Jennifer's blog

This Month At Oxford: Quotations

"If you think apologising is getting off easy, evidently you've never been married, and all alone in your bedroom, and had to say to your wife 'I'm sorry'.  That is suffering."  

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"I dare you to make your facebook status 'My aesthetic is post-colonialism and tits.'"  

-Dude Who Now Deals With My Bullshit Semi-Regularly

"Yeah, well, I'm related to the Queen.  So I win."

-Small child on bike to another small child on bike

Me: So how would you define great style?

Givenchy: To be honest, I just like making women feel pretty.

Me: Julia's an overpass.

Amanda: Mmmm.  I'd light a fire under THAT overpass.

The Girl With No Vices

The purpose of this post is not so much to name-drop madly (though I know it will read a bit like that) as to record events for posterity.  When I am eighty-four and have hair even bluer than currently, and start trying to boil eggs in shoes and marry my postman, I'd like to have a record of My Younger Self Doing Weird Shit.

Thus, this week My Younger Self:

++ Saw Thom Yorke at the Oxford Covered Market, again, looking upset by the crowds, again, and very pale, again.  He constantly looks as if he's advertising misanthropy and organic malnutrition.

This Is Not Thom Yorke

A friend, to my great distress, has Thom Yorke's art-historian girlfriend as a thesis supervisor.  Their Oxford house, according to her, is not in fact filled with diamond-encrusted zebras or half-naked boys adorning 18th-century pianos.  It is instead filled with small children and Thom Yorke looking distressed at the small children eating his things.

This should have been less surprising than it was, given that Thom Yorke is not, in fact, Liberace.  

++ Watched Dave Eggers tell a single story for an hour to 300 people.  Oxford, regardless of what you may have heard, has just the same amount of attention-span-stunted bints as anywhere else (here they just wear tweed and conjugate in their sleep).  And yet he got 'em.  They sat entirely still, and breathed very quietly, and when he finished everybody looked around as if they'd just woken up.

If I didn't know anything about storytelling I would report Eggers for exercising criminal large-scale hypnosis.  Lord forbid he should ever go into marketing.

My Beard Detects A Lack Of Intelligence

++ Had a brief argument with Paul Collier, who is a profoundly brilliant and admirable man, but said something odd about physical disability benefits and how useless he thinks they are in developed economies.  He seems to view most first-world countries through an overlay of cynicism, exhaustion and beard.  (The beard really does seem essential to his world-view.  It twitches indignantly when people are stupid in his presence.)  

++ Was somehow, inexplicably, adopted by Geoffrey Robertson.  

Look, I don't know.  I turned up for a talk on free speech where he proceeded to insult George Eliot, The Times, the Lib Dems and virtually everything else going, asked a question about genocide instigation afterwards, and suddenly he's telling me stories about Barry Humphries yelling obscenities over his back fence and taking me to lunch.

Hello, Every High School Crush I Ever Had

This is all very well and good, except that now he's found out I don't drink or smoke and has started referring to me as The Girl With No Vices.  Which sounds morbidly like a Stieg Larsson title.  As this in no way guarantees me looking like Noomi Rapace, it is mildly upsetting.

This week my Younger Self also spent inordinate amounts of time fussing about Sappho, mocked Twilight with a hilariously sleepy ginger, received an expletive-filled missive from a great-aunt and received a haphazard invitation to cover Paris Fashion Week.  However, given that my worthiness is obviously dictated by how many famous people I know, this is irrelevant.

(Save for the fact that the daffodils came out this week.  And they are beautiful.)

On Arrest And Other Aspects Of Turning 22

It may interest the internet to know that, over the course of my 22nd birthday, I:

++ Was thoroughly unimpressed by the interior of Blenheim Palace, because I find nothing interesting about vast collections of porcelain/gilded/marble morbidly obese ladies, which were probably collected by REAL morbidly obese ladies;

++ Wandered the Blenheim Palace gardens pondering the penchant of the British aristocracy for bewildering topiary shapes and homoerotic statuary;

++ Was dive-bombed by a flock of butterflies in the Butterfly House, because they apparently decided that since my hair is blue I am Fair Game.  This wouldn't have been a problem had some of them not been South American species the size of small birds.  I spent about ten minutes ducking and being smacked in the face, bewildered several small children, and now have a morbid fear of the Blue Morpho;

++ Observed a flock of geese and was suitably pastorally impressed, until two of the male geese started beating the shit out of one another, at which point I admired the wonders of the natural life cycle while slowly backing away;

++ Had a picnic, including a Terry's Chocolate Orange, in a glade so terrifying I started SINGING ALOUD to make myself feel better (which, quite justifiably, upset some nearby sheep);

