rarefied streets and five star hotels of Hyde Park East. Ah, America.

As for Iraq, that corner plot in Colombo said it all. Prime real estate with an artisan sandstone perimeter and intricate wrought iron gates. Beyond that, scraggle. Wild vegetative scraggle. And refuse. Rubble and refuse. A vine partially obscuring the oxidised plaque, I finally figured out what it was I was looking at, or more to the point, not looking at when I lifted the veil of weeds to one side: ‘The Embassy of the Republic of Iraq’.

Not yet a philosopher (nowhere near it), but prone to thinking, my sensitivities needed some fresh air, so on the weekend, AB and I struck out into the sunshine for a vigorous walk from Dover to St Margaret’s along the White Cliffs. Enjoyable as it was, the contrast is stark and sobering given you can’t unknow what’s happening just over there, on the French side of the channel. A clear day, we could see the opposing cliffs at Calais, our lunch stop so close to France I was welcomed to the country by French Vodafone informing me ‘global roaming’ had been activated. Capital slips with such ease between borders.

A first visit of what will be many to the LRB Bookshop threw up this eye-catching question of the front of the TLS 'Why so few women philosophers?'. Passing over the temptation to be drawn in, I left it on the rack, but the question (which annoyed me) stuck, my retort growing larger and uglier as the days passed... Until one of the weekend supplements threw up a doozy re: Joey Barton's philosophical efforts. I had to laugh. Who am I to pass judgement on whether Joey Barton is a philosopher or not? In fact, I found the piece enjoyable, pitched perfectly at a weekend readership, but if we're to apply the same bar...? Well - women philosophers? I know a few...

Plain old bosh

The foreign lady with yellow hair

But if thongs are called ‘slippers’ then what do you call slippers? Slippers? You know, shoes you wear at night, inside, when it’s cold... On average 33 degrees, I didn’t once stop sweating, so RR suggested a facial––booking me in, not for the relaxing kind mind, rather one where they attack your face in what’s known as a ‘clean-up’.

After a month of trailing her around and steering Ari Kujo’s chariot, I’ve become a mythical character in Colombo social circles, a point of discussion among car park attendants and baristas. ADSW would hear it from some alert G-Pa––his wife was seen today with ‘the foreign lady with yellow hair’ or with ‘Australia lady’.

One morning, preferring anonymity, RR and I went to the port area of Pettah where traders own the streets, where the frenzy is indifferent to me, the barbers of the Oriental Saloon cut hair, and mosques bow proud under pre-Eid sprucing.

With the general election set for August, campaigning commenced with the nearby soccer-field transforming into a platform for rallies where––after some speech or other, Sri Lankan baila played into the night. Opposition attack ads picture lines of cocaine, shout: ‘A drug free country needs a drug free parliament’ and RR confirms, some electoral candidates do have drug convictions, but yes, still manage to find or buy loopholes through which to throw their hat.

Said goodbye to my little Ari Kujo and after two heavy films (Leviathan and Two Days, One Night), and a grilling from border control, I waited tired and heavy-hearted for my luggage alongside other lethargic passengers. Amid the bulky, black cases a lone pair of women’s knickers scroll past, once, twice around on the conveyer belt. Then they’re gone. Everyone giggles, this will end.

Then suddenly you’re in AB’s Queens Park flat watching the Wimbledon final with ADSW’s seven spice Colombo Gin and manioc crisps and you’re not sweating and you smile because you think of Maya saying ‘very taste madam’. And you couldn’t agree more. I haven’t achieved much since I arrived in London, which I’m reminded is fine. The gang have had their work cut out just assuring me I haven’t made a monumentally big mistake. But come on, can you lot back in Oz dig some more stuff out of the ground or something? The dollar’s tanking and given I’m about to pay the bulk of my Masters course fees the timing couldn’t be worse!

What to do? Baila baby...

Lunghi prints loom large in Pettah.

One metre above sea level

So if it’s an orange––it looks like an orange, it tastes like an orange––but it’s green... is it an orange? Dodunduwa, the small town on the South West coast, which translates in a way to orange-island, or green-orange-island, gave us plenty of time to debate the terms with its 97-year-old procession creating a three hour tail of trucks, buses, tuks and tractors. Stuck on the single lane old Galle Road we were witness to the snaking parade of feverish dancing, drumming and whipping; children, adults, ceremonial transvestism; ghouls, fairies, butterflies.

Then, at a point along the coast came a clearing with a gleaming, looming likeness of Buddha––a young, lean, gender non-specific representation, arm poised in something between a stop sign and scout’s honour. ADSW tells me its impressive height is to mark the crest of the 2004 Tsunami. It’s so damn tall it's difficult to fathom and I question what the metre-high sea walls built along parts of the coast could have done to stop it. Strange. I’ve always hoped nature will win. But not like this. Here my fantasy was pitted against the wrong people. The sea now is rough on shore, but there’s little swell. The land lies flat. The humidity is heavy. Out near the horizon the ocean looks to be levitating. I’m hot and the sweating might be making me crazy.

Back in the city, it’s a head-spin of a different kind. Every second person in Silk is smoking. The DJ plays bad EDM. A bottle of Moet comes in a bucket with a live firework. I shuffle away from the Russian prostitutes for fear of being blonde by association. We’ve come from ‘ladies night’ at Café Francais to find positive discrimination also in effect at Silk. Men’s entry: 2000 rupees. ‘Ladies enter free.’

Less than a week left in SL and somehow the list is still long, though revolves mainly around cake. Thankfully my chauffeur has an extensive knowledge of Colombo's cakeries, so provided I can keep Ari Kujo entertained in the backseat, she will oblige and take on the insanity of the traffic in pursuit of our sugar hit. Tuk-Tuks spar and constantly set off all four-corner sensors of this European car, mahoots hang from open bus doors directing their maddening drivers to disregard police instruction, despite their incredibly funky oversized white vinyl gloves with large red 'stop' circle in the palm. I mutter Hey-Zeus under my breath a thousand times a day and desperately try and avoid being the person who teaches our cutey Kujo the 'F' word.

In what is a sign of the times, we picked from the 'posh' options, ending up at Silk.