sumus Bristolienses!

One more exam to go! My Legal Practice Course is nearly finished! And then the real world is, once again, my oyster. This is quite terrifying. Although my previous foray into the real world turned out fairly successful, that was in another country. My track record in Blighty on the other hand leaves something to be desired. I hope this will change, but in the current climate, I have my concerns... Oh well, just need to keep my options open.

I have had 2 of my elective exams already - Employment Law to begin with and Advanced Commercial Property last Monday. Just Commercial Law to go, hence I took my IP statute book out for coffee earlier, as a first date, to butter it up, in preparation for the beginning of what I hope will be a short-lived yet passionate love affair lasting hopefully until 12.15pm on Friday 8th June. I've just dropped some custard cream crumbs into its spine. Surely that will win it over.

Coffee was an iced espresso frappé thingy at Coffee #1 on Gloucester Road. Yes, I have abandoned Beestonia for Bristolia for the week! Mark is away in Munich for a conference and with a lengthy revision period, I had a grave concern that a week of unstructured time in isolation might send me loony. Always a worry. I have a genuine fear of retirement. Or any period where I might be at home for a long period without any role more pressing than doing the washing up. No joke. For the same reason, finishing the LPC with no work lined up is giving me the fear. Financial fear, yes, but bigger than that is the fear of the endless ocean of free time I am about to be dunked into. I can't enjoy a dip in the ocean of free time if I can't see the shores of purpose, the island of responsibility, the dinghy of gainful employment.

So anyway, I am in Bristol, revising, enjoying the weather, enjoying a bit of TV and the company of Lep and Père. And not enjoying the public transport (Firstbus? FAILBus. Why can't the drivers just CHEER UP? I used to be able to u-turn the mood of the grumpiest of Post Office customers*, but the bus drivers of Bristol just DO NOT respond to my mega-cheeriness. They need some serious...I don't know...intravenous seratonin? provision of bouncy castles on their lunch breaks? Srsly bus drivers, stop bringing me down!) But the weather is pleasant enough for walking everywhere, so I can avoid the grumpy-poos and retain my joyful state. Tomorrow I may venture to Stoke's Croft for some srs revision and flat-white consumption. And I MUST go to St Nicholas Market and eat falafel....I dream of the St Nick's falafel stall...om nom nom nom nom nom nom.


*Case in point: A very grumpy man came into the Post Office, early one morning. He ranted, he raged, he had a parcel problem. Within about 15 minutes, he was ready to leave, a smile on his face, "Thank you so much, you are an ANGEL!" he cried. My colleagues stared in amazement. "What did you do??" they gasped in disbelief. "I gave him some of my good mood, there's enough for everyone!!" I cried, and undertook a flourishing dance to illustrate.

Reflecting and Spain

Sometimes I wish I had never lived in another country so I would never know what I was missing. I don't think anywhere is truly a perfect place to live, but now I just feel these huge glaring omissions in my life in England. Like the sun; beautiful surroundings; affordable yet good quality sushi; amazing independent cafes each different from the next (Costa I want to bring you down*); Sundays on the beach; incredible restaurants; and...y'know...general joy, fun and vastly improved quality of life.

But I know that if I went back to live in Sydney there would be other empty holes that cannot be filled. Like family; The Guardian; BBC 6 Music; affordable and regular live music; London; proximity to Europe, and British and European culture, history and society; better clothes; and just a whole lot of really nice and interesting things that make you feel alive. What I also get in England though is a general feeling that life can just become a joyless daily slog towards not a lot.

I uploaded a bunch of photos the other week from my trip to Barcelona the week before Christmas, so here's a little insight into some fun in the Spanish sun (15 degrees and bright blue skies - perfect winter). Mark and I went out there to meet our friends from Sydney - Emma, Anya and Ellen, and another of their friends, Hannah.

Beautiful poinsettia in our apartment - the apartment was really nice and so cheap!

We went up to Gaudi's Park Guell - the only place I had really visited last time I went to Barcelona. It's so lovely there, although seemingly permanently heaving with tourists. It's like a lifesize toy park or a strange board game come to life.

View over Barca.

I made everyone pose as animals etc for photos but Mark would not pose!

We found this amazing cocktail bar called Pile 43 which served 674824 varieties of mojito. We went there twice actually. The lady who ran the bar was awesome and gave us vodka-lemon slice-turkish coffee shots along with our mojitos!

