It has been a truly stressful week at work so far for everyone and I have been arriving and leaving nearly an hour early/late every day so far this week (and it’s only Wednesday!) just to make a dent in my workload, so tonight in an omg-i-need-to-destress! moment I chopped up six apples into tiny pieces. And then I made an apple cake. Which is this very moment in the oven as I type, making my little room smell absolutely delicious (thanks, Smitten Kitchen!) and making me very hungry.
Yesterday it struck me all over again, en route to Waterloo to meet Debbie, how placidly British people put up with the craptastic public transport system: the train in front of ours on the Northern line broke down and after being trapped in between Mornington Crescent and Euston for positively ages, we pulled very slowly into Euston, whereupon our driver mumbled sheepishly that, erm, the train at Warren Street was broken and, erm, wasn’t going anywhere, and he reckoned our best bet was to get off here and hop onto the Victoria line instead, because “this train will be here for quite a while”.
And of course with the mass exodus of people from the Northern line onto the Victoria at Euston, human traffic slowed to an epic, molasses-like crawl. Everyone was inching onwards step by step, like a zombie horde, I was pushing 20 minutes late, really hungry, knew there wouldn’t be enough time anymore to grab dinner before having to leg it over to the National Theatre for All’s Well, still stressed from work, and quite cranky as a result; of the innumerable times I have been inconvenienced by the Tube and by TfL as an organisation, this was probably the first time I had seriously considered filing a complaint.
As I occupied myself through the zombie shuffle by wording a polite yet suitably annoyed email in my head, I heard an announcement that there were “minor delays on the Charing Cross branch of the Northern line” and nearly laughed out loud. Suddenly it all struck me as absurdly ridiculous – honestly, if TfL considers a train breaking down and having to throw all their passengers off a bunch of subsequent trains “minor delays”… what complaint can I make that would possibly register? And why is TfL like this? And what’s going to happen in 2012 when the Olympics come here and whole masses of sports fans are trapped on a stuck train together?! /rant
Anyway, I did thankfully make it on time for the play, though Deb and I had no time for dinner and had to grab some Krispy Kremes instead (not the healthiest of substitutions but yummy nonetheless). I’ve never seen one of Shakespeare’s problem plays before, and after seeing All’s Well that Ends Well… yeah, I can understand the “problem” tag. It struck me as oddly jarring in critical parts, especially in the portrayals of Helena and Bertram; I can’t decide if I’m supposed to like them, or why Helena likes Bertram at all, as he is sort of a useless prat, or whether it’s misogynistic or positive towards women, there seems to be a bit of both (but then again that vacillation is so Shakespearean, isn’t it – it ended on a really ambiguous, unresolved note too, as Debbie pointed out afterwards). It’s pretty rare that I don’t take to a Shakespeare play right away, the only others I can think of are Taming of the Shrew and Romeo & Juliet (but really, who likes R&J??), but I found it difficult to outrightly enjoy All’s Well and I suspect it has to do most with the play itself rather than the production, which was beautifully staged and generally well-acted. I’m glad I saw it though and did much prefer the conciliatory second half to the first half, but I so much entirely prefer The Winter’s Tale, which is the most recent other Shakespeare I’ve seen.
And to my horror, going to the theatre is starting to remind me of work instead of being a respite from it – perusing the National’s brochure, and looking round their posters and spaces, all these subconscious assessments and comparisons kept popping up in my head, and a never-ending litany of work tasks I needed to accomplish looped nonstop in my thoughts! Yikes.
Ever had one of those unsettling, unfocussed days at work when you feel like you’ve been crazy busy, done loads of stuff, dealt with lots of things that people have thrown randomly at you out of the blue, and yet still be totally unable to actually say what you’ve done when you think about it? Even if you’ve stayed an hour late at the office?
Maybe it’s a Monday thing.
