Sky High

My flatmate Lotte is going to do a skydive for charity - The Big Issue - on the 3rd of March (http://www.justgiving.com/lottewebb). Somehow jumping out of a plane at 10,000 feet is not something I've ever contemplated doing, but I'm happy to cheer her on!

Having a job interview the day before the college breaks for half-term has meant that I need to wait until next week before hearing anything from them which is slightly frustrating. On the other hand I've started volunteering for the Richmond Environment Network. I volunteered expecting to help out in the office and do little things like that, but actually I've been given the opportunity to start (almost from scratch) working on the children and youth side, i.e. develop and support work going on in the ENTIRE borough. So, I'm going to have to pretend I know what I'm doing. Should be fun!

Our washing machine is refusing to open the door so there's a whole load stuck inside at least until tomorrow. Oh well, it's been a good excuse to borrow a towel off our neighbour (a new experience for sure).

UPDATE - Nobody can come to fix it until Monday 11am so the wet laundry will be in the machine all weekend!

The Science of Sleep

Last night Lotte and I got our exercise London-style by rushing from the tube station and trying to find the Barbican Centre in the ten minutes we had before our film was due to start. As both of us had forgotten to bring along the London A-Z we had to do a fair amount of detective work too to find out which way to go. The Barbican Centre - once we had found it - was a maze of empty corridors and enclaves. It was a rather eerie place, especially when we emerged from the film (which is about Stephane mixing dream and reality).

'The Science of Sleep' is a beautiful film. I'm a big fan of Gael Garcia Bernal and enjoyed Michel Gondry's last film: The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, so I did have high expectations and thankfully I was not let down. It is a beguiling fantasy in a merry fluid mixture of French, English, and Spanish and shot beautifully. Besides, how can you not like a film with a one second time-machine?!

We wandered around Soho for awhile later on. What a fascinating hive of bustle and activity with rickshaws attempting to pick up passengers, lots of people walking around (a relief after the quiet and sterile finance quarters), loads of restaurants (we had a lovely Thai curry), and the China Town all decorated up for Chinese New Year.

On our way back, just outside the station we wanted, the train stopped due "to a slight fire outside the signalman's cabin" which damaged the cables a bit. A surreal end to the journey, but thankfully somebody managed to override the system and we did not end up spending the night on the uncomfortable seats. On "alighting" the train we saw no sigh of fire anywhere although I did spot a rat rustling around the tracks.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone!

Appletree

Recently I've taken it upon myself to drastically reduce the amount of my physical possessions. In part this has corresponded with a HUGE increase in technology. I have now joined the classes with white wires hanging out of their ears and am an iPod owner, and my gorgeous friends moving back to Australia (= free place to stay when I get over there!) gave me a dinky little iBook. Somehow I don't think the value of my possessions in under £20 anymore. It is a strange transition, but it is oddly enough helping me cut back in my habit of stockpiling stuff so it surely can't be all bad.

The major problem I can forsee is not understanding what the computer is saying to me or a paralysing fear of breaking it... However our new neighbour works for Dell, and the vicar's husband describes himself as a "techno-hippy" so there's bound to be help around - for a suitable bribe.

Cold and wintry February - finally!

It's pretty darn cold outside, at least by our English standards, but so completely gorgeous I'll forgive it! Just the right weather for slipping into little shops to warm up for a couple of minutes before braving the outdoors again. I love this weather! The Pearl Month of the year... [That's a transliteration of the Finnish for February.]

I registered with the doctors surgery this morning and ought to get back to fill a whole stack of forms littered around my bedroom floor - there are just so many of them! Benefit forms, College forms, CRB checks the lot. I haven't been very diligent though and so my form filling sessions are spread inbetween Dorris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook' and 'The Time Traveller's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger. Writing down details of myself over and over again are a certain way of filling this form of my existence here, defining it and drawing lines around me... (Not sure I like that particular outline of the form I'm filling out hence all these books.)