Mark and I on our second (early evening) visit... We visited the Picasso Museum which is really good and well worth a visit - I love it when you can see the progression in an artists work (often from a fairly traditional starting point - always particularly strange with an artist such as Picasso who ended up known for something rather more abstract and modern. I think my favourite instance of that kind of development is if you look at the works of Mondrian - quite a transformation!)

We ate paella and tapas and drank sangria and on our final day caught the train out to Figueres, a town famous as the birthplace of Salvador Dali and home to the Dali Theatre and Museum, which houses the largest collection of Dali works in the world. It's amazing - Dali helped to design it so the whole thing is like a Dali work in itself. He is also buried underneath the building.

The main courtyard. There are creepy people in the car and it rains inside the car!

Emma and Anya on the stairs...

It was nice to come home for Christmas, but Barcelona was definitely a fun distraction from surrounding stresses of life and work. Made me glad to be in Europe.

*Ubiquitous blandness is normally associated with Starbucks I know, but I learnt something from the Telegraph Magazine today: there are 650 Starbucks in the UK, compared with a staggering 1,300 Costas. That's more than there are even McDonalds.

Ampelmann

Enjoying some caffeine in my Ampelmann mug, from the Ampelmann Ostalgie shop in Berlin, via the parentals (thanks Lep & Père!!!!)

Christmas soon, and hopefully a much needed quick break from my Legal Practice Course. Seriously, I barely have a spare minute in the day at the moment. You're not missing much from my lack of posts - my entire life is study law/think about law/eat/sleep.

The Ship Song Project

I cannot watch this without bawling my eyes out. It is amazing.



The Ship Song Project - Sydney Opera House reinterprets Nick Cave's iconic song. Performed by Neil Finn, Kev Carmody and The Australian Ballet, Sarah Blasko, John Bell, Angus and Julia Stone, Paul Kelly and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Teddy Tahu Rhodes and Opera Australia, Martha Wainwright, Katie Noonan and The Sydney Symphony, The Temper Trap, Daniel Johns and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Directed by Paul Goldman. Arranged by Elliott Wheeler. Photography by Prudence Upton.


Take me back...

Long time no....

Today was a Saturday and a sunny day, not even that cold. I put washing out and it even dried, mostly, which was nice. Unfortunately we spent most of the afternoon in Mark's office at Nottingham Uni, doing our Australian tax returns... you can only do the online thing on a PC, and it was the only place we have any PC access these days. I pretty much hate doing things you can't do on a Mac.


There's Mark in his office....see all those books? They were piled up in our living room for about 3 months until the new office was ready. I am so glad they are now more orderly. At about 5pm we decided to have a break and go for a walk in Wollaton Park. There was a big red sign up at the gate saying "DEER RUTTING SEASON - DEER MAY BE VERY AGGRESSIVE AND YOU SHOULD KEEP CLEAR". We steered clear as much as possible, but we did see this noble stag:


He didn't seem too threatened by us. But we tried not to look too interested in the lady deer, just in case.

Tax return is nearly done....the only annoyance is that National Australia Bank chose today (tonight? I guess?) to have their site down for maintenance, so Mark couldn't get his interest and tax figures! Which meant we'll have to go back to finish it. Grr. Now off to watch a French film we got from LoveFilm - Tell No One, and slumber.

Holidaying

I feel like I haven't really had a holiday in a long time, not since the epic holiday trio (Canberra, Melbs, North NSW) of last October/November. But we did get away a little in July, cramming a lot into a short space of time, unfortunately that did mean it felt like it was over rather quickly!

Mark and I started out with a little trip down to Dorset, primarily for Sam and Georgina's wedding. We travelled down the previous day, but the journey took FOREVER due to traffic and roadworks and we arrived late. Add to that, the weather took a turn for the worst as we arrived and poured with rain all afternoon and evening.

We stayed in Stinsford, just outside Dorchester, which those in the know will know as the place where Thomas Hardy is buried (well, his heart is buried in Stinsford, his ashes are in Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner), and we walked over to the church to visit the grave. We were going to walk out into the wood bit with the stream so I could show Mark the scene of many a Fellows Family Picnic, but the weather was too misery so we headed back to the B+B. It's been a long while since there has been a Fellows Family Thomas Hardy Trip, I think it should be resurrected soon. Especially as the one time Mark came with us the cottage at Bockhampton was closed.

