I like the little reunions that mark each holiday season, I like the catching up and the greetings and the fact that at some point of time over these two weeks from Christmas to New Year everyone always thinks of someone else, old friends, distant family, whom they wouldn’t have thought of for a while. I like Covent Garden at this time of year, I like the lights and the mulled wine tea in Whittards, I like the tinsel round my computer at work. I got to speak to my family on the phone, see many muchly beloved Yorkies and spend New Year’s Eve counting down to the truly spectacular midnight fireworks at the banks of the Thames with Nic and Weez which was really the pinnacle of the whole break for me. Walking an hour and a half from Westminster to Pimlico after it all, armed with a tiny and largely unhelpful map from TFL, through crowded celebrating streets which eventually thinned out as we neared Victoria - random strangers tapping me on the shoulder to say happy new year with a smile and dancing drunkards taking their turns on the tarmac - we were all so cold that freezing would probably have been an understatement, we couldn’t feel our toes, we’d been standing for hours in an insane crowd, but ah the atmosphere!

On top of that I was also sick in a big way from Christmas day itself, on and off (still coughing a little), which has contributed to the past week feeling like a great big daze; I spent hours and hours of it sleeping off fevers and medication and sniffles and general malaise. Though I can’t say being sick for Christmas is very much fun, on hindsight it was probably good for me to have been forced into bed for long periods of time, and not be up stressing over my visa or jostling with crowds at Boxing Day sales or spending hours trying to get anywhere when half the transport network is shut down.

It is back to work and nose to the grindstone for me tomorrow, but it’s been a good rest. If only it were warmer… the weather, as always, has been abysmal. At least one thing here is constant.

The utter panic of yesterday (when I embarrassingly broke down in front of pretty much everyone in the office, tears and all) has passed, but there’s a slow, dull, throbbing feeling of gloom that isn’t much better. I hate having to wait till Monday. And could this have happened at a worse time than Christmas, when everything in this country shuts down to a standstill and I won’t be able to sort any of this bureaucracy out in a timely manner?

“We know you are waiting. Please continue to hold.”

- the weirdness of this hold message cannot be conveyed in words without emphasising the petulance of the “we know!” part.

“I took a taxi from the airport. The others drove the rental car and got lost. This may have been due to V’s navigational skills.”

- from the feedback form for one of the tour hotels last year, under “Ease to find”

“Disconcerted by sight of PVC clad ♀ outside venue, although sight of fit runner ♀ in morning was calming! Grapefruit a bit tinny. Air not fresh. But we all slept well!”

- funniest hotel feedback form ever.

“Please note that to help us give you a better service, we may ask for certain details including your age, gender, race, marital status and religious beliefs.”

- why the @£$%! does a London borough town council telephone information service require these details under any circumstances?

“I don’t have 5 single rooms! Who gave you my number?”

- the most bizarrely accusational guest house owner I have ever spoken to. Lady, if you can’t accommodate 5 of us in separate rooms, you could just say so… also, your number is on the internet.

K (on phone): “Hi, could I speak to Mr M. Fox please? …Fox. …FOX. …F-O-X. Like, small, red animal. Yes… Fox. Thank you.“

- either the receptionist was profoundly deaf, or… I don’t know. I reckon even very stupid people should be able to hear to word “Fox”. But hey I may be wrong…

(over the phone) “Forgive me for being personal, but are you South African?”

- a bizarre stage door receptionist chap from Leeds. I didn’t even know what to say.

D: I can’t make the scanner work! How does it work?
P: Okay you need to put your document here, then press…
D: (interrupting) Oh, it’s scanned already, but where has it gone?!

- somehow this cracked everyone in the office up.

(phone rings and I answer) “Good afternoon, XYZ*, how can I help?”
(voice coming simultaneously from phone and behind me) “Oh god, I’ve dialled the wrong number!”

- I turn around to see one of my managers on her mobile. We both die laughing.

* where XYZ represents my company name, withheld to protect the innocent

M, while labelling envelopes: Well this isn’t going to get anywhere… “N.B., Plymouth College, Plymouth College, Plymouth”.