++ Got lost in a maze because I was distracted by crocuses, which is the most ridiculous excuse for getting lost in a maze ever, a fact that I fully accept;

++ Spent most of dinner laughing hysterically and saying RUBBISH and BORED very loudly.  These two phrases are what my dining companion and I had decided were the most discouraging things you could say to a partner in bed;

++ Met the editor of a fairly right-wing magazine who half-offered me a sub-editing job making the prose of Various Illustrious Contributors faintly grammatically correct. (I say half-offered because my follow-up email languishes unanswered, which is perfectly fine, as the editor also uttered the phrase 'Thatcher was the best thing that ever happened to Britain');

++ Received about eighteen ball gowns in the mail from my parents, who seem to find the concept of me Being Ladylike and Attending Summer Oxford Balls so hilariously incongruous that they want to encourage it as much as possible;

++ Snuck into an unnamed Oxford college to contemplate pretty gardens and how lucky I am and shit like that, and was promptly nearly arrested for trespassing, which pretty much represents perfectly Oxford's policy on Unexpected Expressions Of Joy - namely to regard them with suspicion and demand that they all be done while wearing sub-fusc.

Now, of course, I'm going to a Moulin Rouge themed party, to watch Oxford grad students attempt to carry off garters and elaborate corsetry.  Possibly both will be made of tweed.  YOU THINK I'M KIDDING.

Of Course My Snowmen Are Period-Appropriate.

Normal programming will resume sometime in 2010.

In the meantime, here's something I've been working on in my spare time:

'Snow Queen' Taken Over-Literally.

I Cannot Make This Shit Up.

+ Oxford has a lot of books, and only a hundred libraries (impoverished, darlings).  So, until somebody conveniently dies and leaves them a Georgian mansion/Camelot/historical burial ground, they are keeping some of the lesser-needed books somewhere off site.

In Cheshire.

In a salt mine.

I have absolutely no comment, save to raise the point that 'Librarian/Salt Miner' must be the oddest combination on any CV in the history of existence.  'Can Dewey Decimals And Dredge Drains!'

(The best bit was when the librarian, somewhat sheepishly, said that this would mean 'the books would take a lot longer to be ordered.  And possibly smell a bit strange.')

+ There is a Heraldry Society, a Society For Lesbian Rugby Players, and a Society Of Bibiophiles, which takes tours to remote and beautiful libraries and is run by an Italian Count with an omnipresent cape.

+ Nowhere should this amount of people be allowed to wear this amount of tweed blazers without somebody, somewhere, raising a red flag and hollering YOU'RE OUT.

Fact: Philip Pullman Does A Good Texan Accent.

Other facts:

+ Placing sixteen aspiring writers in the one place appears to lead to an almost rabid mutual support.  Everybody is wonderful and lovely and talented and coos over one another's dogs.  I suspect this is a communal reaction against the OTHER possibility of putting sixteen aspiring writers in the one place, which would end in fourteen ruined egos, one death, and one glorious victor crouching bloodstained on the roof crying to the moon.

What I am trying to say is: Everybody in my course is very nice, and I suspect it is because a) we're very nice, and b) we're all god damn fucking afraid of one another.

+ Feeding aforementioned sixteen two three-course meals, tea, afternoon tea, and breakfast every day will not result in carbohydrate-powered excellence, but it may well result in decent Oxford Masters Programme Pate after the second year.

+ Putting off a dinner because you want to go talk to the cows in Christchurch Meadow is perfectly acceptable.

+ Reading to a bookshop-full of other students, a New Generation Poet, miscellaneous Old Important Oxfordians and a six-foot Swede is made considerably easier if you read a piece about skinning cats.  Nobody in England actually likes cats; I suspect the Queen has an exercise gallery deep in Buckingham Palace where she can go and burn some calories by kicking them.

+ 'Australian' occasionally seems to translate as 'Rochester's mad Creole wife Bertha in Jane Eyre'.  This was only demonstrated once, but it resulted in me being asked if I could speak Vanuatu pidgin. 

+ I cannot speak Vanuatu pidgin.

+ The Hagrid Hut is beautiful, and spacious, and clean, and backs onto a methadone clinic.

+  Oxford really does look like Arthur Rackham and the Roman architect Vitruvius had a conference, drank too much rum, and made themselves a fantasy town.  It's a fairytale.   Like Bruges. 

The Cake Is A Lie?