I've started a Spanish course too; and again it's one of my get out of jail free cards...

Richmond, London

Where to start? I packed all my belongings into three bags and a suitcase and on Friday headed for London after a week or more of going round pubs, people's places, Red Cafe, and generally saying goodbye to all the wonderful and fabulous people I've met in Swansea. Bleary eyed (after a farewell party at the house) I stepped onto the 8:15am bus and headed towards Victoria bus station. Upon arrival I started to curse my inability to pack lighter and dragged my stuff across to Victoria station. But I took one look at the stairs leading down to the tube and bailed. I had to sens an SOS text to Lotte to come and rescue me - which she dutifully did. So not exactly the independent start to a life in London that I had imagined, but at least I'm here.

The weekend has been packed with meeting people, our mutual friends from Iona as well as some of Lotte's friends, trying to unpack and decorate my room, walk around Richmond and try to make some sense of this place and the fact that I'm here... We live a minute away from the river, ten seconds away from the bus station, a minute away from the food shop/High Street. Everything is right here!! The first thing I did on Saturday was to get a library card and I've already got an Oyster Card, so once I've bought myself a London A-Z I will feel a lot more at home.

Our flat is huge, white and magnolia (very much the non-offensive option isn't it) with a Lotte-influenced red-orange colour scheme, gorgeous, has a back garden that we share with the other two apartments in the house but it's huge, and we have a strong feeling of disbelief that now we are the adults in the house which seems unreal. The garden has seven bird feeders which are strung very high up in the trees. Prosaicly I did find a stepladder in the garden, which dashed my initial theory that there must be giants living in the upstairs flat, but we have regular visitors of green parakeets that amase and amuse me and liven up the garden.

I'm still trying to take everything in which means that everything is quite a mess in my head, experiences and sights floating around in no logical sense, but I'm hopeful it will settle down soon. I am so excited about this all!

This is a very euphoric, bouncy post. I'm sure in due course I'll come down to a sober judgement of the frivolty of the rich, how having been into five charity shops and seen their prices that I really am going to need a job soon or whatever, but for now I'm enjoying it.

Twirling, whirling...

On Sunday we had a house-outing to see the whirling derishes of Damascus. They performed with the Al-Kindi Ensamble and the Sheikh Hamza Shakkur and performed Sufi liturgy of the Ummayad Mosque of Damascus. What an experience! I've never seen anything like that live before and they had the whole of the Taliesin art centre transfixed with the music and the whirling. The men in their dresses looked rather interesting until they started to twirl and then it all look increadibly natural - if you can say that about four men twirling around on a stage. (Actually, I kept expecting the one guy in particular to curtsey as he walked back to his chair.) The ensamble were playing classical Arab music from the 9th Century upwards and it was very intricate and fascinating to listen to and to watch.

I have no idea how the men managed to do so much whirling and not a) fall over or b) be sick. My head felt a bit giddy just watching them. And when we got home I felt inspired to do a few twirls but was dizzy within a few turns. It's great to see stuff like this in Swansea!

Lily's Friday Challenge

Lily, my intrepid friend, has just eaten eight pickled eggs for a bet. I watched her munch through these eggs, that a collegue of hers had pickled (probably for her), for over an hour. It was entertaining, although a bit painful too. She has a habit of laying on bets for all imaginable crazy things. And has so far come through most of them honourably. Google later provided a slight dampner on her glory by telling us that the record for eating pickled eggs (and yes, there is such a thing) is 19 pickled eggs in five minutes; but we are still proud of her even while we shake our heads in disbelief.

A previous food related bet saw her eating half a kilo of pickled onions, and she has agreed to attempt to eat two kilos of bean sprouts next Friday as long as they are not pickled.

That woman has a stomach of steel.

