Slack tarts and cheese

Again with the slackness - it's a bit of a worry really. No deep-seated psychological hesitations this time, just overdue university work, insomnia and sneaky dates to Borough Markets for cheese and brownies and some genteel lazing in the sunshine.

The weather has been nothing if not schizophrenic lately - my Year of Living Optimistically had a short run last week with balmy 15 degree days and blue skies. I may have even worn open-toed shoes. I know. Indeed the East End has been putting on the ritz lately as Spring starts to make itself known. I've discovered to my delight two magnolia trees on my street and am loving the gradual transformation of all the depressingly grey spindly trees, with their arthritic miserable limbs and general lack of joie de vivre, into cheery blossoms of pink and white. It's truly charming - even with the requisite shopping bags strewn throughout...

Spring not quite sprung but getting there

Winter is definately so last season. The daffodils are out, the ratio of sun:cloud, while wobbling occasionally like a cheap drunk, is nonetheless redressing itself and there is generally an increasing sense of optimism to be found in the air. It's quite lovely actually and while not quite open-toed shoe weather it's tantalisingly close. I can feel it.

There has been much and nothing happening of late. I fear I'm turning into one of those people I normally loathe - those smiley, hand-holding, kissing on public transport types whose death by choking on their own kissy kissy smugness I regularly invoke. I suppose when the karmic stakes are measured up there are worse ways to go....

The last 10 days have been distracting and hectic and not a little tiring. I am trying to get through a hideously protracted essay, one that got well and truly left by the wayside in the dealings with all things housemate. As usual I'm juggling stress and apathy and my irrepressible need to be brilliant and it's proving fucking torturous. Especially as the deadline was two days ago... I think it will be fine once I get started though and I've surprised myself by discovering that in fact I have an urgent curiosity to understand the implications of what I'm researching.

Under the somewhat pretentious rubric of 'the art network', I have been encouraged [read explicitly pushed] to write about the Sydney Biennale, looking at how it is understood curatorially, geo-politically and artistically in terms of post-colonial theory, globalisation and the Asia-Pacifc region. I hadn't realised before now just how big a victim I had become of the cultural cringe. Perhaps my not-so-latent convict blood has realised that I'm not in Kansas anymore skippy and finding that balance between being Australian and being on the other side of the world is actually more complicated than it might first seem.

Whatever the case, it's been a revelation to discover a desire within myself to understand the place of Australia within the global world and the complexity of questions about responsibility, reception and engagement when it comes to transactions of culture.


One thing is for sure - this assignment is a long way from the last, an auction catalogue entry about Andy Warhol's famous Triple Elvis painting. Perhaps I was being provocative but I rather enjoyed comparing Elvis to a Renaissance religious icon...

God I can't wait to have this essay out of the way. So many more fun things to think about - possible weekends in Cornwall, a party at a tiki bar on Portobello Rd tonight, the arrival of European summer time....

Meerkats and pink elephants

I have been a rubbish writer of late and I'm only vaguely sure why - the usual excuses of procrastination, distraction and ambivalence are as shaky as my hands after an excessive night of drinking cocktails and passing out instead of sleeping... but I'll get to that. I think what's happened is I've reached a curious sort of existential crossroad in this whole writing about my life in a public forum lark. Here's my question: When does writing too much, being too explicit, getting too personal just get weird? Never mind slightly compromising...

I've always tried to write honestly, though with an at-times inconvenient conscience that tells me (scarily enough in a voice reminiscent of my grandmother....) that if I can't say anything nice then I shouldn't say anything at all...

Pancakes and post-post modernism

I saw this great t-shirt the other day. It read "I can stop procrastinating. Just you wait and see."

Rather sums up my life at the moment. There's been lots of procrastinating and lots of waiting. Most recently for pancakes in honour of Pancake Day but also some serious waiting for everything from emails to dawn to summer to inspiration to an end to a seriously upsetting situation with a seriously suicidal flatmate. Say what you will but I've never been one to cope terribly well with not knowing what the hell is going to happen next.

Jo can't believe it's been so long since she last wrote

Jo was unable to write on her blog last week because she spent five days nannying precocious teenagers in posh parts of London.

Jo is incidentally £600 richer and so relieved she's no longer 15.

Jo also hasn't been able to write because it's been hard to find something pithy - never mind appropriate - to say about a seriously depressed flatmate.

Jo has felt hysterical lately about her lack of handle on all things university but is so relieved that her hours of pointless stress about a rubbish presentation weren't for nothing. She learnt how to insert video into a powerpoint presentation...

Jo started a new job behind the bar at a cute theatre in Blackfriars last week and despite a fleeting moment of sheer fucking terror in the first two minutes of the interval, actually rather enjoyed herself.

Jo has begun to think that maybe London isn't so mean and awful. She does though still think it's expensive and dirty.

Jo knows she's been living in London for a while when 11 degrees feels genuinely balmy.

Jo wishes she would stop arranging her thoughts as facebook status updates.

Let it snow let it know let it SNOW!

So my enthusiasm for the snow last night may have been premature - but at least it wasn't misplaced. I woke this morning to find London buried under a solid 2 feet of snow - and continuing to fall. A strange serenity has descended over the city and it is truly beautiful.

Beautiful too was the email from school saying that due to the closure of all public transport in and around central London there will be no classes today. Which means plenty of time to sit and stare out the window with a big silly grin on my face.

SNOW!

I KNEW this cold couldn't be for nothing! Finally - snow. It does beg the question though - how many layers of clothes are too many?....

What it is to be Straalian

So it was Australia Day on Monday. It's not a public holiday I've ever particularly rejoiced in above and beyond it being a day away from the desk, what with the whole "oh, oops, we forgot to acknowledge the tens of thousands of years of history and culture that were already here when we arrived" thing. But a public holiday is a public holiday - and when you don't get to have it, being on the other side of the world and all, well it becomes a different sort of phenomenon.

For me, as a student of well, shall we say broadly "culture", it was hilarious to witness the excessive ongoings in Shepherds Bush (aka SheBu aka Little Australia) earlier this week. You know you're someone drenched in Aussies when your shoes start sticking to the floor before you've even finished walking in the door.

The last time I was in a Walkabout Pub was 10 years ago in Brighton with Kirsten. And they are as dodgy now as they were then. All I remember from last time was returning from the bathrooms to find Kirsten ensconsed in the company of two sunburnt English boys in polyester shirts and her leaning over and whispering, "You're name is Jane, mine is Sarah and we're accounting students at Brighton College". You can imagine where the evening went from there...

Thankfully no need for a nom de plume this time around, though if I was channelling anyone it was David Attenborough as I ventured oxymoronically into this completely foreign place. Am I snob? Well, probably yes, but I really hope inherently no. I mean, I burn for you as much as the next person but it is wrong to wonder, even casually, if someone sporting an "I ♥ Penriff" t-shirt is embracing the great joy that is irony - or if it's just that they're missing two front teeth?

It was actually though a really fun night, and a funny night too. Not least of all because when I stopped to buy food on the way back to the tube station only to find myself surrounded by intoxicated, heaving, noisy, smelly Australians from Canberra, well, I pretended to be English.

It's a funny thing being Australian here in London. This drunk but charming old man chatted me up at the bus stop the other day and upon discovering I was Australian asked me why I wasn't in Earl's Court with the rest of my fellow countrymen. I said I wasn't sure exactly but he was pleased that I was in East London - told me I was sure to have an "authentic experience" living in these here woods. I shudder to think what an authentic East End experience might entail but as long as my shoes don't stick to the carpet then it can't be all bad?