In the past week, I have:

+ Assembled a 45-page collection of documents, passports, dutifully hideous photographs and nail parings with which I aim to pummel on the door of the UK Visa Office yelling 'SANCTUARY',

+ Given said UK Visa Office my biometric details, so that if any dastardly character is walking around with my eyes and fingerprints they can tell the blighter what for,

+ Written nine out of ten requested articles on things like 'Manscaping', 'Cougars' and 'Ways To Feel Better About Your Body In Bed' (the last article has the topic 'How To Tell Your Partner He's Crap In The Sack', and I took a break because I was inclined to reply with things like 'semaphore', 'sign language' or 'on Stephen Colbert'),

+ Opened a UK bank account, which involved three trips into the city and a prolonged interlude in a foyer making faces at a very small Chinese toddler called Charles,

+ Chipped the front of a tooth trying ineffectually to dismantle a kite,

+ Helped an old lady with an alarming goitre across the road,

+ Procured a new Mac laptop, and spent approximately twenty minutes looking at it cooing 'SHINY' repeatedly,

and

+ Been attacked by two blowholes in two days.

In the wake of all this heady achievement - and because, frankly, I feel a little as if I want to crawl back under the covers and give in - I am going to go make a cake.  

In Which Our Heroine Finds A Roof Over Her God-Forsaken Head

It's done.

It only took five months, ten housing agents, innumerable Emails To Express Interest, equally innumerable flats rejected because they lacked heating/fridge/floor, two blessedly helpful British Angels Of Mercy who trooped out to inspect possible abodes and will shortly be put up for knighthoods, a series of increasingly harassing intercontinental phone calls, several expressions of horror at the exchange rate, four scribbled diagrams and the sacrifice of a goat at a crossroads -

- but I've done it.  I have a flat in the dead centre of Oxford.  I will not, bar an act of God or Barclays Bank, be homeless and box-dwelling come September.

Hurrah!

The place itself is teeny-tiny.  Let's not even talk of swinging cats; I'd be lucky to take a gerbil for a turn about the room without giving it a few decent cracks on the skull.  However, it also has a gigantic two-storey window and a deeply amusing loft for a bedroom.  Any visitors will have to be hung out of said window in a basket if they wish to sleep over, but that's their problem. 

Its kitchen is brilliantly well-applianced and (far more importantly) blue, and it's in an old Edwardian schoolhouse, so presumably I will be haunted by the charming ghosts of young boys killed during the routine application of Edwardian caning, which will be nice.

There is, however, a small problem. 

Actually having, for the very first time, an entire apartment to legitimately call my (rented) own, appears to have awakened a long-latent and utterly unexpected fervour for interior decorating.  My bedroom and study in my Australian home have suffered 21 years of half-hearted adornment, resulting most memorably in years of doll-collecting staring down at me as I sleep (I still don't understand why people think this is creepy).  Any possible ideas about creative decoration in Norwich were squashed back into the subconscious by the insane college regulations (No Posters Or Wall Hangings And Don't Lay Out Your Washing In Indiscreet Ways) and the disapproving eye of the Hungarian cleaning lady.  I looked at my dad's design magazines with the lofty eye of the Philosophy Student Scorning The Superficial (most philosophy students have this eye, if they manage not to get it punched by third year).

Now, however, I have white walls and carte blanche, and some animal in me has reared its ugly head and said OH GOODY.  I am looking through Design*Sponge like a particularly focussed madwoman.  I am making plans about arrangements for pictures in my head.  I am talking to bemused family members about Chinese lanterns and thrifting wardrobes.  I have gone insane.

To be honest, I should have expected this.  I only ever enjoyed The Sims and my dollhouses for the elaborate plotting of arranging dwellings; the actual dolls and Sim-people held precious little charm compared to making elaborate digi-mansions and begging for wallpaper samples from decorators for the dollhouses.  (Might I add that I was 10, and probably quite scary.)  At the time I thought it was just harmless megalomania run amok.  Now, it appears, it was something far more sinister. 

Lord.  I'd better get stuck into writing this novel, before I start hanging about hungrily at linen sales and having conversations about the charms of mismatched glassware.  Superficial nothing - if I become That Person I'll have to start breaking out the penitential hair shirts and begging for alms.

Hunting A Hagrid-Hut

The process of uprooting my Fine Upstanding Self from these antipodean foundations is now steaming forth with vim and vigour.  Visa applications, snide remarks regarding the NHS, international driver's license jiggery-pokery and startling varieties of sturdy winter boot are being tossed about the household like so many circus skittles.  I have become some sort of bureaucratic Critical Mass Event, and all my dreams seem to involve signing paperwork.

Item number something-important: finding accommodation.  Various machinations with my degree mean that I am effectively a triple threat of Non-Oxford-Establishment (an international [1], part-time [2] graduate student in the Continuing Education faculty [3], which as far as I know also offers courses in Gardening and How One Discusses Pesky Electronics With One's Grandchildren).  Living in halls- the full, elitist Hogwarts experience, complete with Latin dinner services and hobbing the nobs over sherry- is forcibly out.  I am Hagrid, in a hut, with Flobberworms.

