Siberian wardrobe problems

 

I sat next to a woman who told me she was from Siberia

Two Siberian clichés crashed into my brain, I made a pinchy face, she was defensive

It is not just very cold it is also very hot,  we only have extremes, six months very hot, six months very cold and very great difference over one day - it can start at minus 20 degrees, then later in day zero degrees - so it really fucks with our blood pressure and people die from that, but really big problem in Siberia is that we love British trench coat - every woman has trench coat but weather is either for fur coat or little small top, there are precisely two days every year when  trench coat is acceptable so we all live with trench coat in wardrobe. 

This prompted me to think about an over-sized, new-but-vintage toffee-coloured cashmere coat I bought in a charity shop last year. I had to have it but it looked like I was wearing an actual wardrobe so I got it altered by an expensive tailor. As long as I wear it over a big chunky jumper, accessorised with substantial footwear and headwear it looks fantastic. Mimsy British weather is never cold enough for this outfit, obviously I must relocate . . . but Siberia . . . gulags, chilly . . .

My next post might be from Norway 

Night out in London

* warning this post contains body parts and other horrors

I'm looking after a cat in Primrose Hill. I arrive, say hello to kitty, then head out for a lovely culture-filled evening.

My event is done by 9. I catch a bus, head to the top floor and take my favourite seat at the front. Two stops later the driver comes upstairs - someone has vomitted by the exit, he can't continue the journey, we all have to get off

the bus and it's sicky door remain at the bus stop, the smell was bad but the sight is somehow worse. I walk to the next stop to put some distance between me and it.

Next bus is crammed full, I get on and climb to the upper deck. My favourite front seat is taken so I head to the back. Two stops later a young man stands at the top of the stairwell sways, steadies himself as though preparing for a performance, he then barfs hugely and widely.

A collective groan then stunned silence as the man tips forward and somersaults/slides down the stairs on the sea of sick. Passengers yell at the driver to stop, he pulls up and opens the doors and the young man runs out into the night. The bus continues it's journey. We are engulfed in the worst smell that I have ever encountered but we all stay on because the horror that we must pass through to go down the steps and get out is somehow worse.

WIndy

We're just back from quite a long trip to Portugal, where we had an extremely carnivorous time, chomping our way through a meat parade of chicken, chops and steaks accompanied by mountains of very delicious chips.  

On our return we barely fitted through the front door. I headed straight over to the greengrocer's to stock up on cabbages, beans, peppers and artichokes, serving them up with dahl, hummous and baked beans. The affect on our systems has been dramatic and we are currently unfit for human company, even now we daren't stay too long in the same room as I'm pretty sure we constitute a fire hazard.

In the morning I head to the coast for a swim - curious to see if my internal combustion engine can propel me across the channel

Where to start?

there were cats and now there are none

there was school but that's  finished for summer

I'm sort of back in Bristol but keep going away - that embroidered rendition of Clifton Suspension Bridge was discovered on a visit to a Stoke Newington junk shop on wednesday with my fairy-godmother-aunt who haggled mercilessly to buy it for me. After the f-g-m-a left I met my tutor and asked him if our exam results were out yet

yes but I haven't worked out how to publish them

visited Holy Island with the Man to see the priory and the upside down Hobbit boats

then to Scotland to see my sister and the nibblings where a discussion of future careers was going on:
adult: you can be anything you want
five-year-old : can I be a Wot Wot Hoo Ha?

Afterthought

I feel the need to draw your attention to this poem about hermits

Today I came home

Victoria bus station is chaotic and filthy, a fact I get more time to absorb than usual because I take the cheap bus which always arrives behind schedule.

Crushed in the bus-waiting scrum someone tried to pickpocket my backpack and I shocked myself, and the young man, with the fury of my reaction.

The cheap bus stops further away from home too.

I must have looked like a tired donkey with my little backpack on and dragging a wheelie case uphill (on cobbles) in the spitty drizzle.

I was also trying to carry a plastic carrier in a way that wouldn't tear the handles because it was overstuffed with London-charity-shop treasures*. 