But it’s okay because tomorrow I am going to All’s Well that Ends Well which is my first play at the National Theatre, later this week I will go see 500 Days of Summer, on Saturday I am going back to Japanese class and then York ♥, and in December I am going to Lille!!! Yes I am three-exclamation-mark excited, brief as the trip is! Hurry up, Christmas! :D
Over the course of last week, because I have been so absolutely exhausted by a very, very manically busy workweek, I’ve been chucking everything I want to blog about in a draft post in point form. Now that I’m actually writing it up, I realise most of the points are totally unconnected (as they’ve accumulated over a week), so this will be somewhat piecemeal…
Anyway, so work. It was crazy this week (and looks like it will be crazy for the whole of October), as we have so many shows and big projects coming up that literally, every day, there is something urgently pressing to be done that I simply don’t have the time to start any earlier. And the thing about the nature of the work I do is that it is a long series of small tasks rather than one large, overarching project with an end in sight, so often it feels like a neverending slog. It is, however, truly gratifying when you find out that the season has kicked off with the first two shows being sellouts and everything above target so far – numbers like these make you feel that it is worth the hours spent cold-calling and researching.
Highlights of the past workweek were working from home on Tuesday morning – seriously, I was so productive without people distracting me or throwing new things at me to do, and I work so much better on my own laptop with music on (especially boppy 80s tunes) – and going to the Middlesex Uni Freshers’ Fayre on Friday, which was a massive blast from the past. I’d forgotten what freshers’ fairs are like, the teeming overspill of bright-eyed enthusiasm, exuberance, and sheer gung-ho fecklessness that are first-year uni students. It was a tremendously refreshing and gorgeously sunny day out of the office, and I found myself genuinely enjoying speaking to students, walking round the hall and chatting with staff at other stalls, getting caught up in conversation with a fellow Sydneysider about dust storms, having a journalism final-year tip me off on where one of our celebs gets his hair cut… I always think I detest networking, but when work mode kicks in, I actually do rather enjoy it.
Friday was also dinner at Gold Mine – roast duck! – with Wey Ren and his lovely family, and Saturday was brunch with Kevin, Shan and Evan at the Muffin Man in High Street Kensington, where we all had a good proper fry-up (scrambled eggs, sausage, freshly squeezed juice, tea/coffee, toast, jam/honey/marmalade, baked beans, bacon – heavenly!), a long, lingering chat as the morning stretched on lazily, a stroll down the shops which ended in a trip to Harrods, and then (naturally) Monmouth Coffee and amazing ice cream at Freggo which is my new favourite dessert joint in town!
Kevin pointed out, as we looked at Halloween pumpkin chocolate in Hotel Chocolat and remembered last year’s freak October snowfall, that it’d been a whole year already (or nearly). And so it’s been – with the new school year starting, people leaving, new people coming, another birthday and Christmas round the corner – the passage of time seems, suddenly, very real. There’s always this feeling at the end of summer, I think, the sense of a chapter closing, a golden russet brown once again creeping up round the leaves and the edges of the days. Exactly one year and a few days ago, I bound and handed in my Alice dissertation; on Friday, as I stood in the middle of Middlesex Uni’s Trent Park campus, I noticed the first tree covered with red leaves and it hit me again how time has flown.
I will be off to Sydney, Tasmania and Singapore at the end of November/early December and I am so so excited about that, but sudden-onset wanderlust and an acute restlessness from being stuck in the UK for over a year now has got me thinking about Christmas holidays already. The Christmas market at Lille and the promise of Mediterranean warmth in Nice are fighting it out at the moment for my attentions and tourist Euros… ah just get me out of here already, and bring on November!
just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world
she took the midnight train going anywhere
snapshots of perfect moments like this are what makes city life worthwhile. there was something beautifully alive about it all – the colours changing in the fountain, the national gallery lit up in the background, trafalgar square illuminated on an unnaturally balmy autumn evening – and all around the lively buzz of friday night, there but in the background, almost like movie music – so that as we sat down in the square leaning against a pillar, it was like a private little oasis of quiet contentment.
and in that moment i felt the city live, i felt i understood what dickens and the victorians meant by the city having a life of its own in a way the country doesn’t, there is a pulse running through london that i don’t know how to pin down or describe – but the way it lights up, the way its streets are worn down and its alleys twist, the way you never know who you’ll meet, the way it never ceases to surprise you after living here so long, the way it never sleeps…
all this flashed through my head almost subconsciously in a suspended instant, everything frozen, except for the constantly changing coloured lights in the fountains. i am, by nature, not a night person; i love my sunshine and the long days in summer, i love the calm of early mornings. but the more i spend nights out in london with good friends, coffee and ever-surprising night views, the more it is growing on me. night, and the city.
