Bloomsbury High Tea this week was, in my opinion, a total success. Virginie’s music made all the difference; 1930s recordings of Fred Astaire and Cole Porter and then more modern, higher quality re-recordings of the same. Beautiful jazz numbers and voices filled the air as we drank less tea than I expected people to get through, although granted I only had four cups myself. Normally I get through much more in two hours if left to my own devices outside of Nero’s. But I was drinking out of my Alice in Wonderland cheshire cat mug, with “drink me” written inside, so to be honest my day was made already, and then as people left the committee were showered in compliments so I can hardly object!

We got the food just right – only a small amount of leftover sandwiches and cake, which were duly donated to the homeless of waterloo and a student birthday party respectively. Scones were all eaten in suitably Bertie Wooster fashion; muffins were scoffed and tea was quaffed in perfect degrees of warm. We even had enough mugs! I brought three extra for the forgetful and the turnover was enough that nobody had to use the emergency plastic cups, although we did have to wash up two mugs to cover the deficiency.

What really made it for me was looking the part – my hair. Classics housemate did me up in gorgeous pin curls and waves, so I ended up feeling like Vivien Leigh and looking not far off. I was wearing my dress from the actual ’30s bought from a vintage shop in Shoreditch. It was extra special because this dress reminds me of Laura, who’s in Canada and I miss her, but it made me think of her and smile in a good way, not a mopey way.

Left: The real deal, Viv                                                         Below: Myself and housemate Hel in full updo.

I mean, you can’t argue with that. I included some images of 1930s things on the tables as talking points; typewriter adverts, paintings and photos of the Bloomsbury Set who we were supposedly emulating, a quote – which were largely ignored. People didn’t need them. We just left everyone to talk to each other and make friends, which is my job, and it just happened naturally, and there was laughter and at times you could barely hear the music we were chatting so much.

I’m so, so pleased. This kind of thing is so rewarding when it goes well! Can’t wait to get the rest of the photos off Hel …

Like owls

Or bees

Or, probably most predictably, cats.

Note how all three come from the same website, how I already own a tee shirt, pencil case and in fact a necklace with owl(s) on them, and how just a few days ago I got that bee necklace in gold for £2 from primark. And yet I still lust after a new one, in silver.

I’m actually a retard.

Unless of course you work for the Student bleeding Union, at which point the LGBT is just another “club” and a full list of attendees is required – regardless of the absolute downright validity of confidentiality, crucial to the trust and friendship that an LGBT is based on.

The only justification for this is, in my opinion, health and safety. If you want to know the number of people in a room for fire evacuation purposes, that’s fine. But that is a number, which is infitely different to names and email addresses of people who are supposed to have complete confidentiality. It’s nonsense, it’s blind-sighted; it’s down right offensive.

Why should you have to *pay* to join an LGBT? The union doesn’t charge for careers advice, dyslexia help – for god’s sake, foreign students are offered English lessons free of charge from our language centre, think how costly that is. But you have to pay for LGBT welfare?? Where is the distinction here between the kinds of support?

Our LGBT is NOT a club, or a society, or an activity – the category the SU is threatening to classify it as. LGBT is more than an activity you chose.

I know this because my friend is heavily involved, and she voiced her concerns to me. I help run a society. I’m damn proud of my society. But it’s a society, not a welfare organisation, and if the union says members have to pay I’m fine about that. You want me to give you their emails? Can’t see why, but fine. I’ve not made promises to my members – they won’t be frightened away because they can’t trust me with something that personal and that frightening they’re afraid to tell their friends and family.

Fuck off, SU’s everywhere, don’t use funding cuts as an excuse to cut LGBT rights.

I love this atmosphere. The communal, sitting in the living room chatting. The friendly faces popping in and out, the fact that it’s busy and noisy and people are yelling jokes at each other, doors banging and Pseudonym Housemate softly plucking at the guitar in the corner in a wide brimmed hat.  Hel, who’s long been hailed as the only girl on my course I really connect with, sitting on the sofa positively gushing over her new boy/girlfriend, who I also really like.

It’s the evenings spent watching classic doctor who, the promise of chocolate samosas, the house theatre trips and the film making that I’m looking forward to. It’s a pain to get here, it’s on the wrong side of London to all the other people I really care for who’re all living down south – but once I’m here, it already feels like home.

http://www.thepapalvisit.org.uk/

http://www.protest-the-pope.org.uk/

There should be something in here. To feel, even to feel bad, is better than to feel nothing, sometimes. But to think nothing as well?

