Ice cubes as toes and other such treats

If I close my eyes I could well imagine that the scorching heat on my back is the sun and not from the cranked up radiator I'm leaning against with all my body weight and will (caveat obviously of when would I ever lie in the sun to the point of scorching but you know, whatever...) It is FUCKING freezing here and well, snowing. Yes, that's right. Snowing. I didn't order snow, certainly not with two sleeps to go before flying back to Sydney. If it comes to it I will shovel snow from the runway personally to ensure we depart this godforsaken icebox on Friday.

It's been a lovely couple of weeks, mitigated by hellish trips to central London for Christmas shopping.....

Mumma knows best

It's been a funny few days - misery has been digging my company big time but I've been trying not to let doomed job prospects and a rising tide of panic about what on earth I'm going to do next year overwhelm me every day. I've also been trying not to passively aggressively punish LB for having a job and a life and friends and oh well, everything that I don't have in London. I don't know what I did to deserve such a patient, supportive, understanding man. Survive all those stupid other boys maybe?...

All I want for Christmas is a job

Holy shit it is December already. Again. Head fuck of huge proportions. 17 more sleeps and then it is home, home, home baby. Hello Bondi.

Feeling a bit despondent at the moment. Tired, beyond bored with the fact that it is pitch dark by 4.30pm and so over the novelty of single digit temperatures - two is only a fun number when it comes dressed as a pair of shoes.

So, the countdown is on and the days are ticking over and I am distracting myself with exercise (if I have to be a freckly bi-atch I'm going to be a skinny freckly bi-atch...), making Christmas cards and cake and when I'm not doing any of that I'm looking for jobs. I applied for a freelance job last week, which I was summarily not invited to interview for today and have been disconsolate and miserable since. Methinks this job nonsense is not going to be easy.

Stinging from the impersonal rejection that is a group email, I went to work at the bar tonight only to have this loathsome piggy man get into the most irritating conversation with me about how contemporary art is bullshit and the art world is fucked. Damien Hirst this and Tracy Emin that and my god - piles of bricks in the Tate Modern (thank you Carl Andre) and blah blah blah tax payers money and crap sculptures made out of towel rails and referee whistles. I wanted to kill myself. Or him maybe. But defending the right of the insane and the arrogant and the obtusely brilliant to create crazy works of art was the last thing I felt like doing after being rejected by the very same art world I'd just applied to for a job. Arrogant tosser.

Art and I have made up though. My double date last week was just lovely. Instead of Turner the prize we ended up seeing Turner the painter at the Tate Britain. Nothing contemporary about it but it was a fascinating history lesson and an insight into the workings of The Establishment and it was rather fantastic to go from a show that focused heavily on the influence of the Royal Academy as the measure of artistic success to another show at the same Royal Academy. A show that featured, no less, a life-size working cannon that systematically shot 20kg 'pellets' of waxy red paint every 20 minutes against the walls of this very 'establishment'. Fucking genius.


I loved the Anish Kapoor exhibition. It was playful and provocative and all about texture and surface and the negotiation and perception of space. As for the cannon, it was terrifying and loud and violent and brutal in it's beauty. I still jump a little when I think about it. I also adored this sculpture in the courtyard:


Called Tall Tree and the Eye (2009) it was, despite its obvious density, the most beautiful, ephemeral sculpture - like bubbles floating towards an invisible surface. And god bless a fleeting blue sky against which to appreciate it....

The weather was pure misery over the weekend - when it wasn't bucketing down with rain it was bitingly cold and grey, grey, grey. Blurgh. Blurgh. Blurgh.


On Saturday, invigorated by my art reunion three days earlier, LB and I set off for another artistic encounter, this time in the dire backwoods of Elephant and Castle. Lured by the promise of a late lunch at Borough Market, we first went to see Roger Hiorns' installation Seizure, the work that got him nominated for this year's Turner Prize. Located in an abandoned, listed-for-demolition council estate flat, Hiorns sealed the flat before pumping 75,000L of hot copper sulfate solution into the apartment and leaving it to cool over several weeks. He then drained it and what remained was this strange and rather beautiful blue crystal 'cave':


As LB reflected afterwards, it doesn't make me think, but I like it. I think he's right. If I wanted to get all art pretentious I have no doubt I could comfortably come up with some sort of theory behind it's meaning but mostly, I just love that organisations like Artangel are facilitating encounters like this in alternative environments and reinvigorating ideas of art, space, reception and value. Hiorns' work sadly will be demolished when the building is, but I suspect that's part of it's 'meaning'.


Analysis thus complete, we then meandered in the direction of Borough, with hot chocolates to warm our frozen paws. Chorizo sandwiches and haloumi burgers on board, I then spent the afternoon wrapped up in the duvet having an epic nanna nap before dinner and cocktails and cheesy 80s music with a school friend and her boy. Was a solid Saturday really and I would have stayed in bed all day Sunday if I hadn't had to work in the evening. Am a proper bar wench this week (two undergraduate degrees, a pending Masters degrees and four considerable years of employment and all I foresee for the coming months is beers and temp work. Fabulous...) but at least it will help the time pass between now and my reunion with Bondi.