We have a new housemate, Jen, another waif rescued from a homeless fate, and a very welcomed addition to the house. And the dog is still with us as Ian's mother is stranded in Ireland - the ferries are not running in the force 10 gales it would seem... Dog and I have been exploring around the Tawe river and Kilvey Hill both which are new territory for me. I still find the view from top of the hill quite disconcerting as the Swansea that I can see from there is just so different and it is disorienting to not recognise the town I've lived in over the past four years.

I've found a big box and packed it and it's sitting ready to be sent to Finland. Unfortunately there still seems to be an awful lot of possession left in my room even after three trips to charity shops...

13th of July is when the next Harry Potter film comes out (HP and the Order of the Phoenix), and I've surprised myself by getting quite excited about that:) The room of Dolores Umbridge looks suitably revolting with the rows of kittens on plates hung on the wall! JK Rowling has announced the title of the next and last book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so does that mean that we might get our hands on the book sometime this year? Is Severus Snape friend or foe...

Being on campus at Uni I've bought the paper for 25p. Bargain!

Chronicles of Swansea

The last update from my friend Abi is that she is (or was on New Year's Day) in Antigua lying on a beach watching hummingbirds. She left Swansea last October as a crew member on a small boat. Last I heard she was headed to Cape Verde with six Italians who might go over to Brazil if they felt like it - but now she's in the Caribbean... Well, she was aiming for Mexico so I guess it's in the right direction for her. She is such an inspiration, and I loved living with her for the six months that I did.

Harking back to that time I've also been nostalgic over our tea-habits. We had no teapot but there was always a saucepan full of tea on the table. It was usually green tea that Fred would drink by the pint glass, but also chai, nettles from the back garden, Greek mountain tea, and various other concoctions. At one point we did a inventory and between us we had 26 different types of tea, and we kept adding to it... Currently I am growing rather fond of the yellow teapot I have access to, but I will always keep a spot in my heart for brewing tea in a saucepan and drinking it out of jam jars - as all the mugs were being held hostage in Helen's room...

Ian's mother is going away for a while so we are going to be looking after her dog for the weekend. The rain has let up for a second too so I'm sure we'll get a few nice walks in. Our friend has been staying for the past two days but I think he's not too keen on the idea of a dog and is moving to another friend's place:) His loss, dogs are great!

My time is filled by trying to get rid of four years worth of stuff as a prelude to packing, filling out job applications and hunting for more, trying to figure out a cheap way of sending stuff back to Finland as there are several books I cannot bare the thought of parting with permanently, reading other books from the library, going to see people, and all the other wonderful things that go along with being gloriously unemployed.

I stopped off during lunch break in the AqWa office at Swansea uni as Lily and Shaun are both doing PhDs there. I found out from the disappointed Lily that the tickets to the Eurovision song contest in Finland are sold out already! I also heard a review on apples, heard several bad jokes, and we watched a (dead) whale on a beach being blown up as well as the first two instalments of R. Kelly's soap opera rap thing on YouTube. Entertaining, and R. Kelly may well be a minor genius, but they're never going to convince me that they do any work. And here I was thinking a PhD is a serious business!

Very short stories

Hemingway once wrote a very brief story in just six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." and is said to have called it his best work.

The magazine Wired invited a whole bunch of sci-fi writers to write their concise masterpieces of six words and I've happily happened to stumble across them. Here are a few:

Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket.
-William Shatner

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

From torched skyscrapers, men grew wings.
- Gregory Maguire

Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.
- Vernor Vinge

We kissed. She melted. Mop please!
- James Patrick Kelly

The baby's blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.
- David Brin

And I've got one of my own although I am not a writer of masterpieces or of anything else either:

Why expect anything to be simple?
- me

To quote a friend:

Wishing You 12 months of happiness, 52 weeks of fun, 365 days of laughter, 8760 hours of blessings, 525600 minutes of joy, 315536000 seconds of peace and justice! Happy New Year!