I blame the book I’ve been reading, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It’s not his best work. Detachment should never be the thing that comes to mind. I shouldn’t read a book about five depressed people and feel like the characters are 2D reflections in steamed up glass. The response I get from that book is from over-identification, not the power or beauty of the language. I shouldn’t see myself broken up in three of the four suicides. There’s a headfuck for you, when you thought – no I swear you were – feeling healthy enough. Only yesterday I felt radiant, glowing like people in novels do when they fall in love, dancing along with money to spare. It’s been two years since that happened. The feeling of knowing you can get rid of twenty pounds and not worry is worth sixty.

And yet the scale slides and square one is beginning to feel like home, feeling uncomfortable in my own clothes, unable to wear anything that isn’t soft leggings or baggy cardigans without feeling like a bleeding thumb on white cotton sheets. My poetry is a string of clichés broken up by line breaks, not an original breath in the mix. The same old tune harping along about empty and hollow and blank. Even talking about “the darkness”, for crying out loud. ((Somewhere the wind is sighing, and I doubt he’s thinking of me. I can’t even justify calling him a he, not truly. Because the tiniest slight and I curl up in a big ball of coward and pity and I loathe how much I loathe myself.)) Best part is I spent the day with a better person, trying to be there, to care; someone else with actual pain and real problems who doesn’t flinch away from bravery, and I yet I swamp myself in self pity as though I have any right to do so. Dammit.

My thoughts end on a comma because I don’t know where we’ll go from here, end up back at the start of the post, the very same words that don’t say the right thing for me the way the once did, a circle in a straight line.

I end on a comma because I don’t know where we’ll go from here ,,,

Naturally I ended up there on a joke which became a Yes. If a geeky boy who looks mysteriously like the Home Alone kid assures you he’s “good with trains” – do not believe him. You’ll end up nearly on two wrong trains, instead of the correct one. One of these wrong trains terminated in Caterham, and we joked for a while about how we’d go to Caterham one day. Then I realised what had happened.

So we went to Caterham. On possibly one of the greyest days we’ve had of late. Even the pub was shut, that’s how bad it was. We ate bacon in the single open café. I was sat opposite what I swear to god is a taller but facially unchanged macaulay culkin and we ate bacon.

Not going to lie, Caterham can provide a good bacon sarnie. It also had highly entertaining bacon providing staff – a young Hispanic chap flirting outrageously with a tiny 80-odd year old woman, complaining how she’d stood him up when he wanted to buy her drinks. We left just before we’d outstayed our welcome, and wound up in a wide open space, full of green. Home Alone had brought a blanket and we sat and had a good long chat.

The best thing about this guy is when you get him on your own. In a group, he’ll play the fool and act up to his reputation as a useless clown, but if you sit with him and just talk, suddenly he’ll  hold his own with you on the subject of american literature. Where before you’d find memes repeated to death there’s now considered thinking about the power of the road journey motif and the collapse of the american dream. He will interpret Shakespearian characters with subtlety and insightful comments; he can talk about the individual and the everyman and a place in society. He’s no longer playing up for attention or putting on a face – his voice drops down, and suddenly he seems very mature and articulate. You just don’t get that when he’s part of the group, which is a real shame. But that’s what a day out in Caterham is good for, remembering just what it is about a friend that makes you think, yeah, in a few years when he’s calmed down and levelled himself and grown into his own skin properly, this boy is going to be a real stunner. Shame really, I don’t think the others always see it.

See I think it’s all about perception. I perceive today as a failure, because by god do I feel awful and I don’t want to be in work and I’m going to have to go to the doctors and ask to drag up my medication because it’s not hauling my ass out of bed on time anymore.  To my boss, it’s a success because I’m finally reaslising I can’t do this and I need the time and the help, and it’s a success in me coming to terms that my body is rubbish and I just can’t keep up.

My friend is feeling crummy too, and I just can’t see her as a failure, but she feels like that today. And telling her 101 reasons why she isn’t won’t change the ways she feels, because she knows all the things I can tell her; it’s her perception of these things that matters, not the things themselves. All I can do is offer her love and support, which in these situations is the only and luckily the most powerful help I’ve ever had, just the fact that somebody cares enough to care.

And yet I feel a hopeless failure in being unable to practically help her feel better. I know, in my brain, I can’t do anything more than care, and that caring is the only thing that helps me when I’m feeling like she is today – and somehow, I’m still the failure. Perception, I’m telling you. Nasty, powerful thing.

(If you’re reading this, I love you, and I hope I’m something in your life that isn’t quite so bad as the rest of it seems right now.)

I can’t talk; I’m giving in and running away – to Devon, on a roadtrip with a school friend, the nottingham flautist of great talent. We were planning it anyway, but now it’s an escape, the sand to bury my head in. Mobile off, internet unaccessible, loud music and no shift times or lunchbreaks or To do lists or housework or expectations or anything, just me, an old friend and a twisty little lane.