The weather was actually being kind because as soon as I got behind my front door it turned into a torrential downpour.

The good part is that I can clearly see that the drainpipe is still unblocked at the top because the rain gushes out of the broken part and floods round the back door.

*The London Treasures are shown here, you will see that it is basically an entire outfit if I don't mind being barefoot. That wallet is large enough and has enough zippy compartments to be a make-up bag and pencil case as well as hold money. I paid twenty English pounds for all this and the charity shop lady threw in a broken umbrella for good measure

The passage to Dubrovnik

began reasonably well, the plane stayed in the air all the way to Split. We deserved to be ripped off by a taxi because there was a neat bus that went all the way to the doorway of the hotel in Split and we were too stupid to notice.

Next day at the bus station we caught a bus to Dubrovnik and discovered just how unhelpful bus-related employees can be. Also I discovered travel sickness for the first time since I was eight years old.

Lucky Dip Dinners

After my last post I thought about how I've often gone to countries not speaking the language at all and have simply pointed at parts of the text on the menu in the hope that I was choosing things that would end up resembling a meal.



This made me go and dig out the sketchbooks where I'd made notes in an attempt to try and learn from these experiences, a way to remember the words for 'cat giblets' or 'face of pig' for future reference. The page above was made during a typical 'point-and-shoot' dining experience. This was in Budapest in 1992, I had just got a degree in colouring-in from Brighton. Not knowing what else to do, I managed to get a grant to spend a term at the Hungarian College of Art and Design in Budapest, they didn't make me very welcome and refused to let me use the school facilities so I spent my days in the city's cheap eating and drinking places filling sketch books and taking photos. I dug them out this weekend and fell down a rabbit-hole of memories:





At the end of my residency, to fulfill the terms of my contract I had to put on an exhibition of my work, so I invited people to come to my room and look at these sketchbooks, one of the college tutors edited an arty magazine called Magyar Narancs and several months after I had left town he put a little feature in the magazine, a photocopy was posted to me along with a translation of the text to the left of the image


An Engish girl, taughened(sic) by the salty air of Brighton, drifted into the Trabant-smoked streets of Budapest. She sat into the low-flying bakelite, tiled Budapest; she was flying as a black butterfly between the battered houses. Her drawings, like the magazine illustrations of the thirties, are travel drafts about the magic. Metaphors, jotted down on mustard-stained grease-proof paper; cooked-sausage-sketches. Espresso-bar tables, Dobos-cake crumbs on them, are sweeped into the sketchbook.

Radio Gaga

16th September
Last week we had ever more brilliant ideas about fast things we should film with the Speedy Camera.
We could pile up those old tv’s and explode them
Too dangerous
OK lets fill that rain barrel with milk and drop things in it
like what?
A person - someone could jump in the barrel naked - from up there
and so on…

Our brilliance was edited and I charged around finding props for the filming. A side effect of all this creativity is that the camerawork is eating up computer disk space so I’ve also been buying terabytes by the carload.

Then a fire in the Channel Tunnel last week mucked up all the pretty travel arrangements I’d made for people and kit coming and going over the weekend. (we had to give the camera back – big sighs all round) and I had to go to the UK, retrieve a car and drive it back to France.

In the Lovely House I can get a local radio station that consists of someone reading out small ads, Mimi in Marciac would like to swap a dog for a brown sofa, sort of thing, it involves streams of phone numbers and is mesmerising, so probably not ideal for driving along to. However, I did fancy a bit of company for the epic drive back here. I set the radio to ‘search’ but it discovered only a series of ‘pop’ stations. French pop comes from a bin labelled Merde and makes me want to shoot myself. The CD player was broken, so I finally I settled on a 'phone-out’ programme where, between records, a DJ makes a series of calls to recalcitrant fonctionnaires on behalf of listeners who are having problems with insurance claims and legal issues. I would never have listened to an English equivalent of this (is there an English equivalent?) but I find this kind of thing compelling in other countries.