(I am neither here nor there about this.  I do have a nasty feeling that other graduate students, on discovering that I live in Off-Campus Accommodation, will assume that I have been expelled from quarters for devious proclivities involving sea creatures.)

Finding this Hagrid-Hut has been a new and interesting adventure.  I'm not really very picky.  I just want somewhere halfway close to Oxford, with cooking facilities (beyond 'boiling all my food in a kettle'), a bathroom, some kind of heating system which won't require me to pad about in winter with hot water bottles on my feet, and a variety of sleeping apparatus.  A roof and floor would be all right. Maybe some windows.  Possibly a door.

I would, admittedly, prefer that the sleeping apparatus was not either suspended from the ceiling, accessed via ladder, or flipped down from a wall, all three of which have been offered as options.  The latter would make me feel like a piece of ironing.

Neither- and I didn't really expect that I'd ever need to make these specifications- do I really want to live in somebody's unheated, stone-floored converted barn/outhouse/chaff house, which has incredible amounts of space, but is also in the middle of a large field somewhere near Over Worton (where?  precisely) and possesses no windows.  And living in sloping, thatched attics poses a problem, since at 5'9", and being roughly the 'grace' equivalent of a drunken goose, I would end my life in an increasingly less entertaining series of concussions. 

(On the Over Worton note: does anybody in England put their placenames through a once-per-century giggle-proof test?  In the Oxfordshire area alone, we have Marsh Gibbon, Little Tingewick, Hinton-in-the-Hedges, Gagingwell, Burnt Norton [which is slightly below Norton, and presumably is where they put all their flammable rubbish], and the immortal Upper and Lower Slaughter.  The English must have stiff upper lips through having to say their addresses to foreigners all their lives.  MARSH GIBBON.)

I'm learning the tricks, though.  To be suspicious of the word 'bedsit', which sometimes means a flat but often appears to mean that one shares (with ten other people) a bathroom, a kitchen, and possibly a bed and one's nicer clothes.  To be suspicious of an 'electric token meter' (Want More Heat?  Please Insert $2!).  To beware persons who write back to your enquiry informing you that they, alas, are currently based in Italy/France/French Polynesia with their sick uncle/mother/Pekingese, but to please wire a token amount of money to them via Western Union to prove it is 'worthwhile' their coming back to England. 

Wonder if there's a suburb called Flobberworm?

Shooting From The Hipster?

I'll miss many things about Sydney- the Chinatown markets on Friday nights, the colossal thunderstorms, the free Wednesday concerts at St James's, the oddly high likelihood that one's taxi driver is a Bangladeshi heart surgeon with a controversial slant on Hegel.

One thing I'll miss with a vague feeling of ambivalence, though, is the Sydney Inner West Hipster: a slightly rosier, healthier creature than the Melbournite versions (who appear to exist on a diet of Ann Demeulemeester, androgynous vampirism and Portugeuse cinema), if equivalently fond of miniature jeans. Many of the university-age hipsters seem to suffer from a hideous longing for Looking Bohemianly European, and have picked up a warped image presumably derived from French movie posters, The Sartorialist and an enormous overdose of Toulouse-Lautrec prints.

Put it this way: if they were aiming to Look English instead, they'd be getting their inspiration from P.G. Wodehouse, and everybody would be wearing monogrammed blazers, ascots and highballs.

Bondi's hipsters are all blonde and wear straw hats and too many rings, and the Eastern Suburbs long-necked freaks of nature somehow slid past hipsterdom into Prowling Indignant Fashionistas In Jodphurs; but the Inner West ones are true treasures.  They use old cameras, and wear homemade earrings and red lipstick and canny bob haircuts, and sit in Glebe bedsits under monochrome photographs of the Seine, drinking horrible red wine and arguing incoherently about Camus and Art's Future.  All the boys are drastically undernourished and have Moleskines in which they pretend to write poetry.  Everybody has at least one op-shop cardigan. 

I will miss them LOTS. 

I was reminded of this last week, when two of them stood in my lift - boy in op-shop suit and Clark Kent glasses, girl in natty ballet flats and chic blunt haircut with beret - and had an exceedingly pretentious conversation about Modernism to impress one another.  They were a couple (you could tell by the matching leather satchels), and by the time they'd confused Yeats with Keats while nodding sagely I nearly had a stroke from attempting not to laugh.

I was also reminded of this today, when a charming kid of about 14, with long lanky hair and obvious aspirations to looking European in calico cut-offs (despite hideous cold weather), boarded my bus and displayed his leg tattoos.  Which involved the Louis Vuitton Murakami cartoon logo- and not even in a vaguely ironic way. 

Often I find this breed of people completely obscure.  This was one of those times.  How will I ever discover their secrets overseas?  Does Oxford even HAVE hipsters?