And I won’t be raising money for Amur leopards after all. I’ll do something else instead, I promise, but not that …

Miss Austen

according to her wishes, held a celebratory weekend of dancing, meals and talks in her honour. Myself and my dear friend Mr Patient (who is considering Miss Jane as his dissertation topic) attended an evening put on this saturday. Attired in regency trappings, we heard the music recital of the Reverend of Shawton on the piano, playing contemporaneous sonata’s and a short ditty from a music collection found in Austen’s house with her signature at the base; we danced; and we generally enjoyed ourselves immensely.

We were in the main cathedral, which is a beautiful construction recorded in Jane’s letters as “that long, low building” which she “loved”. They have recently organised an exhibit about her – which is a bit rubbish, but free with entry to the cathedral, and does feature first editions of all of her works and a few manuscripts in an elegant practised hand. There were some canapés and some champagne – we were by far the youngest there, but amongst the costumed half. There was a large representation of americans from the Jane Austen Society of North America, which I didn’t even knew existed, who reportedly finance fresh flowers weekly on her grave in the aisles.

We spoke to a few people – one american girl is studying at my university and attended

Cathedral

every event put on this weekend, and had visited Bath earlier on that week – before slinking into the pews and finding characters from her books in the assembly. We spotted Wickham, an older Harriet, a potential Mr and Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins, Catherine Du Bourgh, Mrs Jennings, Mrs and Miss Bates – and later younger people filtered in with parents, who we identified as Lizzy Bennet. As for ourselves, I maintained that I must be Emma because I had gold earrings in – Mr Patient then remarked that he must be Mr Knightly, although of course he isn’t 35 or in love with me since I was 12 …

Then began the music. Sipping champagne and seated in the front row, we sat through the recital with smiles. I particularly liked the history of the music and the quotes from the novels which accompanied the playing. This was followed by the Hampshire Regency Dancers, who were wonderful, and then we got our chance – hence the title, as the floor of the newer bit of Winchester Cathedral is covered with huge flagstone graves set out with engravings instead of headstones.

Mr Patient and I in full costume

By then end, we were both glowing with perspiration and smiles, and the aussie bloke in charge of the music (sadly not live) came up and complimented us on our dancing. Bemused but pleased, we thanked him and decided the praise was of our enthusiasm and smiles and come from his goodwill, as opposed to any skill on our part.

Then, we ended up chattering away with the treasurer and vice chairman of the Jane Austen Society UK, whereupon I was cordially invited to become a member. Naturally, I said yes. I also agreed to go to a free guided walk of Jane’s Winchester by the tour guide who was to lead it the next morning, which I’m pleased to say was very good too. Did you know there is an arte nouveau statuette of Joan of Arc in the C10th end of Winchester cathedral, where the medieval flagstones still remain? Nor did I. We got a free tour of the cathedral and vaults added on. Tour guide was wonderful, very informative and funny. She was delighted to see me – I don’t think she expected me to show – and devastated to here that my “handsome young man” would not be joining us. His immense height was a huge bonus in his favour for these ladies, him being well over six foot and all, as you can see from the photograph…

Am Dram, was, as expected, appalling. To the point where as we left, even Ryan looked a little sheepish and apologised – he, who had been angrily telling me to stop jumping to conclusions about the quality of the show. But it wasn’t the singing – the vocals themselves were more than acceptable, no bleeding ears as anticipated. It was just, y’know, everything else… Although it contained the lyric: “You thought you were hit by cupid – No, it was the economy, stupid! “ which is destined to become a poetic classic in no time.

The venue was lovely, this really sweet converted barn affair with raked seating – we sat right at the back, all of six (maybe seven?) rows from the stage – facing a traverse stage and small cabaret tables on the other side seating four people apiece – there were only four of these. Three lights comprised the rig, and microphones were unnecessary. I would go back to the theatre itself.

We saw a multi-roling four person cast performing their musical comedy about the current coalition government. Singing about politics, I hear you cry, what possible could’ve gone wrong there? To be honest, I was really hoping for a modern day living Punch cartoon; I was willing to accept dodgy rhymes and snarky jibes; I was offered the highly politically charged jokes along the lines of Tories are vampires, sucking the blood out of the NHS and Clegg only wants to join Europe because his wife is Spanish. Good to know they read the daily mail before writing this. In fact, the three funniest bits were when the PM’s wig didn’t make it to his head before the end of the costume change (which was expertly covered up by the news reporter crying, Nice hair cut Prime Minister! And, Wow your hair grows fast! for the next scene when he did get it back on in time), the poor chap playing three characters in one scene going mental trying to play Nick Clegg, Vince Cable (or Wince Fable, fancied by a pill-popping receptionist) and a puppy dog all talking to each other and the face of the girl in the audience opposite which remained confused and horrified throughout the show, slowly becoming more disgusted toward the end. Note that none of these are to do with the show in itself.

On the bright side, here’s some politics that went very, very right.