Everything bad about living alone comes to a head when you are sick. Suddenly the glorious abundance of me-time is not having anyone to fix you a nice simmering pot of porridge with ginger, the freedom to throw my things around and have my place as messy and homey as I like it is helplessly watching the washing pile up and the stains accumulate as I stumble about sleepily, and everything comes to a magnificent standstill in my Sudafed-induced coma. I don’t often feel this, but this morning it hit me anew, this thirsting to have someone else around.
But amid the throb throb throb in my head I’m thankful to have colleagues and a manager who order me to get out and go home when it’s good for me, and who tell me that I should just take Monday off if I’m still ill all weekend and let Monday be my weekend instead. A 12-hour sleep last night and good spell of fresh air this afternoon have put me almost right again; I’ve even regained enough of an appetite to want to bake up another batch of the best peanut butter cookies in the world and hoard them all for myself this time round (having expended a great deal of time and effort baking a birthday cake I don’t even like for colleagues last week; I was told it was delish, but it tasted of walnutty coffee to me, and all I could think of while eating it was dangit why ruin perfectly good coffee cake with walnuts? more importantly, why had this horror been perpetrated at my hands in my very own kitchen? oh the things i do to please the crowd)
Before I go off on another tangent and sound like I bake all the time (I really don’t. I just write about it because it’s the most interesting thing I do which isn’t work, sleep, and watching old anime) – work is really picking up, and I find myself now at the unwelcome yet not wholly dissatisfying point of having so much to accomplish I am unable to keep it all in my head and have to keep very detailed little notes and reminders in Outlook. There is a funny little joy to signing your name to an official letter, to having something you wrote approved, and the perverse writerly part of me thinks I will always enjoy this aspect of marketing most – writing the copy, writing things to be printed, creating the bit of text that will sell the show – it’s silly, I know, but I feel I will never get tired of it, not in the way that I can imagine getting tired of many other things.
But fortunately for all parties concerned, I am too tired to properly wax lyrical about my work right now – so medicine, and bed. (Maybe cookies first.)
I could get used to this – unseasonably warm weather on weekends, as recompense for crappy weekday weather when I’m in the office with an unlimited supply of hot tea anyway, hanging out with one of my oldest dearest friends as if time had hardly passed, going out for yummy food (Jamie’s Italian at Canary Wharf is every bit as good as the one in Oxford – though i have to disagree in principle with the idea of serving bucatini carbonara – it just does not taste right for some reason), walking the streets of London aimlessly once more – something I haven’t done for a while.
In between hanging out with Wanyun and Andy this weekend I spent an afternoon baking coffee walnut cake for an office birthday tomorrow, as it had been brought to my attention that that was said birthday-person’s favourite cake, but it is strange baking something you don’t actually like (I don’t like walnuts). I feel like I can’t tell if the cake is good because it tastes… well, like something I don’t like! Not repulsive, or horrendous, or anything like that, but just not my thing. And as I am still pretty rubbish, sadly, at dealing with layer cakes, I wound up having to carve my cake up into a funky hexagonal shape so that the sides would be even. This problem is mostly caused by the annoying fact that my two cake tins, which purport to be 9″ and were bought from different stores, are in fact of slightly differing sizes, meaning either Tesco or the little cookware store in Brixton are liars >:O
Also, how does one transport a whole cake on a 1.5 hour public transport commute without a cake box/cake stand/device made to transport a cake? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
stupid things i have done recently include:
and on top of all that, work is piling up very rapidly and suddenly… watch the blonde moments pile up as my sleep deprivation increases! to be continued.
sq
cui
LcT