Me: So is our budget for hotels higher since N is sorting out his own accommodation most nights?
Y: No because we still have to pay him that ridiculous allowance nonsense… -looks at boss- I mean, the very sensible allowance nonsense.

“The only potential problem with this room is that there are some pillars in the middle of it. Of course, since you’re holding auditions there, anyone who bumps into pillars can just be cut there and then…”

- a very perspicacious venue manager in London who rented us a dance hall

and my personal favourite:

Me (on phone with a dance school): Hi, I’m just calling to find out if we can send you some leaflets for your students, about auditions that we have coming up?
Admin guy: I don’t think you should, because the students do their own performances every summer…
Me: Oh okay, that’s fine then, thanks! -about to hang up-
Admin guy: …and they’re not very good.

- in D’s words, when I recounted this to her: “You don’t want our students, they’re shit.”

71, 73, 78, 70.

It is ironic that the module I did best at ultimately was Romantic, not Victorian - and a part of me can’t help but feel mildly annoyed that my dissertation literally just hit the mark I needed for a distinction grade - but… I made it! After all this time. Unreal.

The York city council is after my landlady to pay council tax for last year, from which I should be exempt on account of my being a student, except they claim I have to fork out for the period of time when I straddled undergrad and postgrad and was very, very briefly not techically a student. She’s naturally panicking about receiving letters threatening court action, and it falls on me to deal with it. Except that the council refuse to speak to me any further, for confidentiality purposes, as the account is in my landlady’s name! And I can’t talk to my uni welfare adviser over the phone because they don’t dispense advice that way. So I have to email her and await a reply. Did I mention my lack of internet or phone line at home? Or that the sum in question is somewhere in the region of £300, which is by no means an expense I can easily afford?

I’ve been yelling on the phone a lot this afternoon, for various reasons, and none of the above are anywhere nearer to being properly sorted out. On top of that I’ve cut two days of work so far, within a week of starting, because I had to wait at home for boxes to arrive on Friday and today I blew it all waiting for BT. I know I have perfectly good reasons for skipping out on work but I don’t like doing it; I feel lazy, I feel ashamed. I haven’t spoken to my family in eons, I haven’t spoken to so, so many people. Most of the time I feel fine. When I don’t, though, I really, really don’t.

I know this will all pass and I won’t even remember this turmoil, many months later. For now, though, this is one of those times, and I’m gritting my teeth as best as I can through the profound frustration and disconnectedness. Days like this when I can’t cry no matter how much it’s welling up inside me, I want to go out, buy a massively expensive tub of Haagen Dazs, and eat it all - but it’s been raining and hailing all day and the weather is at odds with my ice cream therapy. So it has to be hot chocolate, and I guess I should be grateful after all that I still have hot chocolate in my cupboard to turn to in a pinch. Some things, unlike others, don’t fail you.

There are a million and one things to think about right now. I’m still waiting on the results of another job interview, and there’s one more scheduled for next week (though that, I can do alongside the London internship I think); I have to think of where to stay, how to move all my stuff down, when to move, how much I can afford to pay for rent. I’m not quite on my last legs financially, but I’m getting there. It’s a whole other world of stress.

But I am grateful for little things, for Nic and Jake who are so kindly letting me stay at theirs, for Steffy who furnished me a whole plethora of makeup tips before my interviews last week, for En Qi who has been unstintingly and generously helping me search for a room in London, for my dad who talked me through interview preparations, for Louis who told me it was okay to keep trying for what I want even if I hit some snags along the way, for Wee Zi who’s always believed in me and kept me company via phone calls, and - for this job offer, which I thought would never come!

One thing, one thing at a time…

*

My siblings and I dragged ourselves out of the house at 9 am today to attend Animania ‘08, Australia’s biggest and bestest anime and manga convention, and upon arriving we were presented with a little guidebook that had something called the Animania Passport Tour at the back. It involved checking in with six different info desks, doing tasks at each of them to collect stamps, and then collecting a special limited edition freebie! (with exclamation mark!) after all six stamps had been acquired.