Back in Korpo(o)

Alas, there is no snow here. Each night the frost has provided a white coat on the roads and a glinting sheen on the rest of the ground, but it is mostly gone by morning. In town there was some ice on the pavements I felt very much like a foreigner as I gingerly made my way across the paths. But I did go for an ice-clear ramble in the woods today feeling far more like a Finn again.

Who travels by car on an island at 2am? And where are they going? The curtain-twitcher in me was curious as I noticed some cars going past... I guess my idea of an island is still very much dominated by Iona. If I didn't know that we had taken two ferries to get here I'd forget that we're not just in the middle-of-nowhere. We drove out here on Christmas Day and the ferries were running on the Sunday schedule - so merely every half an hour rather than every fifteen to twenty minutes. This is truly incredible! Only last week I tried to get to Mumbles/Newton and found that there was only one (1!) bus an hour after 5pm. Utterly disgusted I abandoned that trip. I'll never be convinced, at this rate, that Swansea's public transport system is any good...

A few of my friends are obssessed with list making and ranking things in order. I tend to think this passtime is...well...silly, but perhaps it's a seasonal hazard for while I was musing over this habit I found myself with an urge to create a list too. (I've generally observed that you have to be careful when making fun of something as otherwise you'll end up doing it yourself!) I decided to write a list of 10 things I didn't know about Touaregs (not too sure why either), but when I found out that they've got a great festival each January near Timbuktu - Festival au Desert - it was a short step to be distracted further by the Forbidden Purple City (what a great name!) in Vietnam and WWOOFing in Mexico. So I never ended up with a list afterall. Although I now have another festival I'd really like to go to...

There may not be any snow but we have had stunning winter skies as the sun sets by 4pm. It is very, very dark here. It is Finland afterall.

Virtual fridge magnets!

While my fridge magnets languish in one box or another I've stumbled across a substitute... What fun!!

Here's a hasty poem of pure nonsense I wrote.
http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/?id=1107

The Dude abides

What an ace film... And a reminder of the cyclical nature of things. I watched for the first time 4 years ago in St Thomas, and then again yesterday - in St Thomas. This time it was my turn to introduce it to a friend!

After 15 hours of travel I have arrived in Finland to watch the sun go down at 3:30pm! Not much snow to report, though I faithfully carried th Christmas pudding here in one piece as requested. Now I wasn't allowed to bring a 500ml bottle of water (100ml would've been fine), but noone batted an eyelid at the pud. Where's the logic in that?!

Happy solstice folks! It only gets lighter from here - hurray:)

Hats, bags, and badges

In the spirit of this consumer season I've rediscoved the joy of the above mentioned items. I recently saw a bag that got me drooling, but I did manage to tear myself away and walk out of the shop without shelling out £5. Now that may not sound like much, but when the sum total of your earnings is not even considered worth taxing by our lovely government £5 represents quite a huge chunk... Actually, I've been quite happy rediscovering my said hats, bags, and badges that I had packed away before going to Iona and it's been like an early Christmas pulling them out of boxes:)

Today I've gone a bit over board and am wearing not one but TWO badges... But one is tiny, so it can't really count, right?

Landed! (Said in a Welsh accent for full effect...)

I am now no longer homeless, but have taken up residency in St Thomas of Swansea. Plus I'm living with a friend (hooray) who knows I'm poor as a churchmouse and isn't charging me as much rent as he really ought to be (hooray). It's a "proper house" and everything too...

It's on the east side of Swansea which I'm finding stranger than I thought. I've spent all of my Swansea life on the west side so things really do seem different. It's great being this close to the town centre though as I can finally do my shopping on St Helen's Road and the market. I walked into town today along the river - again a totally new experience for me. And once I get my bike back I'll be able to cycle to Pontardawe and Neath all along the cyclepaths that are by a canal/river.

