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?

only joe

I keep seeing these stickers everywhere. Now if only they could spell my name right...

Re-entry problems and an existential crisis of artistic proportions

So I am back in London. Dazed, tired, arguably a tad flat. I almost wept with gratitude for the blue sky that gallantly attempted a breakthrough this afternoon. After a soggy-style London welcome back (read: pissing down, dark and 5 degrees when I landed) staring into the sun today and re-considering my atheist stronghold, I couldn't help but wonder if dehydrated desert nomads ever drown, wandering as they do straight into those palm tree-lined oases because they refuse to believe they're actually real. It was a bona fide crazy lady moment. I see the sun. I feel the sun. But is it really sun?

While I still think flying into London the day school returned was the best idea (no time to mope) it has meant the first week back has been a little disorienting. And foggy. And a little bit stressful. Returning to a pile of readings two feet high and a suicidal flatmate certainly hasn't eased the transition back to London Life. Thankfully she's ok - well as ok as you can be - but it's left our little house feeling a bit fraught.

It's been a worrying sort of week generally really, which is just a pain in the arse. Wading through the jetlag and the weather-induced apathy towards London, the effort of returning to class and having to think intellectually about Stuff has been buffeted by well, just about everything else. Until yesterday. Yesterday we undertook a tour of some of the major commercial galleries in the East End, otherwise known as my part of the world. I don't think the postcode is to blame but really, how can anyone have anything BUT an existential crisis about their future career and chosen field when THIS is the sort of art being peddled as "contemporary" and "interesting" and, hilariously, "saleable"....


Apparently Jay Jopling is no longer dating Lily Allen - perhaps we can put this work by Andreas Golder down to a similar lapse in good sense? And shockingly this wasn't even the worst of it. In a desperate bid to reassure myself that good art exists, that meaningful art is possible, I am off tomorrow to the Barbican Centre, the Tate Modern and the Serpentine Gallery.

There's only one place I'm sadly not going....

The joys of free wifi

Otherwise known as Welcome to Hong Kong.

My head hurts, my ankles are swollen and my eyes are a tad bleary. It's 1.27am in Sydney, 2.27pm in London and 10.27pm in Hong Kong. I have no clue which timezone my body thinks it's in, all I know is that it aches all over and just wants to be home already. If home is where the heart is - Sydney! And don't spare the horses. If it's where all your crap is kept and you do your washing and attend to general life and studies, well then London here I come. Just not for another two and a half hours. Oh, and then another 11-odd. Good times in economy.

Leaving was crap - I fucking hate it. Hate saying goodbye, hate having to try not to cry, hate thinking how long it will be until I see everyone again.

I had THE best morning before I left. Mum and I walked to Avalon and had the most beautiful swim. The water was blue and clear and just the right sort of refreshing temperature and there were perfect waves to dive under and jump over. Heaven.

Anyway. This is rubbish. I am tired - too tired even for tears - and looking forward to getting to London. I am slightly concerned though - if the air conditioning on a Cathay Pacific jumbo leaves me with chattering teeth, what the hell is London going to do me??