Anyway, we ended up driving into Dorchester for the evening, having pizza for tea and a few drinks in the Wetherspoons, before taking a bottle of port and some good chocolate back to the B+B and watching some TV. We had to be up early on Saturday for the wedding, before which an emergency shopping trip had to be made as I'd left part of my outfit in Bristol, error.



The wedding was at a Victorian hall in another village north of Dorchester, it was a nice place.





I won't bore you with details but it was a super fun day of friends, cider, dancing and even some sun at the right moments (i.e. photo time!)



Sam and Georgie had got this tandem bicycle that they both left on at the end of the night, they were obviously really well rehearsed on it but a lot of the rest of us were a bit wobbly! It requires a lot of teamwork.



My favourite thing was that they made (yes, hand-made!) an individual owl for EVERY SINGLE GUEST.

On Sunday, we scoffed our big veggie breakfast (any B+B that finds you Linda McCartney sausages when you tell them you are vegetarian gets a GOLD STAR in my book) and drove down into Weymouth to meet up with everyone again. Everyone was a bit lacklustre to say the least, haha, but we had a couple of drinks at the pub and Sam and Georgina came to say goodbye to everyone before they flew off back to Melbourne a couple of days later. Weymouth is nice on the sea front, the beach is really big and golden and it seems a smarter sort of place. Mark and I got in a few rounds of cricket (cricket? sort of....) on the beach with Ed, Gen, Cat and Alex, thanks to Ed's provision of the smallest cricket bat known to man.



And then it was time to drive home, Essex for Ed and Gen, Surrey for Alex and Cat and Bristol for Mark and I, ready for a good night's sleep and the next adventure....

Which involving an early start the next morning was not something I was originally overjoyed about! But I was off to London for a day of fun times. Mark wasn't joining me, preferring instead to stay in Bristol and have my mum make him cups of tea, but he did kindly drive me to the coach station nice and early.

Arriving after a couple of hours of motorway boredom, I made my way up to King's Cross and the British Library, to see their exhibition on Mervyn Peake, which was very interesting and very thorough. I learnt a good deal about Mervyn Peake I didn't know and it was great to see his early Gormenghast sketches and plans as well as those from when he illustrated Alice in Wonderland.

I then went over east to meet my old Sydney gang! Rosie, who was on my team at HCF, was visiting Europe with her bf Alex, and our other two teammates Mark and Daniella came into London so we could all have a meetup. I found them all in the Pride of Spitalfields off Brick Lane and we had a good old catch-up, before Mark and Daniella had to set off to make Daniella's flight back home to Glasgow. Rosie, Alex and I went to the Natural History Museum for the rest of the afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed the animals, especially this one:



I think the Natural History Museum is my favourite museum at the moment. It is certainly the one in London I go to the most. They also have a really great room with lifesize models of whales and sharks and dolphins and stuff, which is my favourite bit. I sound like I'm about 5 but it really is good!

Glastonbury!!!

Glastonbury Festival seems ages ago now...well it is I guess - two months.

I put the photos up on my Flickr a couple of weeks back. To sum up, it was an enormous amount of fun. It's such a huge thing, like nothing I've ever been to before, and there's such a good feeling there. We were really lucky that we mostly had good weather as well.



That's our tent, taken on the Friday (the wet day) - that's as muddy as the campsite got, ie not very, so that made life a lot easier! I decided I actually love sleeping in a tent. It's like a cocoon or a womb or something, all snugglesome. Although we cheated and took an inflatable bed with us for ultimate comfort (we are old now).

We got the bus from Bristol on the Thursday lunchtime, found a good camping spot, ate our picnic, drank some of our box of wine and set out to explore the site.

The festival proper didn't start til Friday, so there wasn't a great deal to be done. The ground was thick with mud from the previous day's rain so even though the sun was shining, walking wasn't too fun. Getting a bit fed up, we ambled into a fun looking bar tent that had brilliant bright pink decor, fun music and cocktails. Best move ever. The mojitos were expensive and we thought they might be a rip off, but they were amazing! Generous and tasty. We cheered up no end.



That evening, we made our way to the Park area of the site, met a cool Irish couple and hung out with them in this amazing mirrored pergola for the night.