I've been frequenting the local corner shop to establish myself in the neighbourhood and I hear there is a good bellydancing class in the community hall... Our neighbour on the right keeps pidgeons that he races. One day when I'll get up early enough (like 8 or 9 am) I'll be able to see him "excercise" them. Apart from living up a huge hill 'tis all most exciting!

I'm doing my utmost to take advantage of the best bit of being unemployed: time. I did a lovely walk to Pwll Du via Caswell Bay and then through Bisphopston Valley and a foot of mud, and I've been reading lots again - what luxury! For those of you out there who have been fortunate enough to spend any time in Wales I HIGHLY recommend "Aberystwyth Mon Amour" by Malcom Pryce.

Walking the streets

My bike is still with a friend so I've been doing a lot of walking of these streets of Swansea. After being in foreign lands I do appreciate not having to constantly keep an eye on a map and the bliss of knowing real shortcuts and which bus to jump on. Local knowledge is great once you've earned it!

It all looks so familiar though, and there are many times when I feel like I'm retracing my steps. It is very surreal to be back. I am absolutely loving seeing all my friends again and catching up with what is going on (and things sure can change in 3 months!!), but despite that I'm still feeling very restless...

BeyondTV started on Monday with a great turnout at the Dylan Thomas Centre and a great bunch of films! A trend continued firmly into Tuesday and I'm sure will throughout this week. This is Undercurrents at its best: finding inspirational and empowering films, showcasing it's own latest productions, and passing on the knowledge. Last night we had 6-8 shorts from first time film makers from a Womanist Video Workshop that ran for only six weeks; and the quality really was brilliant! I was sitting with the audience part enjoying the show and part trying to figure out how to start filming again:)

My friend Hamish has a fold-away solar panel that he's hooked up to batteries that run a video camera/a computer for editing and has spent his time on beaches in the Canaries editing his latest film. How much fun does that sound!! And what a great excuse to head for the sun... Hooray for studios that fit in your backpack is what I say! (And where can I get one myself...?)

Life Afloat

On my travels I spent a day in Oxford with a friend. We spent most of it escaping the crowds as we had made the mistake of showing up on a Saturday! So after a breather in a huge bookshop we went for a walk along the canal where I was delighted to see residential narrow boats moored along the shore.

These boats were all individuals. Some had been nestled up along the bank for what looked like years. They had post boxes onshore, and little gardens with flowerpots and bushes, one had a gorgeous and sleek black and white cat curled up on a deck chair that came over to be admired when it saw us looking at it. Some were colourful, one had a pirate flag draped over the side, some had electrical hookups, many had beautiful artwork in the windows, and all of them looked intriguing. The idea of not having to live a life defined by four straight walls is often what keeps me going, so seeing these boats was a thrill! And something I had not expected to see in Oxford somehow. I'm glad unexpected things still exist to remind one to keep one's eyes open and hope up... As I saw the first boat a little part of my mind started to imagine what it'd be like to live afloat: huddling in the cold under piles of blankets in the damp winter, being rocked asleep, watching the world walk past from a deck chair on the roof of my boat...

It is an exciting thought!

Briefly

Looks like I will be returning to Swansea to sleep on peoples' floors as I search for a job and somewhere to live. So look out for me from some time next week as I really do want to be back for BEyONdTV Festival (see www.undercurrents.org for more!). I'm looking forward to seeing you folk again and swapping tails... (I like long furry ones:)

Iona of my heart, Iona of my love ( - St Columba)

And so, yesterday (was it only yesterday??) morning I stepped onto that ferry that took me across the Sound of Iona and away from that beautiful place. Stepping on that ferry was one of the most difficult things I've had to do.

Last Sunday I made a phone call and now I am on the Isle of Skye, in Portree, taking the time to breath and regroup myself. Considering that Oban had more than one street and so many shops and people and cars and was already advertising Christmas - and how much that threw me and made me feel as if I was suffering from a culture shock - I'm glad I came up north rather than going to Glasgow or some place like that.

My head and heart and soul are full of Iona.