So feeling unusually gung-ho (and egged on by having spied a table labelled “PRIZES” with rows of very lovely and expensive dolls on them), we embarked on a quest for stamps that grew, over the next couple of hours, progressively more horrifying; we started from deceptively tame tasks like drawing pictures and striking anime poses to walking round and round the ginormous hall twice over to count the number of sunglasses hanging about, to singing Naruto and Doraemon theme songs in front of a crowd, and finally to the pinnacle of humiliating super-special last tasks, wearing chocobo suits on the dance floor (I kid you not; no, there are no pictures, thank goodness).

The karaoke bit was particularly annoying - there was a list of 10 songs and they’d randomly assign you one, and among them, coincidence of coincidences, was “Ikenai Taiyou”! Which my sister and I were really hoping to get (my brother had been assigned Naruto’s GO!! earlier), but we got a song from Suzumiya Haruhi which we both didn’t know… and in the end, thanks to time constraints, we were chucked in together with a group doing, of all songs, Doraemon. After we’d practised the Suzumiya Haruhi song to perfection too. Pffft.

So after all that effort, we received… a limited edition yellow Animania 2008 wristband, of which there are only 100! In the world!

et voila - I apologise for crappy webcam quality

(Apparently the dolls were for the other competitions. Go figure.)

“And now,” said the guy who gave us our wristbands, obviously dying of laughter at our dumbfounded horrorstruck faces, “you have to ask yourself: was it worth it? Say yes! Say yes!”

It was a massive facepalm moment. Yet thinking back, I have to say, this harebrained Passport game was what turned your everyday run-of-the-mill convention - where I’d normally just stroll round, watch the Karaoke (but not sing), watch the dancing (but not dance) and watch the art desk (but not draw) - into something really special for my brother, my sister and me… and we’re probably never going to let each other forget it. (”Remember when we all wore chocobo suits? Most embarrassing moment of our lives!”)

I’m still wearing this lousy yellow wristband as I type. It’s not even very nice, but it has been one hell of a memorable day.

“Yup, that’s me.”
“Oh! You probably don’t remember me, but - ”
“I do actually, we met last year at my sister’s graduation dinner, right?”
“Yeah! She told me you were coming back! So what are you doing now? Are you on holiday?”

Surprised - pleasantly so, though slightly disoriented - to find myself in an actual phone conversation with a non-family-member in Sydney, I told my sister’s chatty friend that it was actually still termtime, sorta, for me, and that I was here working on my dissertation. She enthusiastically asked me what it was about (despite the fact that she’s a science student), and listened as I rather self-deprecatingly told her, flaky as it may sound, it was on the Alice books. To my further surprise more questions ensued on what exactly I was doing and what my findings were so far, and so I told her a little about my crazy fantasy/insanity parallel idea, and the tea-party in the books, and madness in the 19th century.

“Hey, it sounds really interesting,” she said. “You shouldn’t laugh at your own thesis, if you don’t believe in it, no one else will!”

It was like a shot right to the heart. In that instant, memories of all these people who had been like, the Alice books? Really? (especially my mom’s well-meaning but rather deflating how do you write 20,000 words on Alice in Wonderland?) flashed rapidly through my mind, and I realised this girl, whom I’d only spoken to once before in my entire life and who didn’t even know me, had put her finger bang on the thing that has been bugging me the most - do I really buy my own hypothesis? It’s been an uphill climb partly because of the paucity of criticism relating to Carroll, and partly because, as I only came to realise that evening, I have been far too timid to believe that I can assert something no critic has ever said before.

Matt spoke to me about this way back in one of our earlier meetings. “I think there’s a link there,” he said, of my harebrained, spur-of-the-moment notion, “and I think it’s good that it hasn’t really been explored.” Slavish reliance on critical opinion belonged, he added, to a lower level of academia, and at this point I really should be way past that.

So I thanked my sister’s friend warmly. We continued to chat a little longer, about random things like the USyd library, and she asked if I could get my sister to ring her back once she’d returned. CALL EMILY, I wrote in caps on my notebook above my list of Alice quotations, and underlined it twice.

I don’t think you’ll ever read this, Emily, but thank you.