Friday started well with Metronomy on the Pyramid stage, can't believe I hadn't heard them before, amazing band! Their album 'The English Riviera' has been on repeat on my iPod for the last 2 months. Unfortunately, as they left the stage, the weather took a turn for the worst and the rain started. We grabbed coffee and toast and headed over to the Leftfield to see some comedy from Andy Zaltzman (an old Edinburgh Fest favourite and the man that can be credited secondly only to Mark for making me interested in cricket).
The Leftfield had the benefit of being in an indoor marquee, and was run by Billy Bragg, it had a really great mix of stuff on over the weekend. Political debate, music, comedy. It was a good place and we spent a large amount of time in there even when the sun was out! Friday evening we went back to watch Billy Bragg's live set and despite the fact that I was cold and wet and a bit miserable he is such an uplifting person to hear, so true to what he believes in. That evening we were stood next to this family, a couple and a little boy maybe 8 or 9 years old, and several times they leaned down to explain to him what Billy was saying, about why it's important we pay our taxes and what trade unions do. It gave me hope that there are still people who believe in good things, haha. Also in the Leftfield we discovered some brilliant artists, like this guy Jonny Neesom who played guitar and sang these really funny, perceptive songs (we got his CD in the tent) and this incredible spoken word artist named Kate Tempest. Seriously I've never heard anything like her, she was so powerful. I need to track down of her stuff recorded.

On Friday night we went to sleep really early, haha! We were lying in the tent and where we were camped you could hear Primal Scream playing in the distance. It was lovely to drift off listening to 'Country Girl' drift over the fields.

Saturday was a MUCH nicer day. The sun came out, it was really warm and the mud started drying up fast. We used our Green Passes to try out the solar showers (SO GOOD...well ok it was like washing under a low-pressure, luke-warm hose in a shed, but still....SO GOOD!) and feeling rested, healthier and CLEANER we hung out at the tent into the afternoon and drank some wine and ate a lot of cereal bars (main food source) before it was time for music. Annoyingly the two acts I wanted to see most out of the whole festival were on at overlapping times. So we decided to go to most of Anna Calvi, then skip the end (we saw Anna Calvi a month or two earlier at the Thekla in Bristol) and run over to Patrick Wolf for a full set. Anna Calvi turned out to be so captivating that we stayed the whole thing, but at least we still caught most of Patrick Wolf. Both were amazing, complete highlights. Patrick Wolf is pretty much the most upbeat person ever to exist. This is the video to his last single, The City. It is impossibly upbeat:



Saturday night was so amazing as we went over to the 'after-hours' part of the festival, it was the most incredible thing. I sound like I'm gushing but seriously, it took your mind to a whole other world. Block9 and Shangri-La are like whole worlds built at the festival.



That's the London Underground part of Block9, you don't get the sense of scale from the photo but that is a life size block of flats, with a life-size tube train hanging out, and underneath it is a club. The attention to detail is so amazing. Then round from Block9 is Shangri-La. This area has run on an ongoing futuristic, dystopian storyline for the last couple of years; in 2011 the city is being ravaged by a virus, so the inhabitants are moving out to a new planet, and this is the last party before they leave, 'a rave to end all raves…'



It's built like a film set, I have never seen anything like it. It's a whole town, the centre of which is the slum, a series of covered alleyways leading to all sorts of places...weird shops, crazy bars...half of it boarded up as the residents flee.



The Shangri-Spa!



This shop sold that well-known complementary trio of items phones, crack and biros, before the virus forced its untimely closure.

We went into this mad strip club behind a cage door named Fish and Tits...



...no really.



There was a bizarre mirrored nook inside.



At midnight we went through to the Arcadia midnight fire show at the 'spider', which was also fantastic.



Arcadia take military scrap and use it to make spectacular shows. They had live singers, musicians, acrobats, it was pretty impressive.

Sunday was consequently a lazy day, spent hanging out at Leftfield (trying to avoid heat this time, made a change to the rain!), eating potato wedges, seeing the epic danlesac vs Scroobius Pip show, relaxing in the green fields and the healing fields eating ice cream, and late in the evening watching the only appropriate alternative to Beyonce in existence - Simon Munnery in the Cabaret tent!



He had converted the League Against Tedium/Attention Scum hat into a BUBBLE MACHINE!


In a pleasing Simon Munnery-related side-note, I was packing up my books in Bristol to move them up to Nottingham last week and I found a book that an old friend had given me as a present in 2001, over a decade ago. I was flicking through it and I found he had inserted into the back cover a little Simon Munnery interview/article clipped out of a newspaper! That made me smile a lot and think about the many years in which my life has been made happier by Simon Munnery and his brilliance.